Karachi is not merely a city in crisis. It is a warning about the consequences of a governance structure that has become too centralised, too politicised and too distant from the citizen. Pakistan’s largest city and economic engine should, by any reasonable measure, be a showcase of competent urban governance. Instead, it has become one of the clearest manifestations of the country’s wider governance deficit.

The problem is not simply inadequate roads, unreliable municipal services, traffic congestion, deteriorating infrastructure, poor waste management or haphazard urban development. Beneath these visible failures lies a deeper institutional question: who governs the city, who controls its resources, who makes the decisions, and to whom are those decision-makers ultimately accountable?

After years of political continuity in Sindh, Karachi continues to suffer from fragmented authority, overlapping jurisdictions, weak municipal institutions and an inadequate relationship between political power and administrative responsibility. Responsibility is dispersed among provincial departments, municipal bodies, cantonments, development authorities and other agencies, while meaningful accountability remains remarkably difficult to locate. Yet this is not merely a Karachi problem. Karachi is the critical case study; Pakistan is the subject.

Good governance rests on some elementary principles: transparent decision-making, financial integrity, institutional accountability, citizen participation, administrative competence, equitable distribution of resources and continuity of policy beyond individual governments. By these standards, Pakistan’s governance architecture remains deeply deficient. Citizens frequently have little meaningful influence over decisions that directly affect their daily lives, while local institutions often lack sufficient financial autonomy, administrative authority and institutional continuity to perform the functions expected of them.

This produces a fundamental imbalance. Resources may be decentralised, but effective authority and accountability remain concentrated. Pakistan has already undertaken substantial fiscal devolution. Under the Seventh National Finance Commission framework, the provinces receive 57.5 per cent of the divisible pool, while federal budgetary transfers to the provinces amount to several trillion rupees annually. The problem, therefore, cannot credibly be reduced simply to the proposition that provincial governments lack resources.

The more difficult question is what happens after the money reaches the provinces. If substantial fiscal resources move from Islamabad to provincial capitals but authority, expenditure and decision-making are not subsequently devolved to empowered local institutions, Pakistan merely replaces federal centralisation with provincial centralisation. Fiscal devolution without corresponding administrative and political devolution remains incomplete. Money without accountability cannot, by itself, guarantee governance.

This distinction between resources and outcomes deserves far greater attention in Pakistan’s political debate. The country continues to face serious deficiencies in education, public health, drinking water, sanitation, transport and basic infrastructure despite decades of expenditure,........

© The Friday Times