Pakistan and NGOs

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EPW Reviews August 12-18, 2000
NGOs and Local Government in PakistanG K Lieten The New Development Paradigm: Papers on Institutions, NGOs, Gender and Development by S Akbar Zaidi; Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2000; pp 321, Rs 295 (Oxford Pakistan Paperback). Zaidi has worked hard to assess, in eleven chapters, the probable impact of neo-liberalism and the rolling back of the state in different institutions in Pakistan. He has succeeded extremely well, except probably for the introduction, which conveys an ideological orientation that, it later turns out, is alien to the author, but which nevertheless suggests that the book is written by a newly converted proponent of the no-nonsense new development paradigm. As such, the introduction gives a nice summary of the concerns of the west with development in the third world. The policies that were in vogue earlier have been discarded in successive periods. Most of these policies were sanctioned if not actively imposed by the Washington institutions. Once there was a need for a strong government, which could impose a forced transition from agriculture to industry. Once there was a government, which could effectively guard its borders and stimulate industrialisation with recourse to import substitution. Once there was a government which went out of its way to answer the basic needs of its people and which even imposed land reforms. There have been other strategies as well. Women and ecology have recently been added, and the world has woken up to the seemingly novel idea of human development. The changing strategies over the decades are summarily recounted, but then there is a ‘New Development Paradigm’. It is a view like any other view, with a difference. In the early 1980s, the views from Washington were even more aggressively and overtly imposed than before. Structural adjustment must help to salvage the development process, and, although these views are diametrically opposed to what most governments and intellectuals in the third world used to believe until the late 1970s, the package devised in Washington has been accepted almost in totality. After 50 years of efforts at decolonisation, the west has regained a position of dominance and direct access to policy-making institutions. The imposition of a neo- liberal orthodoxy has made market-friendliness, globalisation, deregulation, devolution, and NGOs into household terms in the corridors in Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi. Zaidi argues that nowadays, there is general agreement on the vicious impact of the control economy and on the virtuousness of privatisation and devolution. More participation by NGOs and decentralisation to local governments must lead to more effective and sustainable development. Civil society will take over the many roles which centralising governments have usurped and have abused by their rent-seeking greed. There is a general agreement that markets will do the job, and that therefore decontrol and disinvestment are an absolute precondition for growth and development. The withering of the state need not be a problem since many of the functions, which the market would not be able to provide, will be taken over by the local government and the non-governmental organisations. These new institutions are fully equipped to take over and have a more direct involvement with local affairs, local needs and local facilities. In the next eleven chapters, it turns out that the author has started us on the wrong foot. He is in disagreement with the so-called ‘general agreement’, and dwelling in each chapter on a concrete case, he helps us to seriously question the two institutional solutions that are being proposed as the better alternative to the centralising state, namely, local government and NGOs. Both institutions may have their advantages, but the advantages would most likely be associated with the functioning of a strong state rather than with an emasculated state. The separate studies to illustrate the argument deal with a specific sector in Pakistan. Theory and analysis are empirically informed by concrete cases in a variety of fields. As such they provide a helpful insight in development policy and development practice in urban and rural Pakistan, and may be useful for purposes of comparison. In the first four chapters, the functioning of local government is examined. Local government in Pakistan, although not based on Gandhian indigenousness, has continued from where the colonial administration had left it. During the three periods of military rule, local government elections allowed for political participation and also provided a legitimisation to the military rulers. However, neither the municipal nor the village councils have the capability or the finances to perform the various tasks assigned to them. In the best of cases, street lighting, water supply and street cleaning are looked after. The local administration just does not have the funds to provide a rudimentary social infrastructure. Zaidi uses the example of Lahore to assert his point. Per capita it can spend only roughly 10 Pakistani paise, which is slightly less than its Indian equivalent, on health and medical care. As in other cases, he also explains the class proclivity of the services provided. Embezzlement and nepotism are further factors which restrain the potential role of local governments. The disrepute which the local governments have earned for themselves make them hardly fit as alternatives to a central government that, likewise, has earned disrepute for embezzlement, misappropriation, inefficiency, nepotism, etc. One case study, on the functioning of provincial towns in Sindh, gives a detailed idea of how limited the financial basis is, and how practically the entire budget is spent on the salary of their staff, in some cases leaving zero rupees. for any development-related activities. It is painful to note that in the seven municipalities which are dealt with in the exercise, and which all have an efficient town planning department, all of which have designed new housing schemes, nothing whatsoever had been done on the ground. In a number of cases, even after two decades of planning, not even the land had been purchased. The lack of resources, inadequate motivation, and the lack of technical skills are compounded by the activities of vested and powerful lobbies. The civic agencies are not answerable to the people; they are subservient to contractors, to superiors, to the political nexus and to the biraderis. Two further case studies, one on the rural water supply sector in the four provinces and one on Karachi, do drive home the point of government failure to bring its facilities to the people most in need of them. It is also shown, however, that privatisation, which under the guidance of the World Bank is in the process of replacing government, does not perform better and has a deleterious effect on the poor. Zaidi repeatedly makes the point that it would not be fair to single out local government, the lowest form of government. Government and politics suffer from the general disease that has gripped society. Local governments suffer the consequences of the ills of higher levels of government and of the macro-economic policies: “Hence reform of local government, or its institutional strengthening becomes a non-starter, unless broader issues are addressed at higher levels of government” (p 70). This is one of the important messages that the book leaves in the mind of the reader, and the present fashionable talk about local government, and good local governance at that, as the new panacea, after everything else has failed, will never again impress, so readily. The harsh assessment of local government has led many to conclude that it would be better to leave a number of its functions to the private sector. What after all is a ‘public good’? Definitions of it could be stretched, or constricted in order to satisfy current thinking. If in the US, even jails can be privatised (after transport, communication, electricity, water supply, etc), why should housing and drinking water supply be a concern of the government? The private sector has a penchant for reaching corners where government staff is reluctant to go, and for getting things done in ways more efficient and quick than government departments. The argument goes that such functions would better be left to private companies, and Pakistan indeed has listened to his master’s voice. Travelling throughout Pakistan, it may be hard to locate schools, hospitals and housing colonies, but American soft drinks are always within reach. So are their hoardings. Pakistan has adopted the ways of Pepsistan. So why not have it Pepsistan all the way, also in education, health, sanitation, drinking water and housing? In his treatment of housing for example, Zaidi dwells on the possible advantages, but also draws a discomforting picture of what happens when private building companies take over. Poverty, which was on the decline, has returned to Pakistan, and the many katchi abadis (jhuggis) that have mushroomed all over the country lack the bare infrastructural facilities. They are a proxy for poverty and for the withdrawal of government. The cases illustrate, that “the knee-jerk response to privatisation is inappriopriate. What is required is reform of government itself, at the national, provincial, and local level” (p 112). Could NGOs provide an alternative? Already now, often at the insistence of the World Bank, they have been involved in many projects. In two chapters, the NGO capability is described. The analysis is as discomforting as the analysis of the private sector. After all, NGOs are the private sector: they are working within the paradigm of the market and the withering of the state, and they are as intransparent as private commercial companies. NGOs, within a multi-interpretable ‘civil society’, as the new panacea which is supposed to solve practically every issues associated with underdevelopment and bad government, come in for a sobering treatment. The author calls it the ‘puppetisation’ and even the ‘yuppieisation’ of the NGOs, and he argues: “In many ways, NGOs are a creation of funding agencies, possibly a major explanation for their failure” (p 204). They are seen as a correction to state failure, but given the dominance of the market, there is a dire need for organisations to apply their skills, resources and power to correcting market failure. None of the NGOs has such a task, and the call of Zaidi, which he elaborates in Chapter 6, is to bring back the state. Some of these issues (the class character of interventions, the weakness of NGOs as an alternative, the foreignness of strategies, etc) are the warp and waft of the last four chapters which all deal with the health sector, a sector on which Zaidi has done much work in the past. One of the chapters (‘Health and Adjustment Policies’) is the revised version of a paper read at a conference at JNU, New Delhi. They all make interesting reading, combining, as the rest of the book, a rich insight in Pakistani politics and society with a sobering treatment of current development fashions. I wish to refer to just one such thought. Development has to be gender-sensitive. This message tends to be ingrained in all World Bank prescriptions, bilateral development aid programmes and NGO manuals. Zaidi, although a male, is definitely imbued with feminist concerns, but he warns against the feminist agenda in the sense that gender inequalities “are symptoms of other, prior, inequalities” (p 286). Most of the explanations for gender inequality have to be sought in the economic and social structures of societies: “In order to improve the quality of care for men and women, those structures have to be dealt with”. This is a well-written book, which not only provides information on Pakistan, a country which is some years ahead of India in terms of tuning its policy to the exigencies imposed by Washington, but also involves an incisive analysis of the development discourse around devolution and NGOs