Academic publications

Books

Journal Articles

Abstract

The Women in Public Service in Pakistan (WPSP) oral history project records the professional life histories of women employed in public sector institutions. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we discuss the nature of public sector employment (sarkari nokri) and review the data and literature on women’s participation in public sector work in Pakistan. These sources reveal that the trajectory of women’s employment in the public sector has been shaped by “gender mainstreaming,” which, in turn, is driven by global treaties and goals. Then, after describing the project design, we explore our narrators’ assertions of status, ability, and achievements as they navigate patriarchy. We argue that women public sector employees have collectively forged a social identity and modified the terms of patriarchy as it applies to them. This article presents women’s public sector employment as a coherent subject of study across a range of sectors of work from education to the civil service. This article also demonstrates that oral history methods enable a substantial intervention in the study of government employment in Pakistan. As such, this rich archive of women’s experiences serves public, scholarly, and institutional interests; is comparable to oral history projects on government in other parts of the world; and intervenes in ongoing debates about digital oral history. At the same time, the WPSP oral history project is unique in its use of an oral history method to study government employment in Pakistan. Our methods, approaches, and conclusions are instructive both for scholars of near-contemporary history in Pakistan and for oral historians seeking to establish their own projects on women in public life.

Abstract

Why do politicians vote to decentralize power and resources? Drawing on structuralist and voluntarist approaches, we investigate why national party elites in Pakistan voted to devolve power to the provinces under the 18th Amendment to the 1973 Constitution but are hesitant to devolve meaningful fiscal and administrative power to the local level. We argue that the explanation for this disjuncture lies in Pakistan’s history of military experiments with local government, its candidate-centered party system, and the re-election incentives of politicians at the national, provincial and local levels. Using interviews with local government representatives, politicians, and bureaucrats, and archival research through National Assembly, Senate debates and newspapers, we show that devolution to the provinces was a means of holding a fragile federation together. However, Pakistan’s political parties, unable to elicit credible commitment from their legislators, feared that devolving power further could result in party defections, the rise of regional leaders, and inevitably, party fragmentation.

Abstract

Bureaucratic performance varies immensely even within low-capacity states. Politicians and bureaucrats create pockets or networks of effectiveness that allow some departments to perform more efficiently than others. How do these networks develop and how are politicized bureaucratic appointments used to influence performance? Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Punjab, Pakistan, this paper argues that politicians and bureaucrats ensure enhanced performance by making legal and extra-legal appointments of hand-picked bureaucrats to key posts. The choice of bureaucrat is made on the basis of carefully curated relationships of patronage established through work, training, and old school networks. As a result, temporary networks of effectiveness are created but rendered unsustainable by the very patronage relationships that create them, preventing them from evolving into more permanent pockets of effectiveness. More broadly, my argument contributes to debates on intra-state capacity and politicization, establishing a link between patterns of staffing and patterns of governance.

Abstract

Pakistan currently ranks 154 out of 189 countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Index. In this paper, we use a ‘political settlements analysis’ to understand how the distribution of political, economic and social power explains this ranking and the inequity in Pakistan’s health system. We investigate elite power struggles over the last seven decades to explain how ad hoc policy-making, instability, patronage politics and rent-seeking have led to a maldistribution of resources, lack of oversight, and inequitable access and service provision for a burgeoning population. We argue that these factors have had two consequences: the privatisation of health care, and the opening up of a considerable sphere of influence to the donor community to direct state policy. Despite promising ongoing reform efforts, we conclude that Pakistan’s health system will remain hamstrung by the constraints of a political settlement in which elites with short-term horizons bargain for influence rather than developing an inclusive, consensus-based approach to improving governance outcomes for citizens.

Abstract

Pakistan has the highest infant mortality rate in South Asia, is one of two countries where wild polio is still endemic, and is ranked third for un- or under-immunized children. Why is this the case when considerable donor and government funds have been spent on Pakistan’s Expanded Program for Immunization (EPI)? Based on a year of mixed methods research in district Kasur in Punjab, Pakistan, we focus on vaccination as a site of interaction between citizens and the state and apply the concept of administrative burden to explain vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan. As immunization is a non-means tested program where the state approaches citizens expecting full compliance, we argue that learning, psychological, and compliance costs are exacerbated by the context in which parents interact with frontline bureaucrats. Citizens’ distrust of an often absent or coercive state and low administrative capacity (specifically overburdened staff, inadequate facilities, and rushed digitization) have a multiplier effect on administrative burdens imposed on parents of young children in accessing immunization programs. Therefore, attempts by the state to vaccinate citizens often exacerbate distrust, and limited capacity hinders the state’s ability to reduce the burdens experienced by citizens.

In countries such as the UK and the USA that are privileged to have adequate supplies of COVID-19 vaccines but are also plagued by histories of deep inequities and white supremacy, it was predictable that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines would not be equally shared across all sectors of society…

Abstract

Participatory governance is a means of making the state more responsive and accountable to its citizens. However, attempts to involve end users in decision making are often met with considerable resistance not just from political elites, but from the bureaucracy. I investigate how and why bureaucrats resist such reforms by focusing on the implementation of the Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authorities Act (1997) in Pakistan, an Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) program that attempted to put farmers in charge of water allocation, revenue collection, and dispute resolution. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in 2015 and 2019 with bureaucrats across the administrative hierarchy and water sector practitioners and consultants, I emphasise the role bureaucratic perceptions and incentives played in driving this program into the ground over two decades. My argument is two-pronged. First, I show that bureaucratic resistance to participatory programs needs to be studied in light of wider political events and processes, particularly patterns of political engagement and parallel attempts at devolving power. Second, I find that the precarious conditions under which irrigation bureaucrats work make them unwilling to cede what official power and influence they do have to farmers. In other words, I contend that bureaucratic resistance to farmers’ involvement in decision-making is the result of a more nuanced set of political and bureaucratic experiences than the perceived technical superiority and colonial inheritance of the irrigation bureaucracy. More broadly, my argument has implications for participatory reforms in other sectors and for decentralized government in Pakistan and in other countries in the Global South.

Abstract

How do ruling political parties accommodate their members’ demand for access to state patronage with a push for merit-based bureaucratic reform? I argue that political commitment to reform is contingent on electoral calculations within the party. Therefore, distortions in reform implementation reveal not only dynamics within the party itself, but also the significance of appointing the right bureaucrats to the right posts to regulate access to patronage. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Punjab, I contextualise political commitment to bureaucratic reform to provide an explanation for their unsustainability and for persistently low state capacity in countries with weak, patronage-reliant parties.

Book Chapters

  • Majid, A.M. and S.A.M. Ali (2023). Teachers and their Monitors: Negotiating Disciplinary Regimes in Pakistan. In, Staci Zavattaro, Jess Sowa, Lauren Edwards and Alexander Henderson (Eds.), Portraits of Public Service: Untold Stories from the Front Lines, SUNY Press.

    Abstract

    In 2004, the donor-funded Punjab Education Sector Reform Project (PESRP) was initiated to revamp the School Education Department’s (SED) recruitment and monitoring systems in Punjab, Pakistan. Following a New Public Management (NPM) approach, monitoring and disciplinary regimes were put in place to ensure street-level bureaucrats, i.e. teachers, met attendance and performance targets set by the department. In this chapter, we draw on interviews with senior bureaucrats, teachers, and their monitors to document the pressure and states of fear experienced by teachers, particularly women who are subjected to workplace harassment with little recourse to report such behaviour. With little incentive to perform, teachers serve in silence, using their embedded discretion to adapt to monitoring regimes and meet unreasonable performance targets to avoid penalties. We argue though that such discretion serves not to empower, but as a means for teachers to protect themselves from punitive action and administrative overreach enabled by monitoring regimes. More broadly, we contend that disciplinary regimes lead to an imbalance of power within departments, amongst administrators, monitors, and teachers, that makes the latter increasingly vulnerable in their roles as frontline bureaucrats.

  • Ali, S.A.M. (2021). Pakistan: COVID-19, federalism and the first wave response. In, Rupak Chattopadhyay, Felix Knüpling, Diana Chebenova, Liam Whittington, and Phillip Gonzalez (eds.), Federalism and the Response to COVID-19, pp 170-182. Routledge India. [open access]

    Abstract

    By the end of 2020, Pakistan had recorded over 475,000 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus, with over 10,000 lives lost. At the end of the first wave, in July, lockdowns were lifted, and businesses, public transport, restaurants, and educational institutions re-opened. Pakistan was slow to mobilize its pandemic response, preferring to monitor the situation and then scrambling to test samples and develop a response plan. In addition to the human cost, the pandemic is expected to have a serious impact on Pakistan’s already fragile economic situation. Initially, the Pakistan government’s response to the pandemic was marred by indecision, confusion, and mismanagement. The federal government prevaricated on a country-wide lockdown, citing valid concerns for the poor who would be disproportionately impacted but failing to substantiate concrete steps for handling the situation. In April, the Prime Minister announced the easing of the lockdown despite opposition by medical professionals and provincial governments.

  • Ali, S. A. M. (2020). Governance amid Crisis: Delegation, Personal Gain, and Service Delivery in Pakistan. In, Mariam Mufti, Sahar Shafqat, and Niloufer Siddiqui (Eds.), Pakistan's Political Parties: Surviving between Dictatorship and Democracy, (pp. 178-194), Washington D.C.:Georgetown University Press and Lahore: Folio Books.

Reports and other outputs

Abstract

Democracy has been in decline across Asia and the Pacific for more than 10 years. Information disorder, an environment in which distorted and manipulated information is ubiquitous, is believed to play an important role in affirming authoritarianism and destabilizing democracy across the region. To understand how distorted information is being used to gain and maintain unchecked and unaccountable power in Asia and the Pacific, USAID/Asia Bureau’s Technical Services requested, under the Asia Emerging Opportunities mechanism, an analysis of how information disorder affirms authoritarianism and destabilizes democracy in Asia and the Pacific. In discussing the scope of work with the USAID/Asia Bureau, the research team received guidance that the analysis should present a series of in-depth country case studies that examine if and, if so, how information disorder affirms authoritarianism and destabilizes democracy in Asia and the Pacific. The team approached this question through a series of in-depth country case studies that concentrated on identifying supply- and demand-side factors that contribute to information disorder at the national and subnational levels in four countries in Asia and the Pacific. The case study countries are the Kyrgyz Republic, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Thailand. The countries represent regime types ranging from relatively democratic political systems to de facto military dictatorships.

Public Scholarship and Other Outputs

Pakistan’s Elections and its implications, The Review of Democracy, CEU Democracy Institute

Pakistan election: the military has long meddled in the country’s politics – this year will be no different, The Conversation UK

Oral History, Collaboration and Research on Women Public Sector Workers in Pakistan, with Sana Haroon, MHRC blog

Bureaucratic Reform, Discourse, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics

Pakistan Immunization Booklet - Billu’s Vaccination Adventure

EdJAM Pakistan Children’s Series

Humqadam Application - GBV Response Services

“The good, the bad and the ugly in Punjab’s new local government laws”. Herald, 5 July, 2019.

Interview on civil service reform, The News, 7 October, 2018.

“Will the suspension of local bodies make July 25 elections a fairer exercise?” The Daily Times, 11 July, 2018.

“Is the bureaucracy politically neutral during elections?” DAWN, 9 July, 2018.

“Good sifarish, bad sifarish: A look at PML-N’s selective anti-corruption drive”. DAWN 19 April, 2018.

Why Pakistan’s new plan to fix the bureaucracy won’t work, DAWN Prism, 10 September, 2020.