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The 2022 floods that affected 33 million people in Pakistan resulted from a confluence of factors. The nation is highly vulnerable to climate change, which requires international action. But internal governance reforms are needed to improve the state’s ability to help citizens recover from the floods and better prepare for future natural disasters. Pakistan has mismanaged its natural resources and is mired in economic and political crises. In rural areas, colonial-era patterns persist in unequal control over land and water. Though some lessons were learned from major 2010 floods, the latest disaster response revealed a need for improving coordination across different levels of government and engaging with civil society.

How can we close persistent gender gaps in political participation? We develop a theory highlighting the role of male household members as “gatekeepers” of women’s participation in patriarchal settings and argue that the answer involves targeting these men. We conduct a field experiment in Pakistan and find that targeting women with a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaign has no effect on their turnout in a national election. However, women’s turnout increases substantially when male household members are canvassed to support women’s participation. Households where both men and women are canvassed see the largest increases in women’s turnout and additional increases in political discussion and men’s practical support to help women vote. Using a costly behavioral measure, we also demonstrate lasting effects on men’s supportive behavior in these households two months after the election. Our results address the importance, and tangible benefits, of engaging men to ease constraints that hinder equal participation.

The cost of the Covid-19 pandemic remains unknown. Lives directly lost to the disease continue to mount, while related health, livelihood and wellbeing impacts are still being felt, and the wider ramifications across society, politics and the economy are yet to fully materialise. What is known about these costs though, is that they have been unequally distributed both within and between countries. Preparedness plans proved inadequate in many settings – especially when it came to protecting those most vulnerable, including those marginalised by geography, poverty, or exclusion along the lines of religion, ethnicity or gender. The top-down, surge-style, biomedically dominated and technologically driven preparedness approach that has dominated global health thinking and which was propelled into action with Covid-19 was found wanting not only on the grounds of effectiveness, but also of social justice. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for a convergence of the preparedness and development agendas. Drawing on a growing body of social science evidence, this report contends that securing health in the face of today’s uncertain disease threats in often unpredictable settings means making social, economic and political priorities as core to the preparedness agenda as biological and technological ones. We present here a framework for a vision of pandemic preparedness for the real world – one that accepts that context is paramount, embraces inclusivity and justice, shifts power centres and rejects simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions.

Relief, rehabilitation, and recovery from climate emergencies require getting the governance of disaster and crisis management right. In Pakistan, there are five actions where response actors can either contribute directly, or facilitate action to enable effective interventions: Support the collection, coordination, and dissemination of data relating to the crisis; Help regenerate multi-sectoral cooperation and partnerships; Assist the vertical integration of institutions at the sub-national level; Urge coordinated resources across response actors: donors, government officials, and civil society; Strengthen social protection systems in the longer term. Most of these are familiar to those that work on humanitarian crises in Pakistan, but they represent unresolved bottlenecks in responding effectively to a crisis. Getting these areas of action right is critical for the current crisis and to prepare for other expected and accelerating climate emergencies. To expand on these five elements, this brief draws on the authors' experiences of national and international responses to previous disasters and their aftermaths in Pakistan. It was written by Shandana Khan Mohmand and Miguel Loureiro at the Institute of Development Studies, and was reviewed by Saba Aslam (Institute of Business Administration, Karachi), Luqman Hakeem, (UNICEF), Hayley MacGregor (IDS), Annie Wilkinson (IDS) and Olivia Tulloch (Anthrologica), and edited by Victoria Haldane (Anthrologica). This brief was commissioned by and remains the responsibility of SSHAP.

What does research on informal sector workers and the state entail in the time of Covid-19? The pandemic has limited possibilities for in-person interactions and required adaptations in research approaches. These challenges are exacerbated when the subjects of the research are informal sector workers with limited access to technology and undefined spaces of work. In this article, we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has magnified distances: between researchers located globally; between researchers and respondents; and between the state and people within informal employment. However, these distances also create new ways of working and opportunities for doing research. We discuss the challenges faced in the field, document the adaptations introduced to ensure robust research in difficult settings, and set out the limitations that remain. We also examine the ethical dimension of confronting dangerous misinformation related to the pandemic while conducting interviews, and the questions it raises about the distance between research and prescriptive advocacy in academia.

This chapter examines the impact of hybrid clientelism in the context of rural politics in Pakistan. There are two popular claims about Pakistan's politics that are widely accepted: that its military has been omnipresent in its politics, and so its political institutions have remained weak without strong constituencies of their own; and that political parties have assembled in a modular fashion around the local power of large "feudal" landlords and kinship-based networks that organize the vote within communities. Nevertheless, electoral competition has opened up political space for marginalized voters. The Pakistani Punjab thus provides an evocative case through which to examine the impact of the hybrid clientelism that defines much of the Global Indian Ocean. At a time when democracy around the world is experiencing indeterminate fortunes, how voters engage with democratic practice and can build mechanisms to hold elected officials to account from the ground up is crucial. Doing so helps us analyze how democracy functions beyond Western-style liberal orders, in the complex politico-historical landscape of the Global Indian Ocean.

This article is part of a Book Forum review of Shandana Khan Mohmand’s book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters (2019). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by three intereste...

Although the country has made gains over the past two decades in terms of electoral democracy, guarantees of individual equality and liberty have weakened.

The pandemic is in many ways a crisis of governance It has created a set of unique challenges that underscore the need for governments to collect revenue more efficiently and equitably;and to spend it more inclusively, transparently, and accountably, especially on the most vulnerable and marginalised populations In this article, we suggest a set of governance interventions to help create conditions for building effective and inclusive institutions that can support efforts to build back better We propose that the impact of the pandemic can be dealt with through a mix of some interventions that deal with the immediate impacts of the crisis, and other interventions that can transform development in the longer term © 2021 The Authors IDS Bulletin and Institute of Development Studies

At the centre of many explanations for Pakistan's unstable democracy remains the landlord, still seemingly in control of his/her constituency, able to deliver the votes to any party that asks and, by extension, in apparent control of the population that makes up the constituency – parties and kinship notwithstanding. How does one reconcile this view with the transformations that have occurred in rural economy, society and politics over the last few decades? Are Punjabi landlords in as much control of their rural constituencies as is suggested? If yes, how have they managed to retain this control, and if not, why then are they still at the centre of Pakistan's political story? I answer these questions in this chapter by returning to Sahiwal village in Sargodha district and tracing its history from the 1960s to the election of 2008. Sahiwal presents a perfect case study in which to investigate these questions because it is home to a landlord family that fits the stereotypical image of the ‘feudal’ lord with historical landed power that s/he uses to exploit the dependence of landless villagers for political gain – the crafty oligarch of popular discourse in Pakistan. It is also a good place to gain a unique insight into institutional path dependence – how initial conditions of inequality produce a certain type of local politics, despite socio-economic and political changes over time. Sahiwal was studied in detail by Saghir Ahmad in 1964–65 as the case study for his doctoral dissertation (Ahmad 1977), and then again in 1978–80 by Shahnaz Rouse for the same purpose (Rouse 1988). It is, therefore, the perfect site for a longitudinal study that can provide a unique, micro-level view of the impact of structural changes – such as land reforms and agrarian modernisation – and of national political changes represented by alternating periods of authoritarianism and democratisation on the residents of a village, and on their political and socio-economic relationships with one another. Armed with the earlier studies, I came to this village with a team of researchers in 2006–07. We knew from Ahmad's and Rouse's studies that Sahiwal had been steadily changing over the decades, but much of what we saw here, such as the village meeting recounted in the initial pages of this book, seemed to support the usual stories about the unfree votes of rural Punjab.

It was a hot summer evening and as I walked out of the landlord's living room in his spacious bungalow, I noticed that a crowd had begun to gather early in an open space just outside the inner walls of the house. People were arriving from different parts of the village for a meeting that the landlord, Naib, had called. They walked up in groups and seated themselves on what appeared to be pre-designated charpai s (string beds) laid out neatly in a square formation. As I looked down the four sides of the square, I realised that everyone present was male and from amongst the older members of the village, and that they seemed to have sorted themselves into quom s and biradari s – groups that I recognised because of the few weeks we had now spent doing field research in this village. The zamindar quom , or landowning caste, and its various biradari s were all seated together on one side, members of the kammi quom , or artisanal caste, were seated together on another side, and some kammi biradari s and a few muslim sheikh s, the lowest caste, filled the third side. The fourth side, at the head of the square, was still empty, to be filled shortly by Naib, his cousins and nephews, his estate managers, or munshi s, and his special guests – the men in our research team. I, as the only female in the group, was asked to remain inside the walled garden of the bungalow. People walked around and warmly greeted one another but most stuck to their own side of the square in general. Once everyone had settled down, one of the managers walked into the living room to inform Naib that it was now time for him to join them. The landlord and his male relatives emerged together with great ceremony and walked towards the gathering of village residents, all of whom stood up to greet them. While his family and managers walked straight to their assigned charpai s at the head of the square, Naib walked down each side of it, greeting each person as he went. With the zamindar s he exchanged the customary hug, followed by a quick handshake.

Decentralisation is a major policy item across many emerging African democracies. However, repeated waves of local government reforms have had little impact on the region’s continuing problems with governance, and the decentralisation agenda remains incomplete. Yet, within this larger story there are smaller stories, of how different regions and different actors experience differential outcomes in the decentralisation process. Such stories have not been told in enough detail in the overall narrative on Africa’s decentralisation efforts. This IDS Bulletin is an attempt to get at these micro, comparative stories by accumulating evidence on how decentralisation works differently in a series of countries, and the factors that are responsible for differential outcomes. Together, the six articles of this issue interrogate the extent to which decentralisation has affected change at the local level and identify the factors that may allow decentralisation efforts to have greater impact through future reforms.

There is a growing scholarly and policy awareness of the fact that informal institutions that lie wholly or partly outside formal state structures and that take on various governance‐related functions have tremendous potential to strengthen citizen participation, encourage inclusive decision‐making and promote improved service delivery at the local level. Local informal governance institutions that play an active role in promoting citizen participation in decision‐making at the municipal level exist all over the Western Balkans. However, systematic empirical research on these is limited. This article is an initial analytical attempt at bringing together some of the existing literature and data on these institutions in four Western Balkan countries together with our own original research on the topic. Our analysis indicates an important role that these informal institutions play in the areas of citizen participation, inclusive decision‐making and service provision.

How do political parties in Pakistan aggregate votes and connect to voters, especially in rural areas? Most explanations for party-voter linkages in rural Pakistan can be grouped into four broad categories: (a) political parties are made up of powerful landlords who use economic power to collect votes from dependent voters; (b) parties are conglomerations of clientelist networks; (c) parties are large aggregations of kinship networks; and (d) parties function by building links with specific types of constituencies across large parts of the country, and voters forge links with political parties based on ideology and party identification. These are, at best, only partial explanations. How is it that they can all co-exist? The answer lies in the level of analysis employed. I argue that when viewed in aggregated form at a macro-level of analysis, such as that of national politics, these varied explanations of party-voter linkages appear to be distinct and sometimes mutually exclusive. However, when disaggrega...

In this article we take a comparative look at strategic opportunities and barriers for action on nutrition in Pakistan's four provinces in the post‐devolution context. Provinces have faced historically common constraints of lack of a comprehensive policy and minimal allocations by the state, driven by low visibility of nutrition, siloed working of sectors and weak coalitions. Provinces also face common contextual impediments of poverty, patriarchy, and inadequate health and WASH coverage, with two provinces also constrained by inequitable power structures. Recent focusing events have provided a window of opportunity to the provinces for action on nutrition leading to definite movement towards horizontal coordination for nutrition, upscaled funding and stronger vertical integration. However, there are variations in the extent of coalition building on nutrition, supportive leadership, governance and community outreach. The Pakistan experience shows that strategising for nutrition needs to move beyond a closely tailored national policy to accounting for sub‐national potential and constraints.

One of the central questions in political economy is whether there is path dependence in the political dominance of historic elite families in post-colonial societies. This paper uses a unique combination of household surveys, archival data and family genealogies to empirically estimate whether the political dominance of historic elite groups in the colonial period predicts local political dominance, today. This question is analyzed in the context of rural Punjab, in Pakistan, where the colonial state established institutions that granted unequal political and economic power to proprietary families and excluded non-proprietary groups. The results suggest that political dominance established 150 years ago persists in spite of the abolition of the de jure political institutions of the colonial state. We find that path dependence is the result of continuity in local village institutions. Within the sample of elite families we find that the magnitude of current land ownership impacts political dominance.