Politics of institutional reforms in the water and drainage sector of Pakistan[We would like to acknowledge the very useful comments by Sakwa Bunyasi and Usman Qamar, and by 3 anonymous reviewers and an associate editor. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the World Bank.]

This paper develops an approach to assess the political risk associated with implementation of institutional reforms in the water sector, while providing insights into the interrelationship of institutional arrangements, power structure, and policy outcome. The analytical approach consists of a two-tier process to assess the institutional feasibility of reform implementation. The first tier is a structured analysis of power distribution among the power groups interested in the outcome of the reform. The second tier is a Delphi process, reflecting the opinions of experts. The approach was applied to the case of the National Drainage Program Project (NDP) in Pakistan, currently in the early stages of implementation. Several hypotheses regarding likely progress were tested, using the feedback provided by a panel of experts in the Delphi process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]