Aims of the Devolution Research Project

The Devolution Research Project aims to document, analyse and assess the impact of local government reforms as a pro-poor institutional change in the rural areas of Pakistan 's Punjab province. The initial work is being carried out in the Punjab because of the faster pace of implementation of these reforms in the province. The impact assessment is divided into three separate components namely, Impact Assessment of Government Responsiveness, Participation Impact Assessment and Fiscal Impact Assessment.

This three year project is currently working to draw a base-line and to document changes in local government fiscal performance; the purpose of this analysis being to identify the budgetary space provided to local governments for greater social service and infrastructural spending as a consequence of devolution. At the same time the project is also analyzing the extent and nature of the reciprocal relationship established by LGO 2001 between citizens and the state, characterised by the participation of the former in decision-making and the responsiveness of the latter to citizen demands.

The project will be completed in a time span of three years.

• To draw a base line of fiscal performance of local governments as a result of decentralization exercise promulgated by LGO 2001.
• To observe changes in fiscal allocations at local levels with special emphasis on social service and infra structure spending.
• To identify factors that can explain variation in performance of local bodies spread out across different geographical regions.

Pakistan 's Local Government Plan (2000) and its aligned reforms are a major step in the evolution of state-citizen relationships in the country. This ambitious reform aims to create new accountabilities at the local level by restructuring inter-governmental fiscal relationships; by creating new forms of electoral accountability and by institutionalising citizen-based participatory bodies. In particular, a stated objective of the reformers is to make the state more accountable to women, poor and marginalized groups. International experience reveals that the success of decentralization as a pro-poor reform is predicated upon far-ranging fiscal restructuring, the degree of equality of economic and social assets in civil society and the prevalence of political and social collective action among the poor and marginalized groups.

Impact Assessment of Government Responsiveness uses community and household level field surveys from the Punjab province to assess the degree to which devolution reforms have resulted in: (a) increasing the magnitude of local government provision at the village/household level during the past three years and (b) the degree to which the post-reform targeting of provision by union administrations (the only directly elected tier of local government) can be classified as pro-poor. It develops a unique empirical methodology to assess whether the targeting of provision has become pro-poor or elite biased as a result of the reforms. Empirical results are based on in-depth field work, randomised household and village survey data and rigorous quantitative analysis. Field work has been conducted in 3 tehsils, 6 unions, 12 villages and the current survey is of over 1000 households. In addition, to documenting social, economic, governance and provision characteristics of households the surveys involve a complete provision mapping of villages for a pre-reform base line and a post-reform provision line. Jaranwala, Dunyapur and Shahpur, the selected tehsils, represent intra-Punjab variation in the: degree of inequality of land ownership; types of land settlement; and extent of exposure to urbanization.

Participation Impact Assessment examines: (a) the extent to which participatory bodies have been empowered during the past three years in our case villages; and (b) the extent to which the reforms have reduced the anti-poor bias in access to and awareness of local level citizen bodies. Again, use is made of randomised household surveys in the three chosen tehsils to assess the degree of access the poor, women and marginalized groups have to participatory bodies. This component also examines the institutional mechanisms through which households participate in local level elections. In particular, it examines the degree to which non-party based electoral processes strengthen non-formal elite based vote blocks.

Finally, the Fiscal Impact Assessment is in the process of putting together a database of district budgets that will include 2001 as the pre-reform base line and will include post-reform budgetary data. The database will be used to assess the degree to which devolution has resulted in changing expenditure priorities at the district level. It also assesses the degree to which changing expenditure priorities reflect the needs of district citizens. Results of this work will be disseminated to Government, citizen bodies and civil society groups with an explicit aim of influencing the design of policies, legal measures and programmes that aim at strengthening local level governance in Pakistan.

The work will be disseminated through three primary channels: (a) by establishing working relationships with local and provincial governments; (b) through training courses for local government managers and civil society groups; and (c) through publications that will be posted on the LUMS-McGill Social Enterprise Development Centre website.