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 ACTIVITY REPORT

INTERIM ACTIVITY REPORT

This Interim Activity Report covers the period between March – August 2002 of the International Policy Fellowship Programme. The activities were in accordance with the Project Activity Timetable submitted at the beginning of the project along with the budget and revised research proposal.

Major activities during the period under report revolve around attending Fellow Seminars in Budapest, meetings with OSI Resource Persons, consultations with Mentors, establishing contacts with relevant people and background research. The period also included domestic travel to review the actual situation at provincial and district level after the devolution.

March 2002 – Activities during the Fellow Seminar in Budapest

The fellowship began with attending the fellow seminar in Budapest from 2-17 march 2002. This occasion provided for an opportunity to meet IPF staff, OSI resource persons, prospective mentor at CEU and other IPF fellows. In addition, training sessions were also attended. I had substantial discussions on the course of the project and identifying major issues with Prof. Peter Mihalyi, Department of Economics, Central European University.  I was also able to establish contact with LGI (Mr. Adrian Evtuhovici, Project Manager) and COLPI (Mr. Zsasa and the Training Coordinator) for possible cooperation and benefiting from the work undertaken by these organizations. Two areas have been specifically identified for future cooperation namely capacity building at local levels (LGI) and police training (COLPI). Both the areas remain a focus of highest-level attention in Pakistan. Local governments have been established under a new Local Government Ordinance in 2001, which has created a lot of room for capacity related intervention at local level. Similarly, Police Act of 1861 has been replaced by a new police ordinance promulgated in August 2002. The ordinance aims to improve the working of the police by improving their capacities and establishing better accountability and responsiveness mechanisms. I am evaluating the entry points in Pakistan to benefit from the work undertaken by LGI and COLPI. Discussions with IPF staff helped clarify many issues and gave more confidence to work on the project with refined goals. Interaction with other IPF fellows provided invaluable insights into the situation in Central and Eastern Europe. This was especially beneficial in increasing my limited knowledge about the region.

April 2002 – Activities in USA (15-26 April) and France (April 27-May 03)

In April 2002, I was awarded an IMF Institute scholarship to attend a residential workshop of a distance learning course in financial programming and policies in Washington DC. Besides learning about the macro-economic issues, the occasion was utilized to meet my Mentor Prof. James Manor (IDS, University of Sussex) who was based as a Research Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (website) at that time. I was able to benefit from his rich experience in the area of decentralization specially relating to South Asia and learned about many relevant people and literature. I also had discussions with Dr. Omar Azfar, Researcher, IRIS Center, University of Maryland, College Park who was kind enough to guide me through the research and introduced me to an excellent body of literature, including his own work on decentralization in Africa. I also had an opportunity to visit World Resources Institute (www.wri.org) courtesy Ms. Mehr Latif. I was introduced to Mr. Jesse C. Ribot who has worked in the area of decentralization in Africa especially in the environment sector. He was kind to share his key work on the subject of decentralization with me. The stay coincided with the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF and gave an opportunity to observe alternate views on the way development issues are being handled by the multilateral institutions.  

After the workshop in USA, I joined Pakistan’s delegation to the Pakistan Development Forum (www.worldbank.org.pk) in Paris from 29-30 April, 2002. This is the highest-level policy forum, where government shares its development policies with development partners and future course of action is determined. While I assisted the delegation throughout the forum, I was specifically tasked to assist on Government’s presentation on Governance. This was an invaluable opportunity to interact, learn and contribute to development and governance related policies. This was followed by participation in the Pakistan Investment Forum on 2^nd May 2002.

May-June 2002 – United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Nagoya, Japan 

I was awarded a UN Fellowship to attend a training program in Regional Development at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development (www.uncrd.or.jp) from 15 May to 26 June 2002 in Nagoya, Japan. I did miss IPF Fellow Seminar (with intimation to IPF) held in June but decided to avail this opportunity to utilize this period of being away from official work to complete the background readings related to decentralization. In addition, the program had a number of modules related to decentralization, local development and also participants from many countries undergoing decentralization. I was fortunate to meet and benefit from the experience of Ms. Elena M. Panganiban (Philippines), an important personality with valuable experience in decentralization especially in the Philippines. She was one of our instructors there.

July-August – Consolidation, partnership and moving ahead

These two months have been very significant as follow-up to earlier activities and moving ahead with the project. The highlights of these month include completing work on my IPF website, preparing the interim financial report, deciding on a format for IPF Research Paper, preparing questionnaires for domestic field visit and establishing contacts within Pakistan. There have been important gains in this regard. For interaction on relevant issues, following contacts have been established:

National Reconstruction Bureau (www.nrb.gov.pk)

Syed Anwarul Hassan Bokhari                                        Mr. Zulqarnain Hussain Anjum

Deputy Consultant (Civil Services Reform)                        Deputy Consultant (Fiscal Decentralization)

bsyed@hotmail.com                                                      z_anjum@hotmail.com

Planning & Development Division, Government of Pakistan

Mr. M. Shahid, Chief Coordinator, Projects Wing

Tel. 92-51-9204649

An important linkage has been with Mr. Douglas Porter, Senior Governance Specialist, Asian Development Bank, in Pakistan. Asian Development Bank, in collaboration with the World Bank and Department for International Development (UK), is planning a major study to maximize service delivery gains from devolution in Pakistan. I am currently discussing the possibility of undertaking a part of that study through my IPF project to investigate intergovernmental relationships in the education sector under devolution in Pakistan. If this relationship materializes, it will be a significant achievement for the project. I am withholding my domestic visits for the time being before a decision is taken on the issue.

A word on Draft Research and Policy Papers

The Government announced the current devolution Plan in year 2000 and promulgated the Local Government Ordinance in August 2001. Therefore there is a shortage of literature on the subject after the devolution was implemented in 2001. A lot of information needs to be collected from the field before any concrete analysis could be made for problem identification and policy recommendations. At this stage, therefore, only a sketch of Research Paper is proposed. It is hoped that short policy papers will be written to highlight specific issues under devolution plan. A case in point is a policy paper regarding intergovernmental relationships under devolution in the education sector in Pakistan.

FINAL ACTIVITY REPORT

(September 2002 – March 2003)

Picking up from the Interim Activity Report

As per the original activity plan submitted to IPF, main activities for the period September 2002 – March 2003 included Designing of questionnaires / interviews and preparation for field visits in Pakistan. The field visits were to be used to get first hand information about the devolution in action by interacting with provincial administrative authorities / city governments and political and administrative leadership at the district levels. Another purpose was to observe the people, the actual stakeholders to gauge their impressions about the whole process. The observations would have to be then used for finalizing the project report.

It was reported in the Interim Report that a contact has been made with ADB for possible participation in their proposed study on service delivery under devolution in Pakistan. Unfortunately, due to the security and other constraints in Pakistan, their work could not begin to coincide with my visits and waiting any further would have considerably delayed my project. Therefore, the study was done as per the original plan. I am, however, confident that it will still be of use to their work, which is still underway.

September

The month of September was used to visit two provinces in Pakistan. The visit was preceded by establishing contacts in the provinces at appropriate levels and designing of questionnaires for all levels of stakeholders. Given the resources and time available, direct observation and interview methods were selected as data/information gathering tools.

September was a month of a lot of political activity and uncertainty. Political activity as election to the national and provincial legislatures was planned for the month of October. Uncertainty was due to the fact that the elections were being held by the military government after three years of overthrowing the political government. Despite these facts, the visit provided an excellent opportunity to see the devolution plan in action. In addition, the occasion was used to observe people’s views and perceptions on how the elections will or will not affect the devolution plan.

Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan in terms of population, meets the food needs of the country and has a very significant role in the politics of the country. The visit to the Punjab province started off with initial interactions with the provincial authorities and the city government of Lahore. The places visited comprised of the cities of Lahore and Multan. While Lahore is the capital of the province and houses the provincial administration, Multan is a major city in the southern Punjab and was chosen for being representative of the feudal belt of the province. Road transport was used to commute, in order to get an opportunity to observe both the rural and urban areas of the province.

North West Frontier Province, another province which borders Afghanistan, meets the energy requirements of the country and offers a different variety of culture and terrain. Cities visited in the province included Peshawar, the capital of the province and two other districts namely D.I.Khan and Swabi to get a sample of the whole province. Meetings were held with provincial departments of finance, local government and district offices. Most interesting were the interaction with the common people.

October

The month of October was another milestone in Pakistan’s political history as the elections to the provincial and federal legislatures were held. The month was used to observe elections in the surroundings of Islamabad, which borders both the North West Frontier and Punjab provinces. The elections were held under a strict military watch with much controversial legislation enacted before the elections. Of special interest were the statements and manifestos of the political parties as relating to the newly established local government system which promised lot of powers at the local level. Historically, local governments did not have a comfortable coexistence with the political governments. The observations provided important initial information and clues on the future relationships between various levels of governments in Pakistan.

October was also the month to visit Budapest to attend the fellow seminar. As expected, the occasion was used to present initial findings of the project in the working group meetings. Feedback of the fellow participants, IPF staff and mentors was extremely useful in clarifying some of the issues. One such issue was the importance of statistical data in making any policy project more legitimate. Equally useful was the guidance received on steering the remaining part of the project. The training component was refreshing and generated debate on ethical issues in policy process.

November-December

The months of November and December were used to evaluate previous visits to the provinces, learn from them, incorporate observations from election campaigns and accordingly prepare for and undertake new visits. The visits were planned for the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan.

Sindh, the province having access to the sea, has the largest city of Pakistan named Karachi. Karachi, the provincial capital, is houses more than 11 million inhabitants and is a major commercial and industrial center. Visit to the Sindh province comprised of cities of Sukkur and Karachi.  The menu of meetings included officials of provincial governments, city district of Karachi and district Sukkur.

Balochistan, area-wise, the largest province of Pakistan, has the least of the population with highest incidence of poverty and a rough terrain and harsh weather. Quetta is the capital of the province and also the city district. Other places visited in the province included Khuzdar and Loralai to get a representative glimpse of the province. In all the three districts, meetings were held with political and administrative machinery and informal interaction with common citizens.

The overriding impression got from the district political leadership was a sort of reservation on how the newly elected provincial governments will work with them and the local government setup. The provincial governments were still in the process of settling in, however.

January-February

These months were used to consolidate the theoretical research and field observations to finalize the policy and research paper. With the arrival of political government, many organizations started working on paving way for them to work with the local government set-up. One such organization is Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) which kicked off this series with holding a conference on demarcation of roles in January, 2003. Participation in such events provided an opportunity to interact not only with a variety of district, provincial and national representatives but also a number of experts on decentralization.

Another interesting development was finalization of Decentralization Support Program (DSP) loan with the Asian Development Bank. As part of my official position, I was partly involved in finalization of the program and also assisting the representative of our Division on the Steering Committee for this program. This was most rewarding and at the same time utilized my learning about decentralization and devolution at the highest policy level in Pakistan.

The same period was used to prepare for presentation of project results during the fellow seminar in Budapest in the month of March, 2003.

 March

The highlights of the month included participation in the fellow seminar in Budapest. Most interesting part of the stay in Budapest was presenting the project and its outcomes in a Public Lecture delivered at the Central European University. With an introduction by Mr. Adrian Ionescu, Program Director
 (LGI), the occasion was used to share the learning with a select audience and learn from their questions/answers and constructive criticism.

 A note on request for extension

The IPF project was originally planned to be wrapped up in March 2003. As per the original activity plan, the research relating to the project was completed in time and so was the analysis and finalization of observations. However, it was felt that more time was requested to polish the policy/research paper and most importantly, get it reviewed by mentors and other important people who have been involved in planning and overseeing devolution in Pakistan. Although, with the placement of political governments at national and provincial levels, a plethora of issues both political and jurisdictional in nature emerged. The purpose was to briefly look at them for fine tuning the results and recommendations of the project. It was, however, ensured that the quality of output is improved without moving the original project goal posts, which was to look at the initial launch of the devolution plan in Pakistan and evaluate it for problems in order for it to function well in future.