Not just about the money
Public policy issues in the developing world are often framed around the fact that governments here dont have enough money. That can be misleading. Though limited fiscal space does have a great bearing on what transpires in the development profiles of these countries, there is also the limited capacity of the state to respond to challenges. And that capacity is not limited to immediately having funds in hand. Consider: the district of Rawalpindi has utilised only 40 percent of the funds that it had been awarded for the current fiscal year; disturbing, since there are only a couple of months left till the start of the next fiscal year.
But it is not just Rawalpindi district, it is many other throughout the country. And provincial departments and federal ministries. Challenges are not something you can just throw money at. It requires research, planning and execution. And the necessary paperwork and red-tape between these broadly defined stages. In the longer run, these might also boil down to money, with the state employing more and more civil servants and specialists.
Like almost all the bigger problems facing the country today, there is also the far from ideal political development in the country that is to be blamed. Development projects originate from the ministries. And there are problems aplenty there. True, there might be a dividend of democracy but the consensus-building process that democracy, as opposed to authoritarianism, requires is messy. Political governments are ill-equipped to deal with these issues for lack of experience. These are problems that a sustained, uninterrupted process of democracy will weed out. Consider the present federal cabinet, with some rather important portfolios unattended; other important portfolios, like finance most notably, have changed hands several times. Perhaps the government after the next, or perhaps the one after that, will not only have its act together right from the beginning of its term but the opposition parties will have shadow cabinets.
Till then, a slow trek.
