Pakistan’s political parties have been pushing the cause of provincial autonomy from the centre for sixteen years. Yet they refuse to grant the same autonomy to their allies, the districts and unions. The worst failures that came to light after the 2025 monsoon floods were not the big ones we all expected. The delays in issuing timely warnings, the overstretched relief camps, and the health system pushed to breaking point were glaring. But underneath them all, a quieter failure was at work. Local governments were not functioning, and that structural weakness made the disaster response far worse than the rains themselves. A Jinnah Institute review of the disaster response concluded that in many parts of the country there is simply no local government left for people to turn to for effective assistance.
No one can reasonably claim they did not see this coming. The 18th Amendment in 2010 inserted Article 140-A into the Constitution, promising every province a local government system that would share political, administrative, and financial authority with elected representatives. Sixteen years later, none of the provinces have kept that promise. The pattern is too regular, too common, and too convenient for too many parties to be mere coincidence.
But it is no accident.
Punjab last held local council elections in 2015. It has still not moved forward. Only a new election law and terms of reference were passed recently, and those are expected to allow polls this November at best. Even then, it will be the union chairmen who are directly elected; everything else will follow indirectly. Delimitation has been completed, yet the date for actual voting remains unclear. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which once had some of the best local governments in the country, the election schedule has still not been announced. In Islamabad, the local government has been missing since February 2021. The Election Commission has floated four different dates since then, the latest of which was supposed to have taken place last February.
When the political process stalls, the courts have sometimes stepped in. In its February 2022 verdict, a Supreme Court bench headed by former Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed ruled that the government of Sindh had failed to grant local governments the authority that the Constitution clearly grants them and had not taken the necessary steps to ensure the law would be enforced. The same court was also dealing with parallel challenges from the PTI and a separate petition from Punjab at the time. No province currently in power has clean hands on this issue.
Follow the money
The reason is not hard to spot once the numbers are looked at. Ever since the 18th Amendment, provinces have been guaranteed a fixed 57.5 per cent share of the federal divisible pool. That formula was fought for and now exists. But there is no equivalent mechanism linking provinces to their districts, as the National Finance Commission does for the centre and the provinces. Provincial Finance Commissions are supposed to play the same role, yet they, too, have been delayed. Researchers at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics describe these as discretionary grants that give provinces full control, with no constitutional deadline to act. Sindh has been operating on an outdated Provincial Finance Commission award for years. The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation has publicly warned that the delay is already hurting its budget, which has risen by 16 per cent as a result.
This is where the argument turns from theory to politics. According to a study in Publius, the Journal of Federalism, ministers and assembly members have little incentive to hand development funds to elected councillors they cannot hold directly accountable. They prefer to keep the money themselves and use it to build political credit. The study, published after the parties voted in 2010 to devolve power, reminds today’s leadership that true devolution would not help their re-election prospects.
The same pattern is visible in August 2026. Political analysis shows that the current government relies heavily on direct development spending to hold its ground against a PTI that is showing no signs of weakening. Those transfers are proving decisive.
Karachi, up close
The pattern is on full display in Karachi. In 2014, the provincial government abolished the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s solid waste management system and handed it to a new provincial body. In 2021, the then-mayor was made chairman of the board, but he immediately said the extra title came with no budget or staff. More than ten years later, the same battle is still raging. In May 2026, opposition-led town chairmen from local government filed a fresh case in the Sindh High Court, arguing that the transfer of the solid waste function was never meant to strip elected bodies of their authority.
Even in the province that once seemed most committed to devolution Khyber Pakhtunkhwa progress has been uneven. PTI’s 2013 manifesto and the 2019 addition of direct elections for tehsil chairmen made village and neighbourhood councils a central promise. Yet a February 2026 report found that timely and consistent fund releases remain missing, and departments like education and health still exercise full administrative control over their budgets. Technical capacity is not the problem; one province that tried to create village councils failed on schedule. The issue is political will and that will is absent wherever parties have not yet tested it.
The battle that is still being fought
The most interesting fight is not in the centre or even in Punjab or Sindh. It is happening inside a provincial assembly, but not the one you would expect. For years the Urban Resource Centre has worked quietly with Karachi’s communities, building the knowledge base that the official planning process deliberately ignored. The Orangi Pilot Project went further: it helped residents of the Orangi slums pay for and install their own sanitary lines block by block when the city bureaucracy refused to do it. That kind of bottom-up action is what Article 140-A was meant to encourage.
The same instinct is at work in the Sindh High Court case. Town chairmen are not the usual suspects when the topic of local democracy comes up in civics textbooks. Yet these are the people the Constitution entrusted with the job in 2010. Sixteen years later, they are still waiting for the job to be finished.