THE ROLE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT SYSTEM IN SOUTH ASIA: A CASE STUDY OF PAKISTAN

Pakistan is a democratic country in the region of South Asia, but it has been deprived of political backdrop from its independence from the British Empire in 1947, notably in the field of local self-government. Pakistan's history demonstrates that inconsistency in civilian norms hampered the establishment of a robust democratic culture at all levels of government. The military has repeatedly swallowed the civil-military political romance. Each military commander instituted local self-government; General Ayyub instituted the Basic Democratic System in his dictatorship, and General Zia instituted local government as well; their primary goal was to legitimate their own authority and that of the military. However, the decentralisation changes in Pakistan may be traced back to the last military takeover led by General Musharraf in 1999. Under General Musharraf's leadership, recent decentralisation measures in Pakistan have been examined in this article. We emphasise the most important features of this reform and examine its growth in the context of history to better recognize the probable causes for the current decentralisation of power. In Pakistan, the history of local government reforms is particularly intriguing as, on request of a non-representative centre, each of the top three reform efforts has been executed using a "top-down" strategy for the reform process. It should be noted that each of these reforms is an add-on to the broader constitutional reengineering agenda that is designed to centralise the political authority of a non-representative centre further. In these cases, we would propose that the design of local government reforms is endogenous rather than exogenous for centralization purposes of the non-representative centre. Pakistan's analysis aims to provide understanding into the good economics of why non-representative governments were keen to promote local decentralisation, which has been dismay formerly