Big Cities, Small Governments

Pakistan’s cities are becoming larger, denser, and more economically important. Their governments have not grown in authority at the same pace.

Urban residents experience transport, water, drainage, waste, housing, land use, policing, and electricity as one daily system. The state often manages them as separate administrative territories divided among municipal bodies, provincial departments, utilities, development authorities, cantonments, and special agencies.

The fragmentation is visible whenever a road is rebuilt and then excavated for a utility line, a housing scheme expands without transport, or storm-water channels are blocked by decisions made elsewhere in the system.

Responsibility Without Power

City leaders are frequently blamed for problems they do not fully control. Revenue authority, staffing, land, and major infrastructure decisions may sit at provincial or federal level. At the same time, overlapping mandates make it difficult for citizens to identify who is responsible.

This weakens accountability. When everyone has a piece of the problem, no institution owns the outcome.

Pakistan needs durable local-government arrangements with clear functions, predictable fiscal transfers, stronger own-source revenue, professional municipal staff, and public performance reporting. The precise model can vary by province, but constant institutional resets make long-term planning nearly impossible.

Land Is the Hidden Balance Sheet

Urban land determines where people live, how far they travel, what infrastructure costs, and who benefits from public investment. Yet land records, zoning, valuation, and development permissions remain fragmented and vulnerable to influence.

Transparent land governance could improve housing supply, property taxation, transport planning, and municipal finance at the same time. It would also expose the distributional choices hidden inside urban expansion.

Climate Raises the Stakes

Heat and flooding turn governance weakness into physical danger. A city cannot build resilience through emergency response alone. Drainage, green space, building standards, water supply, settlement policy, and transport must be planned together.

Pakistan does not lack urban projects. It lacks city institutions able to select, coordinate, maintain, and answer for them. Until that changes, metropolitan growth will continue to outrun metropolitan government.

Source note

This commentary is informed by the population and climate material in the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025–26 and the NDMA monsoon infrastructure advisory.