Publication

Pakistan’s weak historical record of social service delivery is widely blamed on its overly-centralized, inefficient, elite-centric government. This paper explores whether decentralization is successfully improving the accountability and responsiveness of the government in Balochistan. It finds that, to-date, decentralization has been more successful in some sectors than others. This can be explained by the deeply-embedded clientelist networks that underlie the tribal, ethnically-polarized context of Balochistan.