Policy Governance in Pakistan: A Critical, Contemporary Qualitative Inquiry (2021-2024)

Abstract

It is a detailed qualitative research that offers a thorough, interpretive examination of the ecosystem of the public policy formulation and implementation in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan revised to reflect the radical socio-political, economic, and environmental changes of the post-2020 era. The following question will be answered using a critical governance lens and a strictly qualitative research design and exploring the multifaceted relationship between historical legacies, institutional structures, and agentic power dynamics that characterize the current policy environment in Pakistan. The methodology used in the research is carefully phenomenological and hermeneutic and relies on deep interviews with elites, comprehensive discursive examination of policy documents and media discourses and participation in policy communities. It transcends the linear, technocratic paradigms of policy making in order to reveal the own reality of a system of competing sovereignties where formal authority of elected government grabs at and tends to corrupt local developmental imperatives, and where global financial interests collide with and frequently pervert local developmental demands. The paper especially emphasizes new forces that are defining the policy space: the digital governance revolution and its dissatisfactions, the existential demands of climate change after the 2022 super-floods, the unsettling political restructuring after the 2022 no-confidence motion and the 2024 general elections. The paper, through an in-depth sectoral discussion of economic survival under the 2023 IMF Stand-By Arrangement, controversial adherence to the Single National Curriculum, and the development of climate change adaptation structures under the influence of the crisis, creates a layered account of a state that negotiates policies all the time. These threads are summarized into a reconstructive framework on policy governance at the conclusion, as the policy governance model needs a fundamental change in attitudes towards a state-centric model of top-down delivery to an ecosystem of adaptable, collaborative, and citizen-engaged co-production that is uniquely suited to the fragmented but robust socio-political fabric of Pakistan.