Legal, Political and Administrative Barriers to Citizen Participation in Local Governance: An Inquiry of Local Government Institutions

This paper was designed to explore the Legal, Political, and Administrative barriers to Citizen Participation in Local governance. The paper explored both the subjective factors that include the role of stakeholders (local administrators, local political representatives, Civil Society Organizations and Citizens) and objective factors such as legal and administrative basis of Citizen Participation. The paper presented evidence from an inquiry of the local government institutions in Pakistan by employing qualitative research methods. The findings divulged manifold problems that contributed to the ineptitude of Citizen Participation in current development lexicon. First, mechanisms of direct Citizen Participation are faulty. The legal framework on Citizen Participation has a very high margin of manipulation. The main policy documents and laws can be easily interpreted and accommodated to different development discourses. In addition, local government administration, the provincial government, and political elites are not ready to disseminate their powers. Furthermore, local bureaucrats are more empowered than any other stakeholder, which is making Citizen Participation a distant reality. Overall, the findings suggested that it will be difficult to implement participatory governance effectively in Pakistan due to the low degree of Civil Society Organizations’ effectiveness, the truncated level of education regarding Citizen Participation, loopholes in the legal framework, and no mechanism for accountability.