A Framework for Assessing the Urban Governance Effectiveness in Pakistan

Abstract

Urbanization is creating many governance issues in developing nations like Pakistan. This study mainly focuses on the urban governance effectiveness frameworks, their issues, and barriers to measuring effectiveness. This research aims to evaluate the existing good governance frameworks of the world and then propose a new framework to measure Pakistan's urban governance effectiveness. Other objectives of the study are to identify the barriers to measure the urban governance effectiveness and check the general public's satisfaction with the performance of local government institutions of Islamabad, Pakistan. Existing governance measuring frameworks were identified with the help of a literature review. Questionnaires were developed to serve the purpose of data related to effectiveness barriers and issues in Islamabad. Expert surveys and structured interviews were conducted to know Islamabad's governance effectiveness and identify the barriers to urban governance effectiveness measurement. A separate public satisfaction survey was conducted to understand the general public's satisfaction with the performance of local government institutions. The study results showed the poor condition of institutions, lack of women participation in all fields, less acceptability and lack of penetration of modern technology-based practices, corrupt practices, less involvement of the private sector, and poor public service delivery system. Moreover, unskilled public servants, lack of data availability, and the unwillingness of public and public servants to participate and cooperate in governance measurement are the biggest hurdles to achieving and measuring urban governance effectiveness. The literature-based identified grey areas and expert survey-based barriers were integrated with the local conditions-based parameters to form a new governance effectiveness framework. Then these parameters were used to measure the urban governance effectiveness of other cities of Pakistan.