Pakistan’s urbanization challenges up due to poor governance: ADB

ISLAMABAD: Amid the possibility of flooding in major urban centres in the wake of heavy rains, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has highlighted that Pakistan’s urbanization challenges are increasing due to poor governance as multiple governance structures have failed service delivery.

A report titled “Pakistan National Urban Assessment” released by the ADB illustrates that multiple mutually exclusive governance structures militate against the clear assignment of liability for municipal service failures. The accountability of multiple municipal service providers that operate within urban jurisdictions is not necessarily linked to the responsible local government.

This includes the local development authorities (responsible for land use planning and management), water and sanitation agencies responsible for the provision of networked water and sewage services), traffic engineering and planning agencies (responsible for developing transport infrastructure), cantonment boards (responsible for the local provision of municipal services on military-owned establishments), and industrial estates and private housing societies (responsible for local housing developments and their management). In the absence of any agreement delegating responsibility from the local government to these municipal service providers, elected urban local governments cannot coordinate these providers to ensure a minimum quality of municipal services for all their citizens.

The report states that military lands and cantonments do not fall under the jurisdiction of city administrations but are administered by the Military Lands & Cantonments Group, a department attached to the Ministry of Defence. The group oversees the governance of 44 cantonments through local cantonment boards and manages the Ministry of Defence land throughout the country through 11 military estate circles. In contrast to municipal areas, bylaws and regulations are strictly enforced in cantonment areas with almost no encroachment on privately-owned lands under their development.

The increasing imperviousness of urban surfaces due to a loss of green cover and the soil sealing that comes with massive construction works and infrastructure development in cities is a major factor behind urban flooding. Lahore provides a good example. It became more prone to flooding after it lost more green cover in just 7 years (2010–2017) than it did in the previous two decades. Urban flooding is exacerbated by the aging and overburdened drainage systems, lack of rainwater storage and management systems, inadequate waste disposal systems, institutional capacity constraints, weak urban governance and development that ignore topography and landscape.

Air pollution alone shortens the average Pakistani’s life expectancy by 4.3 years and imposes an additional loss of 6.5% of GDP per year due to mortality and years lived with disability.

Pakistan’s high exposure to climate-related hazards, such as floods, droughts, and cyclones, and its lack of coping capacity will make it continually vulnerable to climate disaster risks. Therefore, mainstreaming climate mitigation and adaptation measures in development is not an option but an imperative. With urban areas especially vulnerable and likely to bear the brunt of climate change impacts, urban focal agencies and planners need to be proactive and lose no time in adopting climate resiliency principles and approaches in development planning and management.

Urban housing has failed to keep pace with rapid urban population growth. The housing shortage estimated to have approached 10 million housing units in 2018 has forced around 57% of the urban population to live in slums or Kutchi Abadis (informal settlements), usually under harsh and unhygienic conditions. No recent update is available on Pakistan’s urban housing deficit, but the World Bank has reported a 1% decline in the proportion of the urban population living in slums from 2018 to 2020.

Government pronouncements to meet the escalating housing deficit have not translated into practice in the face of the realpolitik of the vested interests at play. For instance, government agencies that control nearly 90% of the public land in Karachi have been reluctant to release even a portion of that land for affordable housing development. With a monthly mortgage repayment of Rs 20,000 (roughly $70 in December 2023), the Naya Pakistan Housing Program launched by the federal government in 2020 is clearly not targeting low-income groups. By mid-2023, the program had completed only 53,000 housing units (with another 28,000 under construction), well short of the target to provide 5 million housing units to those currently not owning an independent residential unit in Pakistan.

As the urban population continues to swell, the country’s housing shortage will be hard to address without public-private partnerships (PPPs) that target the more affordable end of the housing market (including vertical housing developments). The PPP Unit of the government of Sindh has initiated some housing sector interventions but has yet to make an impact.

As the role of the government shifts from being an executor to an enabler and facilitator of private housing development for poor people, the report concluded that the need to establish a legal and regulatory framework to contain the market pressure to serve the interests of non-poor people would remain a key challenge.