Access to Power

Front matter

ljlal Naqvi

ELE

INFRASTRUCTURAL STATE IN PAKISTAN

Part Ii: The City Level Of Analysis Part Ii: The Individual Level Of Analysis

7. Money, Violence, and Connections: The Culture of Power 133 8. Conclusion 151

References 175 Index 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I couldnt have written this book alone. Charlie Kurzman shepherded me through my dissertation fieldwork and the difficult process of writing up without returning to the University of North Carolina (UNC). Charlie’s generosity of spirit and mind is such that I can’t imagine a better adviser. Andy Perrin, Margarita Mooney, and John Stephens took a leap of faith on a project that was little more than a hunting license in its early stages. Ayesha Jalal’s razor-sharp insights on Pakistan and continued enthusiasm for the project always provided a boost. Needless to say, all errors remain my responsibility alone.

The fieldwork I did in Islamabad lies at the heart of this book. Employees of the Islamabad Electric Supply Company (IESCO) and the Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO) taught me how their system works, sharing their time and wisdom and tea with humor and an open spirit—all with no reward to themselves. I am especially grateful to the staff of the subdivisions who tolerated my repeated intrusions into their working lives as well as the katchi abadi residents of Islamabad who helped me try to see things from their perspective. I am grateful to all who shared their time and views with me.

In Pakistan, I was very lucky to stumble into a professional community with extensive experience in the Pakistani power sector when I joined the Energy Policy Program, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded consulting effort that supported the Ministry of Water and Power in its governance reform program. I learned a great deal from Mian Shahid Ahmed, Charley Moseley, Salahuddin Rifai, Manzoor Shaikh, Michael Gembol, Mary Webster, Shahid Sattar, and others. Munir Ahmed’s camaraderie and support in navigating the madness of the ministry and USAID’s contractor politics was essential to keeping a sense of perspective and humor. Munir was an early reader of my dissertation whose feedback I relied on. More broadly, my colleagues had a depth of power sector knowledge which they generously shared viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS with me. Saleem Arif and Ashfaq Mahmood offered crucial support and guidance based on their tremendous experience and knowledge.

Singapore Management University (SMU) has been my intellectual home for the past ten years, and sometimes a sad one. Too many friends and colleagues departed the School of Social Sciences (SOSS), but many more have joined, and I am happy to see this environment changing into one that is more supportive for junior scholars. Chandran Kukathas has led this transformation, and I am grateful to him for his faith in my work. Christine Henderson and Chandran have jointly set the tone by opening their home to myself and colleagues with generosity and joie de vivre. The academic writing group at SOSS has been a wonderfully supportive peer-learning environment. I’m particularly thankful to Nick Harrigan, Serena Wee, Jake Ricks, and Gao Yang for their inputs to this book (and other projects), but most especially for their friendship. Ulas Ince and Hiro Saito gave constructive comments to unpolished drafts. Rebecca Maniates at the SMU library solved my problems with handling citations across multiple formats in unwieldy files. I also need to thank the students of my development class who learned more about electricity in Pakistan than they perhaps wanted to! The SMU School of Social Sciences and the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship both provided funding for this book. Part of the research for Chapter 4 was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 grant C242/MSS13S004.

Parts of this book have been published in the Journal of Development Studies, Current Sociology, and Urban Studies. Developing these sections for publication was an essential step toward improving the argument in those chapters, and also in developing the overall framework of the book. I thank the editors and the anonymous referees for their comments. I also benefited from the collective effort entailed in the Current Sociology publication, which was guided by Diane Davis and Julie-Anne Boudreau.

In no particular order, I have many debts of gratitude to acknowledge for people and institutions who have helped me develop this work (directly or indirectly). Aasim Sajjad Akhtar helped me get started on serious fieldwork in Islamabad. Tariq Rahman at Quaid-e-Azam University’s National Institute for Pakistan Studies generously provided me with a temporary academic home away from UNC. I benefited from a seminar at Oxford organized by Indrajit Roy. I thank Miguel Loureiro and Shandana Mohmand Khan for hosting me for a talk at the Institute of Development Studies. Majed Akhtar very kindly arranged for me to give a talk at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where Ed Simpson and Liz Chatterjee provided insightful comments. Audiences at Northwestern and Brown turned up for online talks and gave comments that helped me refine the argument. Kamran Asdar Ali, Shahnaz Rouse, and Itty Abraham have all offered sage advice and warm support at different times.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Federico Rossi provided theoretical sophistication and friendship in large doses. Seth Schindler brought me to Manchester’s Global Development Institute for a workshop on the Belt and Road Initiative, which helped me see the significance of Sahiwal for my argument. Subadevan has been an extraordinarily capable research assistant over several years and is now well on his way toward developing his own scholarly agenda. Ate Poorthuis and Anirudh Govind helped me immensely with the models and charts in Chapter 4. Anirudh also contributed to almost every figure in the book, giving each a little more style and purpose than they might otherwise have had. Syed Zahoor Hassan opened doors at LESCO for me at just the right time. Waqas bin Najib has been an invaluable interlocutor. Ejaz Haider tried to mitigate the damage I was doing in translation and transliteration. I am grateful to Libby Beri for casting a professional editor's eye on the entire book in her role as development editor. The book’s cover is based on a photo taken by the very talented Omer Rana.

I owe a great deal to the salty sharks for keeping me current with developments in Pakistan and allowing me to learn from their incisive commentaries. I hope this is reflected in the quality of this work, and ifnot, I will certainly hear about it!

The two weeks in 2015 that I spent at Brown’s Watson Institute for the program on Governance and Development in the Global South have had a very broad influence on this project. Nitsan Chorev, Andy Schrank, Prerna Singh, and Michael Kennedy, among others, helped me see a larger intellectual landscape. On an unrelated but equally important note, I also learned at Brown that Latin Americans are simply more ready to have fun than anyone else! Patrick Heller gave valuable feedback on the development of the book at the proposal stage. He and Ashutosh Varshney opened the door for me at OUP’s Modern South Asia series.

I have more reason than most to thank my editor at OUP, Dave McBride, as well as the anonymous reviewers. The reviewers understood this book and captured its strengths in better ways than I have often managed. Their generous praise and constructive critiques were a delight to receive and have given me a chance to improve the book. There are few joys in academic life better than having your work read, critiqued with care and skill, and returned with encouragement. My thanks to Dave for shepherding this process through in a timely manner, not least in securing the vital second review the week that SMU was to decide on my tenure case. He and the delegates who endorsed the manuscript have my sincere gratitude.

In Matthew and Tom I have two friends as loyal and true as one could wish for. They, and the FC crew, have also forced me to stay much healther than I otherwise would have done. To help me finish on time, Tom and Kate even threw me a party to celebrate the completion of my book manuscript!

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sofi is the best kid a dad could ask for; enough said. Leylac saw this book develop through many iterations of dissertation chapters, articles, and talks. We traveled a long way together. Thank you.

My wonderful siblings are a testament to all the love that is possible in a big family. We live so far apart, but they have always managed to be there for me. I can’t wait to join them and all of the 37-D gang at our next raucous celebration.

This book is dedicated to my parents, whose love, encouragement, and support have been such a powerful constant in my life.

Introduction

Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. This is the rare issue on which government and private sector can unite, and it is the cause of suffering for rich and poor alike across the entirety of the country. For most of the last two decades, urban residents in Pakistan may have been without power for 8 hours on any given day, and rural residents for 12 or more. Electricity shortages are one of the many poor governance outcomes characteristic of the South Asian state. Standard development thinking points to a lack or absence of institutions in comparison with an idealized and distant other country, such as Denmark, with governance reform programs formulated accordingly. The orientation toward what Pakistan is not takes us away from how it actually functions and to whose benefit. Electricity governance reinforces relations of power between provinces and the federal center, contributes to the marginalization of subordinate groups in the city, and orients citizens toward a patronage-based relationship with the state through encounters with street-level bureaucrats.’

Pakistan’s power sector’s woes are less mystery than tragedy,” but to conclude simply that a weak state produces poor governance outcomes misses the manner in which these arrangements are important for reproducing existing relations of domination and are resistant to change. The question this book addresses, therefore, isn’t just about why Pakistan doesn’t produce enough power. There is no lack of political will to address the power sector’s challenges, and the sector has received relentless attention from bilateral donors and multilateral development institutions over many years—yet reforms have failed and Pakistanis still suffer. Why?

This book seeks to unpack our understanding of how states in the Global South, with their complex colonial histories and regional tensions, actually work. The argument builds on the literatures on good governance and class-centric analyses of power relations while remaining focused on solving real-world problems. An adequate electricity supply is a necessity for all states. In addition,

Access to Power. \jlal Naqvi, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/0s0/9780197540954.003.0001 the challenges of state-formation entailed therein, including constructing the infrastructure and extracting the related stream of payments, are general tasks with broad relevance to other infrastructures and public goods across the Global South. In many senses, Pakistan's electricity problems are neither unique nor even surprising given that public service failures are commonplace in the Global South. This book moves beyond the diagnosis of a lack of Weberian state capacity and looks instead at the relationships of power and processes of governance that produce these poor outcomes and why they are resistant to change. The Pakistani power sector is bedeviled by operational and financial troubles. The rolling blackouts known as loadshedding have become a regular feature of daily life in Pakistan with huge consequences. Loadshedding disrupts business and deters investment,’ and it is estimated to reduce economic growth in Pakistan by 2%.* The federal government’s subsidy to power consumers for the three fiscal years between 2008 and 2011 exceeded one trillion rupees ($117 billion) and added 10% to the total national debt; this subsidy was greater than the entire public sector development budget over that same period (Ministry of Finance, 2011). Since then, residential electricity subsidies were found to be 0.8% of GDP in 2015, a comparable amount to total public health spending (World Bank, 2017, p. 1).

Unpaid electricity bills contribute to the crippling accumulation of debts owed from one government entity to another—known as circular debt—which both arise from and contribute to this budgetary stress. The scale and importance of the electricity crisis have escaped nobody’s attention. In his 2008 inaugural address to the National Assembly, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani promised to address the electricity shortage.‘ However, loadshedding worsened during his tenure, and the government's promise to end the shortages in 2009 brought them ridicule both when the plan was announced and when the government failed to meet it. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government of 2013-2018 was committed to ending loadshedding as its signature policy initiative and campaign issue.° Although the PML-N government did add more capacity, cash flow problems coinciding with a change of government meant that any respite from loadshedding was temporary. The issue received international attention as well: addressing the electricity shortages was also near the top of the United States Agency for International Development's plan for spending $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act. Unfortunately, the governance reforms and capacity additions pursued under United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also had limited success. More recently, the China—Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was launched with $37 billion worth of energy projects intended to address Pakistan's power sector woes by replacing expensive power with cheaper alternatives.’ National policy concerns are regularly in the headlines, but the personal experience of loadshedding is more directly disruptive to everyday life.

The idea for this research project started in the summer of 2005 when I was part of a disgruntled mob of middle- and upper-class Pakistani men that had gathered in front of the local office of the electrical utility in a residential neighborhood in Lahore. We had been without power for most of the night, and in the hundred-plus-degree heat many people could not sleep or be comfortable when deprived of fans and air conditioners. The assembled group had come to the office to find out why their power was out and when it might be restored. My father had made me come down to the office. I had resisted—what was the point?—but I finally relented. I was familiar with Pakistanis maneuvering their way through government bureaucracies armed with introductions and references from some important third party (sifarish), and perhaps even supplementing these requests with a payment (rishwat). But until that night, when I first encountered ordinary Pakistanis demanding that their state provide them with a service they needed and wanted, I had never seen such a vociferous expression of demands on the state that hinted at citizenship rights.

Armed with little more than their frustration, these otherwise-stolid burghers fumed in the heat but got no satisfaction from the employees of the electrical utility who were on duty that night. Eventually, one person who had gotten into the office (the majority of us stayed outside) informed the rest of the crowd that the phone line had been deliberately disconnected so that the employees on duty would no longer have to listen to our complaints. People started to make bold claims about what they would do to resolve the situation. One man claimed that he would march to the house of the utility’s chief executive, to which another responded, “Pll follow you, lead the way.” After someone suggested going to the house of the nazim of Lahore, a group of about 30 people gathered to walk or drive the quarter-mile to his house.* I left for home, having no confidence that the nazim would achieve anything if anyone was even able to contact him.

Several hours later that morning the electricity came back on, without any indication of why it had gone or why it returned when it did. Over the years I lived in Islamabad from 2008 to 2011, I was to become very familiar with this characteristic lack of transparency and accountability as I researched the power sector across government departments, city neighborhoods, and the offices of the Islamabad Electric Supply Company (IESCO). The eventual choice of appealing to the nazim was probably influenced by his proximity. The nazim has absolutely no authority over the electrical utility, and—if he were to do anything—it would be to call someone at the utility and request that they address the problem. Petitioning an elected representative to help in redressing a grievance is a staple of democracy, but the appeal to the nazim also reflects a patron—client mode of supplicating a notable member of society to put pressure on state officials.

4 ACCESS TO POWER National, City, and Individual Levels of Analysis

The book uses a three-part narrative structure to explore how the relationships around electricity carry different meanings and sustain distinct debates at different levels of analysis: national, city, and individual. At each level, I treat the unevenness of electricity governance as a product of state-building and an integral part of the system of rule rather than an absence or erosion of governance. Meanwhile, the material properties of electricity require the entire nation to be synchronized in its production and consumption of electrical power.’ At the national level, the federal government must balance the rival claims and contributions of each province, wherein ethnic differences and the legacy of past disputes become entangled with political economy. At the city level, squatter settlements seek legal access to electricity as an acknowledgment of their occupancy, while industrialists and the middle class are increasingly aggravated by the poor quality of service. At the individual level, people encounter street-level bureaucrats with whom they negotiate using a blend of personalistic appeals, bribery, and threats of violence or intervention by influential individuals. The bureaucrats themselves carefully shade the moral valences of the shortcuts they take against the constraints of sustaining an underfunded system that pays them poorly.

Each level of analysis has its own dynamics and is typically the domain of different academic disciplines. By knitting these levels together through the theoretical framework of the “infrastructural state” (which will be advanced in this Introduction), we are able to see why it is so difficult to reform the governance of Pakistan’s electricity sector. The different disciplinary approaches typically speak past each other, but deploying them together helps to show how Pakistan's power sector troubles manifest at different levels of analysis in interrelated ways. National policy concerns emerge from the consequences of dynamic processes at multiple levels. From above, policy decisions are driven by a commitment to a unitary vision of national identity governed through a strong federal center. From below, the rules of street-level bureaucracies are embedded in practices of patronage and rents, culture, and interpersonal connections. In the absence of an established interdisciplinary approach to knit these different levels of analysis together, the most influential school of thought for addressing governance reform has come from economics.’

Critique of the Dominant Governance Paradigm

The message that governance reform requires attention to more than the formal rules of governance is now well entrenched in development thinking.

Governance reforms that concentrated on formal rules and excluded the informal realities of country context have been a failure. Despite spending in excess of US$10 billion per year, aid from countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that targets governance as a set of formal rules has had “limited impact” (Institute of Development Studies, 2010). However, the dominant theorization of governance for development is drawn from new institutionalist economics, which—in practice, at least— largely restricts itself to formal rules. There are historical and sociological strains of new institutionalism that are much more attuned to how institutions develop and evolve (Hall & Taylor, 1996), but these are nowhere near as influential in development thinking.

The seminal statement of new institutionalism in economics is Douglass North’s (1990, p. 3) formulation that “Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” These rules can be formal—codified by human beings—or informal, “such as conventions and codes of behavior.” That the new institutionalist economics framework includes informal rules is a major step beyond neoclassical economics, in which treatment of the Global South relied on “social arrangements that economists usually take for granted, but which are conspicuous by their absence in poor countries” (Rodrik, 2007, p. 153). Northian informal institutions are conceptually cluttered in that they contain everything from panchayats (village councils) in South Asia to the Protestant ethic.!! The critiques of new institutionalist economics come from too many sources to be able to cover them all. Mushtaq Khan's (2018) political settlements approach draws attention to the social context from which institutions emerge as a key point in understanding their relative effectiveness (or lack thereof). In turn, political settlements analysis can be critiqued for being insufficiently attentive to the role of ideas in bringing together elite cohesion. Moreover, the developmental outcomes of political settlements are mediated by a meso-level field specific to the policy domain in question (Kelsall & vom Hau, 2020). Relatedly, the developmental state literature examines the evolution of industrial policy through the back and forth between state actors and key industries.'* Two recent examples from political science point to the broad deficiencies in new institutionalist economics using the cases of road building in Indonesia and in the economic rise of China.

Jamie Davidson (2015) proposes a political sociology of infrastructure development in which he uses a study of toll roads in Indonesia to speak to shortcomings in new institutionalist economics. The three main deficiencies are a neglect of close ties between state and business, the importance of regulations and ordinances other than parliamentary legislation, and the local power struggles revealed in contests over eminent domain. Ang Yuen Yuen (2016) argues that China’s development involved a coevolution of institutions and markets from a starting point of weak institutions. Ang contrasts her dynamic view of institutional development to Acemoglu and Robinson (2012), whose explanation of why nations fail focuses on the absence of strong institutions due to some unspecified historical conditions." Power and politics are all too often absent from new institutional economics (Bates, 1997), and the emphasis on formal institutions—rather than power or politics—invites further tweaks to institutional design when the subsequent reforms don’t pan out as expected (Radaelli, Dente, & Dossi, 2012). Indeterminacy in causal claims and an emphasis on top-down interventions concentrating on formal rules are significant limitations of governance reform based on the new institutionalist economics. Where my work can build on these literatures is to trace state policy down to the everyday state, in its citizen-facing rather than industrially oriented stance, and to explore the unevenness of state capacity across its territory.

Many sociologists and political scientists engage with state capacity as an alternative framing to the literature on good governance and institutions. In a recent programmatic statement, Centeno et al. (2017) define state capacity as “the organizational and bureaucratic ability to implement governing projects.’ Arguing that state capacity is based on “a constellation of organizational qualities” whose interactions are complex, they consider the “pursuit of parsimonious theories and linear methods unproductive” (pp. 26-27). Unpacking the state to examine state capacity also lends itself to problem-solving sociology (Prasad, 2021), in which the analyst seeks to solve rather than just critique problems, and to bridge the distance between victims of social problems and those who cause (and benefit) from them.

The theoretical framework for this book focuses on state capacity with an eye toward problem-solving as well as critique. The framework is based on three elements that I draw from existing literatures. The first element is to approach the state as a set of nested fields. The second element is to study the state by tracing the material connections across society and territory that constitute the electrical power network. The third element is to approach the unevenness of state capacity as a result of deliberate action, rather than a lack or absence of the state. Building on these three elements, I call the theoretical framework of this book “the infrastructural state.”

Using the three elements of the infrastructural state framework and a methodological blend of ethnography, statistics, and comparative political economy, this book uses Pakistan's chronic shortages of electricity as an entry point for making more general claims about the state in Pakistan:

1) Pakistan’s inability to meet its power supply requirements is nested within dynamics of governance and power relations that cannot simply be reduced to a lack of Weberian state capacity;

2) Pakistan is neither a weak nor a failed state, but state capacity in Pakistan is chronically uneven and marked by profound inequalities;

3) Moreover, the unevenness of the Pakistani state works in specific ways to suit and benefit regions and groups that hold power, and the resulting “inequality by design” is the product of many layers of conscious strategic decision-making;

4) The everyday state is bound up in the personal and the informal rather than departing from the Weberian ideal. These informalities pervade relationships at all levels of governance, making governance—understood as an emergent compromise—especially resistant to top-down interventions privileging formal institutions.

Theoretical Framework of the Infrastructural State The State as a Set of Nested Fields

The first element is to approach the state as a set of nested fields, where each field is an arena of conflict over the distribution of valued resources—in this case electrical power. An institutions-based approach privileges codified rules, whereas a field-based approach is above all else relational—and thus about power—and informed more by culture and habit than strategic decision-making. Moreover, conceptualizing the state as a set of nested fields allows us to establish how national-level issues emerge organically from the underlying behaviors of interest at the city and individual levels.

Fields are arenas of struggle in which actors with varying capacities vie for advantage. Actors in a field share an understanding of what is at stake and how the positions of different actors are related (i.e., their relative power), and they understand the rules of the game that shape the permissible and feasible modes of behavior. The field is a well-established sociological concept most strongly associated with Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1999), but that has been interpreted by other leading theorists more recently as well (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; J. L. Martin, 2003).'* This book draws from each of these theorists but extends them into domains less traveled rather than seeking to specifically intervene in the theorization of fields themselves. For example, the approach to individual action taken here is more in line with a Bourdieusian field rather than the strategic action fields of Fligstein and McAdam, in that I conceive of action as more tacit and practically informed than shaped by conscious strategizing (Swartz, 2014). Regardless, the empirical material this book engages with does not have the kind of episodes of strategic contention in which fields are reshaped that would lend themselves toward the strategic action fields approach.

Within this broad theoretical approach, one aspect in which I do follow Fligstein and McAdam (2012) is in the formulation of treating states as a dense network of fields. The different levels of the Pakistani electrical power sector are vertically nested fields. Each has its own players and dynamics, but the city and local fields are dependent on the national field in that crucial decisions of policy—such as the content of governance reforms—are decided at the national level and implemented (ideally) at all levels. At the same time, the consequences of lower-level contests over electricity filter upward to shape the emergent properties of the system. Each level has differing patterns of coordination and regulation as well as different ways in which power is brought to bear.

Emergence is the idea that systemic characteristics arise organically from the interaction of a system’s parts. Emergent properties (which belong to the system, not the individuals) cannot be determined in advance. It is a central concept in sociology because we are studying not just aggregations of individuals but also the organizations and institutions that arise out of social life.'* The dynamism with which people and their social environments adapt to each other is a key part of what makes social life so difficult to model or predict.

Emergence is one example of the type of nonlinear system dynamics associated with complexity science that are becoming more established in social sciences and specifically in development studies.’ Through a complexity lens, human societies are nonlinear systems with multiple, independent actors who coevolve with their environment. Referencing complex adaptive systems in the context of development is useful because complexity science has become associated with policy approaches that are themselves decentralized, dynamic, and adaptive, in contrast to the Washington Consensus suite of policies, which align better with a focus on formal institutions and top-down prescriptions.” Chapter 3 will discuss complexity and its application to policy in some more detail, but at this stage it is important to contrast the approach being taken in this book to the dominant paradigm of development thinking.

A field-based approach is quite different from an institutions-based approach because of the emphasis on relationality and power. The conceptual apparatus of the field entails more work for the analyst, but that effort brings attention to questions of relative power and position, as well as the many informal ways that these dynamics play out. The approach of treating the state as a set of nested fields can also be contrasted to the development and policy literature that focuses on configurations of classes and political parties as well as anthropological approaches, which often look for “the universe in a grain of sand” and generalize from one case or locality to the larger whole.

My approach of conceptualizing the state as a set of nested fields is also aligned with Neil Brenner’s (2004, p. 8) approach to “the scale question.” Each nested field reflects a different scale, allowing for the integration of distinct vantage points across them, with attention to how the relationships of social processes across these scales influence each other. However, Brenner’s more geographical approach—strongly influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s work on state and space (see, e.g., 2009)—also underscores the need for attention to the hierarchy of scales and their spatiality, meaning that these spaces are ordered within vertical and hierarchical relations of domination that reproduce themselves through the social processes of governance. The second element describes how this book uses the material infrastructure of electricity in Pakistan as its entry point for tracing the connections within and across scales, and the third element of studying the infrastructural state discusses this spatial unevenness in more detail.