LocationsLeading Change from the Ground Up
By Abbas Haider | Director, Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER)
Change from the ground up does not mean replacing formal institutions. It means making them more responsive, accountable, and connected to the people they are intended to serve.
Development is often imagined as a process that begins with policy. Governments identify a problem, institutions design a response, laws are enacted, and programmes are implemented. Yet for many people, change rarely follows this sequence. Communities begin responding to problems long before they appear on policy agendas. Workers organize when wages are withheld, women come together when their safety is threatened, and communities mobilize when access to land, livelihoods, public services, or social protection is denied.
This is where change from the ground up becomes important. It reminds us that development is not simply something delivered to people. It is also something people shape through collective action.
Pakistan has no shortage of policies, laws, and institutional commitments. The more persistent challenge is translating these commitments into outcomes that people can experience in their everyday lives. The latest Labour Force Survey reports a labour force participation rate of 46.3 percent and unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, while informal employment remains a defining feature of Pakistan’s labour market. The result is a familiar governance gap: Rights may exist formally and institutions may have defined responsibilities, yet access to those rights remains uneven.
This gap is where grassroots leadership becomes consequential.
Grassroots organizations and community leaders do more than raise demands. They transform individual experiences into collective understanding, and collective understanding into organized action. A worker denied wages may initially experience the problem as an individual dispute. When workers organize, the same experience can become a question of wage enforcement, workplace accountability, and the effectiveness of labour institutions. Similar processes occur when communities organize around land, social protection, public services, environmental risks, or access to justice.
In this sense, grassroots action generates something that formal institutions often struggle to produce: knowledge grounded in lived experience, carried over into public debate and policymaking.
Effective grassroots leadership is not simply about mobilization. It combines local knowledge with organization, evidence, and sustained engagement. It creates spaces in which people most affected by a problem can define it themselves and participate in shaping solutions. This matters particularly for groups that remain underrepresented in formal decision making, including informal workers, women workers, home based workers, agricultural labourers, migrants, and communities living in precarious conditions.
Their exclusion is not merely a problem of representation. It can also lead to policies that are difficult to implement because they do not adequately reflect the realities in which those policies must operate.
Another important lesson is that sustainable grassroots leadership is shared leadership. Effective community action does not depend on a single individual or organization speaking permanently on behalf of others. It develops new leaders, builds collective confidence, and creates networks capable of sustaining engagement beyond a particular campaign or project.
This is why access to information, legal awareness, and collective organization matter. A right that people do not know exists is difficult to claim. A right that can only be exercised individually is difficult to defend where power is unequal. Organization gives people the ability to engage institutions with a collective voice and hold them accountable.
For policymakers, this has a direct implication. Participation must begin before policy is finalized.
Too often, consultation takes place after priorities have already been determined and solutions designed. Genuine participation requires a different approach. Communities and workers should have opportunities to identify problems, define priorities, contribute to policy design, and monitor implementation. This can make policymaking more inclusive, but it can also make reforms more realistic, responsive, and implementable.
This becomes increasingly important as Pakistan confronts changing patterns of employment, technological transformation, climate pressures, and persistent informality. Current efforts towards worker and enterprise formalization recognize the need for an enabling approach rather than relying exclusively on enforcement. Yet formalization will remain incomplete if the people whose employment is being formalized have little influence over how that transition is designed and implemented.
The principle extends beyond labour policy. Whether the challenge concerns social protection, climate adaptation, urban development, land rights, or public services, reforms are more likely to endure when they are informed by those who experience the consequences of policy decisions.
Ultimately, governance is not measured only by the quality of laws or the number of reforms announced. It is measured by whether people can influence decisions that affect their lives, claim the rights available to them, and hold institutions accountable for delivering on their commitments. The social contract becomes meaningful when citizens experience institutions not simply as authorities that regulate them, but as institutions that respond to their needs and recognize their agency.
Change from the ground up does not mean replacing formal institutions. It means making them more responsive, accountable, and connected to the people they are intended to serve.
For policymakers, the lesson is not to choose between institutional reform and grassroots action. The two need each other. Strong institutions provide the systems through which change can be sustained, while organized citizens provide the knowledge, scrutiny, and participation that can make those systems responsive.
A more inclusive social contract will require both. Institutions must be willing to listen from the top, while citizens must be organized enough to make their voices heard from the ground up.
When people organize, they do more than demand change. They generate knowledge, build leadership, strengthen accountability, and create the social foundations on which lasting reform depends. Recognizing this capacity within society is essential to making reform work.