LocationsMaking the State Work:
Governance and Reform for a Renewed Social Contract
By Saroop Ijaz | Senior Counsel for Asia, Human Rights Watch
The social contract survives or collapses in whether rights are fulfilled. Every person in Pakistan is entitled to the conditions necessary for a decent life. The state’s legitimacy depends on honouring that entitlement, not aspirationally, but through governance systems deliberately designed to deliver on it.
Pakistan’s governance crisis is most visible in the systematic and growing gap between formal commitments and actual delivery. Structural barriers to healthcare, education, and justice remain. These are not isolated inefficiencies. They represent the persistent denial of economic and social rights—the entitlements that define what citizens can legitimately expect from the state.
Pakistan’s legal obligations are clear. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ratified in 2008, imposes concrete duties to progressively realize the rights to health, education, work, and an adequate standard of living. The failure to uphold these obligations is not primarily one of scarce resources, but of resource allocation and institutional design, rooted in how incentives are structured, how accountability operates, and whose interests governance systems are actually designed to serve and protect.
An equitable social and governance order must arrange its institutions to benefit the least advantaged. Pakistan’s institutional reality often does the opposite. Those with means can purchase private healthcare, private education, and even private security, effectively opting out of the public sector and leaving the poor to encounter the state in its most dysfunctional form. This pattern reflects what Albert Hirschman described in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty as the exit response: when public services decline and effective voice mechanisms are weak, capable citizens withdraw into private alternatives, further weakening the system for those who remain. The state extracts taxes, compliance, and deference, yet often fails to uphold its end of the bargain: providing the public goods that justify its authority.
Amartya Sen framed development as the expansion of human freedoms and capabilities. By this measure, institutional failure is not merely inefficiency, it is the active curtailment of people’s capacity to shape their own lives. Economic and social rights are indivisible from this: the right to health ensures citizens need not choose between medical care and destitution; the right to education enables meaningful participation in economic and civic life. When these rights go unfulfilled, the social contract is weakened.
The key question is not whether institutions conform to abstract governance ideals, but whether the underlying distribution of political power supports or undermines delivery.
The key question is not whether institutions conform to abstract governance ideals, but whether the underlying distribution of political power supports or undermines delivery. In Pakistan, patronage networks, structurally embedded rather than aberrational, routinely redirect institutional capacity from public purposes toward private ones. The citizen-state trust deficit often reflects not simple pessimism but a rational assessment: citizens have repeatedly experienced a state that takes from them but rarely gives back. Rebuilding that trust requires closing the gap between formal rights and actual experience.
Acemoglu and Robinson’s distinction between extractive and inclusive institutions illustrates the deeper problem. In Pakistan, extraction operates through everyday mechanisms: the bribe required to register a complaint, the ghost teacher collecting a salary while children go untaught. Civil servants may advance through seniority and political favour rather than measurable service delivery. Bureaucratic energy is often focused upward rather than serving citizens. The result is a lack of meaningful accountability.
Yet the dominant narrative of institutional failure, while largely accurate, obscures something important. Mahmood Ayub and Turab Hussain, in Candles in the Dark, document institutions, among them NADRA, Rescue 1122, the Motorway Police, and the Punjab Education Foundation, that have delivered effectively within the same broken system. What distinguishes them is neither exceptional resources nor favourable political circumstances alone but shared structural features: insulation from routine political interference, merit-based recruitment, clear performance standards, and cultures of internal accountability. These are demonstrations that Pakistan’s institutional environment, however hostile, does not make effective governance impossible. It only makes it harder. Reform must ask how to replicate these conditions system-wide rather than confining them to protected islands.
The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) offers perhaps the most instructive example. By anchoring eligibility in biometric identification and a scientific targeting methodology, BISP substantially reduced the clientelism that plagued earlier social transfers. BISP survived multiple changes of government precisely because it built legitimacy through visible, measurable delivery, now supporting nearly 9 million families with direct digital transfers and scaling digital wallets to 10 million beneficiaries. It fulfils, at scale, the right to social security that Pakistan’s human rights obligations require and demonstrates that the right combination of institutional design, technology, and political commitment can produce a state that actually reaches the people it is meant to serve. The ambition of the state should be to expand this foundation to ensure universal social protection.
The 18th Amendment devolved authority over health, education, and social services to provinces in 2010 and is sometimes treated as a source of coordination failure. This misreads both its intent and its achievement.
The 18th Amendment devolved authority over health, education, and social services to provinces in 2010 and is sometimes treated as a source of coordination failure. This misreads both its intent and its achievement. The Amendment was a democratic accomplishment of the first order, reversing decades of excessive centralization and placing responsibility for services closer to the citizens those services are meant to reach. The principle is sound that governance closer to people is more likely to be responsive and accountable. The challenge has been incomplete architecture, and provinces inheriting responsibilities without always inheriting adequate capacity or coordination mechanisms. The answer is not recentralization but completion by building provincial capacity, strengthening inter-governmental coordination, and most importantly, empowering local government.
Genuine reform requires reorienting governance around a central principle: citizens seeking healthcare, education, or justice are not requesting favours, but claiming rights. The progressive realization of these rights demands measurable, deliberate progress, with budget allocations tracked against rights-based targets, performance data made public, and institutional consequences when delivery fails. It requires protecting key institutions from political interference, as BISP and the institutions documented in Candles in the Dark demonstrate is possible. And it demands confronting distributional questions directly, because economic justice rights are inherently about who benefits and who bears costs.
As Pakistan enters its declared year of reform, and with the recent release of the Pakistan Reforms Report 2026 documenting more than 650 governance reforms implemented across 135 federal institutions in 2025, the measure of progress cannot only be frameworks adopted or committees formed. Pakistan already has several frameworks. What it lacks is the institutional discipline to implement them and the political will to hold power accountable when it fails.
The social contract survives or collapses in whether rights are fulfilled. Every person in Pakistan is entitled to the conditions necessary for a decent life. The state’s legitimacy depends on honouring that entitlement, not aspirationally, but through governance systems deliberately designed to deliver on it. That is the standard against which 2026’s reform agenda must be judged.
