Pakistan’s Policy Paralysis: Bold Plans, Empty Promises

Pakistan has a long history of launching – but not implementing – policies and plans of all kinds. In fact, if there is one thing we can be sure of when developing a policy (or plan), it must be there is often no plan to actually implement it.

Take any policy or planning document or a five-year plan this country has produced – we have produced many since the 1960s when this process began – and one can easily see this to be the case. Every plan begins with an appraisal of how the previous plan did, and while an effort is made to demonstrate that the previous plan worked (or not), it is often easy to spot that the plan did not achieve even half of what it was supposed to achieve and whatever was achieved was, perhaps, in spite of the plan and not because of it.

It is often repeated in our development discourse that Pakistan designed some masterful five-year plans in the 1960s that were copied by the South Koreans and a claim is made that had Pakistan implemented what it planned, we would have been where South Korea is today. I don't know to what extent the former statement is correct, but I can assume that there may be some truth to the latter.

If one studies the South Korean development model from the late 1950s and 1960s onwards, one is surprised at how flawless and masterful the South Koreans have been in identifying the right policy levers, picking the right winners, and implementing whatever they have planned. And this has resulted in South Korea becoming one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, with exports – what Korea sells to the world, not what it produces – being more than three to four times Pakistan's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In the 1950s, fresh after the Korean War, these numbers were probably reversed.

There are many reasons for this failure of policy and planning, and I feel they mostly lie in our inability to understand what a policy actually is. In Pakistan, policies are usually big, thick documents that have a lot of words and hardly any substance – and (almost) certainly no will or wherewithal to implement. In effect, creating and launching policies is, at best, meant to be an exercise in ticking a box and hence an exercise in futility, and at worst, designed to procure and spend resources that one will never be held accountable for. No minister or ministry in Pakistan's 75-year-old history has ever been held accountable for his/her performance or failure to implement a stated policy.

There are several issues at hand here, and I will address these one by one using Pakistan's recent attempt at a National Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (NSTIP) as an example. The NSTIP is a 145-page document produced by the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology (PCST) and issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology in January 2022. I particularly like the fact a National Policy document begins with the following thought-provoking and scientifically inspired verse from Allama Muhammad Iqbal, our national poet-philosopher:

The NSTIP document was produced by a committee of 17 people – mostly drawn from government and academia – with minimal private sector representation. It is a comprehensive – often verbose and overly prescriptive – document with analysis, policy, and plans all rolled into one. However, the one thing that it seeks to do that is quite novel in the Pakistani context is that it identifies several "policy statements" presented as key decisions that this "policy" seeks to affect. This is a welcome departure from the past practice where any exercise in policymaking quickly turned into programmes and projects rather than actually delving into policy itself. This brings me to the key arguments I would like to make about the NSTIP policy, in particular, and policymaking in Pakistan, in general.

As a student of public policy, particularly as it is practised in Pakistan, I have three main assertions and arguments about how policy is practised in Pakistan and why it often doesn't seem to work.

First: Policy must be minimalist. It is almost a fashion in Islamabad to issue policy documents that are at least 100 pages long. The policy documents include a thorough overview of the sector for which it is made – including paragraphs and paragraphs of meaningless text often written by a junior staffer or cut-and-pasted from somewhere – such that the actual operative part of the policy document is drowned in endless and 'meaningful' text. If our policy is not at least 100 pages long, it hardly ticks the box for being useful.

The truth is quite the opposite. Good policies should be designed to be minimalist, i.e., having the least number of words and where every word is made to count. I often think of good Constitutions as effective policy documents. The US Constitution, for example, has 4,500 or so words, and the meaning of every single word counts, and (constitutional) battles have been fought over the meanings and interpretation of these words for more than two centuries. The shorter and more impactful the policy document is, the easier it will be to implement.

Looking at the NSTIP document, it is quite clear that even though the document – for the first time – clearly lays out some key policy statements and themes, they are just too many to be implementable – about 63 in all (or 1,700 or more words). A closer look at some of these statements suggests that they offer neither a change in direction nor are even meant to be implemented, for the policy itself carries no teeth unless it is somehow enforced or funded, or both.

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