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Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan Ijlal Naqvi full chapter instant download
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I JL AL NAQVI
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197540954.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
1. Introduction 1
4. e Administration of Losses 81
8. Conclusion 151
Notes 163
References 175
Index 187
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii
viii
with me. Saleem Arif and Ashfaq Mahmood o ered crucial support and guid-
ance 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. e 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 dra s. Rebecca Maniates
at the SMU library solved my problems with handling citations across multiple
formats in unwieldy les. I also need to thank the students of my development
class who learned more about electricity in Pakistan than they perhaps wanted
to! e 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 bene ted from the collective ef-
fort 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 in-
directly). Aasim Sajjad Akhtar helped me get started on serious eldwork 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 bene ted 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 Cha erjee provided insightful comments. Audiences at
Northwestern and Brown turned up for online talks and gave comments that
helped me re ne the argument. Kamran Asdar Ali, Shahnaz Rouse, and I y
Abraham have all o ered sage advice and warm support at di erent times.
ix
So 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. ank 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.
is book is dedicated to my parents, whose love, encouragement, and sup-
port have been such a powerful constant in my life.
1
Introduction
AccesstoPower.IjlalNaqvi,OxfordUniversityPress.©OxfordUniversityPress2022.
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780197540954.003.0001
2
e 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 o ce of the electrical utility in a residential neigh-
borhood 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. e assembled group had come to the of-
ce to nd out why their power was out and when it might be restored. My father
had made me come down to the o ce. I had resisted w hat was the point? but
I nally 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 rst 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 li le 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
go en into the o ce (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 execu-
tive, to which another responded, “I’ll follow you, lead the way.” A er 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.8 I le for home, having
no con dence 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 o ces
of the Islamabad Electric Supply Company (IESCO). e eventual choice of
appealing to the nazim was probably in uenced by his proximity. e 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 ad-
dress the problem. Petitioning an elected representative to help in redressing a
grievance is a staple of democracy, but the appeal to the nazim also re ects a
patron–client mode of supplicating a notable member of society to put pressure
on state o cials.
4
Governance reforms that concentrated on formal rules and excluded the in-
formal 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. ere are historical and sociological strains
of new institutionalism that are much more a uned to how institutions develop
and evolve (Hall & Taylor, 1996), but these are nowhere near as in uential in
development thinking.
e 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.” ese rules can be formal codi ed by human beings or in-
formal, “such as conventions and codes of behavior.” at the new institutionalist
economics framework includes informal rules is a major step beyond neo-
classical economics, in which treatment of the Global South relied on “social
arrangements that economists usually take for granted, but which are conspic-
uous by their absence in poor countries” (Rodrik, 2007, p. 153). Northian in-
formal institutions are conceptually clu ered in that they contain everything
from panchayats (village councils) in South Asia to the Protestant ethic.11 e
critiques of new institutionalist economics come from too many sources to be
able to cover them all. Mushtaq Khan’s (2018) political se lements approach
draws a ention to the social context from which institutions emerge as a key
point in understanding their relative e ectiveness (or lack thereof). In turn,
political se lements analysis can be critiqued for being insu ciently a entive
to the role of ideas in bringing together elite cohesion. Moreover, the develop-
mental outcomes of political se lements are mediated by a meso-level eld spe-
ci c 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.12 Two re-
cent examples from political science point to the broad de ciencies 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 soci-
ology of infrastructure development in which he uses a study of toll roads in
Indonesia to speak to shortcomings in new institutionalist economics. e three
main de ciencies are a neglect of close ties between state and business, the im-
portance 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
6
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 unspeci ed historical conditions.13 Power and politics
are all too o en absent from new institutional economics (Bates, 1997), and the
emphasis on formal institutions rather than power or politics invites fur-
ther 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
signi cant 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) de ne state capacity as
“the organizational and bureaucratic ability to implement governing projects.”
Arguing that state capacity is based on “a constellation of organizational quali-
ties” 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 bene t) from them.
e theoretical framework for this book focuses on state capacity with an
eye toward problem-solving as well as critique. e framework is based on three
elements that I draw from existing literatures. e rst element is to approach
the state as a set of nested elds. e second element is to study the state by
tracing the material connections across society and territory that constitute the
electrical power network. e 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 meth-
odological 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:
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 speci c ways to
suit and bene t regions and groups that hold power, and the resulting “in-
equality by design” is the product of many layers of conscious strategic
decision-making;
4) e everyday state is bound up in the personal and the informal rather than
departing from the Weberian ideal. ese informalities pervade relationships
at all levels of governance, making governance understood as an emergent
compromise especially resistant to top-down interventions privileging
formal institutions.
points across them, with a ention to how the relationships of social processes
across these scales in uence each other. However, Brenner’s more geographical
approach strongly in uenced by Henri Lefebvre’s work on state and space (see,
e.g., 2009) also underscores the need for a ention 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 so-
cial processes of governance. e 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.
"Mr Bohun", sanoi tohtori hiljaa, "en tiedä miten lausuisin sen. Jos
sanon että pääkallo on murskattu kuin munankuori, ei se vastaa
täysin totuutta. Luusirut upposivat ruumiiseen ja maahan kuin kuulat
hiekkavalliin. Jättiläisen käsi on sen tehnyt."
Hän ei ollut vielä puhunut loppuun, kun pitkä seppä tuli esiin kirkon
kulmasta ja marssi omalle pihalleen. Täällä hän pysähtyi ja vasara
putosi hänen kädestään. Poliisitarkastaja, joka koko ajan oli
käyttäytynyt mitä kohteliaimmin, meni heti hänen luokseen.
"Minä olen pappi", huusi hän vapisevalla äänellä, "ja pappi ei saa
vuodattaa verta, — minä — tarkoitan, ettei pappi saa toimittaa
ketään hirsipuuhun. Ja minä kiitän Jumalaa, että rikoksellinen on nyt
tiedossani ja että hän on sellainen henkilö, jota ei voida tuomita
kuolemaan."
"No hittoa", huudahti tohtori, "olipa hyvä, että puhuitte tästä! Mutta
kuinka voitte selittää —"
Isä Brown oli niin kauan ja niin kiinteästi katsellut puhujaa, että
hänelle oli selvinnyt, etteivät tämän suuret, harmaat silmät olleet
aivan niin merkityksettömät kuin hänen kasvonsa yleensä. Kun oli
tullut hiljaista, sanoi hän korostetun kohteliaasti: "Mr Bohun, teidän
teorianne on tähänastisista ainoa, joka johonkin kelpaa ja jota suurin
piirtein voidaan pitää eittämättömänä. Mielestäni ansaitsette
sentähden, että sanon teille varmasti tietäväni, ettei se ole oikea." Ja
tämän sanottuaan pikku mies siirtyi jälleen syrjään tarkastamaan
vasaraa.
"Tuo mies näyttää tietävän, mitä muut eivät tiedä", kuiskasi tohtori
harmistuneesti Wilfredille. "Nuo katoliset papit ovat niin pahuksen
viekkaita."
"En usko, että mikään ihminen ohjasi sitä vasaraa", sanoi seppä
käheästi. "Tämän maailman kannalta katsoen sanoisin, että mies oli
yksin, kun hän kuoli."
"Sen annan nyt", sanoi pappi. "Muistatteko, että seppä, vaikka hän
uskoo ihmeisiin, puhui pilkallisesti moisesta lasten sadusta, että
hänen vasaransa olisi muka saanut siivet ja lentänyt yli maiden ja
mantereiden?"
"Ei siitä ovesta", sanoi hän lempeästi. "Se ovi vie helvettiin!"
"Jos hän olisi täysin terve", sanoi isä Brown, "ei hän välittäisi
tuijottaa siihen."