'Urbanisation of everybody', institutional imperatives, and social transformation in Pakistan

Pakistan Development Review, Winter, 1999 by Mohammad A. Qadeer

This paper argues that reforms of social institutions, namely family, community, property, work, etc., are necessary instruments of economic development. This argument goes beyond the economists' and the World Bank's conceptions of institutional reform, which tend to focus only on transactional institutions. The institutional reforms necessary for Pakistan's development should include measures that will realign family and kinship ties, restructure communities, bring about an urban moral order and impersonalise economic and social dealings to some degree. This argument is developed through a sub-theme embedded in the paper, namely the imperatives of urbanisation in Pakistan.

Pakistan is an urbanised country. A large part of its rural area has been turned into an urban landscape, primarily through population density. The urbanisation of Pakistan has led to an institutional lag. The paper documents the institutional imperatives of urbanisation and Pakistan's shortfalls on those scores. It concludes with a recommendation for reforms to bring Pakistan's social institutions in line with its spreading urbanism.

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Cultural change and social transformation are essential elements of the process of development. They complement and sustain economic growth. Economic historians acknowledge that the rise of the West from poverty to wealth was as much the result of improvements in trade, savings, investment and productivity as of emerging norms of thrift, trust, specialisation, rationality and contractual relations [Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986)]. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that economic development is essentially a phenomenon of cultural change.

The recognition of the role of cultural and social factors in economic growth has led to a subtle revision of the terminology from 'economic development' to the adjectiveless term 'development' or the fully spelled out title of economic and social development. Yet this acknowledgement has remained largely on the conceptual plane. It has not been translated into policies and programmes to deliberately set the direction of cultural change and define the alignment of social organisation. Development strategies have, by and large, treated social and cultural factors as exogenous variables. This is true of development planning in general and in particular of its practice in Pakistan. In fifty years of economic planning in Pakistan, little attention has been paid to the social and cultural aspects of development.

This paper argues that the neglect of social and cultural factors has created an institutional lag between spatial, economic and technological sectors on the one hand and the cultural, social and political institutions, on the other. Pakistan is predominantly an urbanised society spatially and demographically, but its social institutions and cultural ethos remain rooted in traditions of rural origins. (1) This divergence between economic and spatial organisations and social and cultural institutions has impeded the process of sustained development. This is the proposition argued in this paper.

INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF DEVELOPMENT

The political economy of development is a theoretical tradition that has long emphasised the role of social structure and cultural norms in economic production and distribution. Classical economists, Smith, Malthus, Mills and Marx analysed economic systems in terms of social and political institutions. In contemporary theories, the Modernisation paradigm explicitly links economic growth with cultural change, political development and behavioural transformations. A classical formulation of the Modernisation paradigm was used by Gunnar Myrdal in his monumental study, Asian Drama to analyse the prospects of economic development in South Asia, including Pakistan [Myrdal (1968)]. Drawing on South Asian statements of development goals and approaches, Myrdal articulated a set of Modernisation ideals as the criteria for policy analysis. Among those ideals were (a) rationality, (b) the improvement of the host of undesirable conditions, (c) rise of productivity, (d) rise of level of living, (e) social and economic equalisation, (f) improved institutions and attitudes such as efficiency, diligence, orderliness, punctuality, honesty, enterprise, integrity and self-reliance, etc., (g) national consolidations, (h) national independence, (1) political democracy, (j) democracy at grassroots, (k) social discipline versus democratic planning [Myrdal (1968), pp. 57-67].

This list of the guiding principles includes not only economic criteria such as the rise of productivity and equitable distribution, but also the political, cultural and social conditions without which development is presumed to be uurealisable on a sustained basis. There are disagreements about the significance of particular items on Myrdal's list, but his arguments and approach have not been disputed, namely, the stress on political, cultural and social reforms along with economic and technological progress. His definition of development as "upward movement of the whole system" exemplifies this conception [Myrdal (1968), p. 1868].