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Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road investments, the Pakistani power sector continues to stifle economic and social life across the country. Why?
In Access to Power, Ijlal Naqvi explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. Naqvi argues that the national-level challenges of crippling budgetary constraints and power shortages directly result from conscious strategic decisions that are integral to Pakistan's infrastructural state. As he shows, electricity governance in Pakistan reinforces unequal relations of power between provinces and the federal center, contributes to the marginalization of subordinate groups in the city, and cements the patronage-based relationships between Pakistani citizens and the state that have been so detrimental to development progress.
Looking through the lens of the electrical power sector, Access to Power reveals how Pakistan actually works, and to whose benefit.
One of Pakistan's largest problems is its inability to produce enough electricity. In Access to Power, Ijlal Naqvi explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. He argues that the national challenges of budgetary constraints and power shortages directly result from conscious strategic decisions that are integral to Pakistan's infrastructural state. Looking through the lens of the electrical power sector, this book reveals how Pakistan actually functions and to whose benefit.
Access to Power unpacks the riddle of why so many efforts to reform the electricity sector in Pakistan have failed and why electricity remains such an unequally distributed service. Moving beyond the good governance literature, Naqvi locates power and politics at the center of his inquiry and through a nested analysis that moves from the national to the local methodically exposes the distributional conflicts and strategic actions that shape uneven state capacity. If many have called for disaggregating the state, Naqvi actually delivers. This is sociology at its best and a must read for anyone interested in understanding development as a contested process." -Patrick Heller, Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Brown University
