Sunday, March 31, 2013

Governance, politics, policy, and practice

By Fasihuddin

Governance in the third world is suffering from a lot of problem—structural and functional, legal and financial, cultural and political. This situation is further augmented by the industrialisation, modernisation, urbanisation- especially unplanned and ill-conceived-and the rapidly proliferation of technology. This creates challenges not only for the under-developed countries but also for the highly developed countries. To generate appropriate responses and tackle such issues properly it needs commitment, vision and leadership. The people in the process of governance and service delivery need work hard and especially interact more for enhanced capacity building training, and information sharing and knowledge sharing, through the organised leadership and effective administrative skills which are necessary for good governance. Governance is what we mean to keep the society in discipline, order, harmony, peace and stability. For good governance what we should know is to have good policies and good policies should be based on good research, evaluation and assessment—that means the knowledge-based management of the problem. Again this needs commitment and resources, and cooperation amongst stakeholders, departments and agencies.

This visualisation or thematic vision of governance and policy seems right but the problem is how to put it into practice? It requires human resource development which can be done, inter-alia, through local trainings, on-job trainings, and especially in an environment which is cross-cultural, global and international, so to develop the capacity of the people who are in the process of governance and who are responsible for decision making, policy-making and projects designing.

Pakistan is one of the third world most important countries. Currently it is a frontline state in war on terror with extremely social, cultural, and law and order problems. Its socio-economic indicators are terribly depressing. In vein of these depressing situations the government decided to initiate comprehensive and serious criminal justice reforms, 1 one of which are the much debated police reforms, replacing the old Police Act of 1861 with the new Police Order 2002. It completely changed the police structure and function with the vision of developing a police model on the basis of professionalism, democratic control, accountability, rule of law and public satisfaction. In implementation much support came from the international community. However, for the last eight years the law and order situation went from bad to worse, which means that there is a gap between the governance and policy. Either the implementation suffered from difficulties or the policies, the reforms, were not proper and well-thought. Table-2 (and also figure-1 in Annex.B) shows that the police reforms were done at the time when the recorded official crimes went down, and soon after the reforms, it kept on gradually growing up and up.

Pakistan is one of the most important countries, which is clear from the international security situation and the incessantly profuse literature and reports on Pakistan which are coming from abroad. It is discussed more than any other country in international media at the moment, which means its geo-political and strategic importance.2 Effective policies for good governance are needed in each and every sphere of the government but as a case, we have taken the law-enforcement, in Pakistan, as there is no comprehensive and empirical research and verifiable and authentic data. In a country like Pakistan where the police reforms have failed and where crime rate is on the increase (see: Table-1) there is no national criminal justice policy and no national crime prevention policy.3 The only exception is of the National Judicial Policy, piloted by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and the draft of Juvenile Justice Policy created by the Pakistan Society of Criminology. 4

The above discussion shows that the current police reforms must be properly analysed and evaluated for further reforms and the fault-lines be identified for effective implementation and evaluation in a future research.

Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk

Back to Top