Suchergebnisse

"Pakistan's economy is currently semi-industrialized, but it has the high potential for prosperity in the 21st century. The focus of this book is on industrial infrastructures of production and circulation, from power distribution and roads to dry ports and airports. It looks at how these infrastructures underpin visions of progress and mediate relations between the state and capitalist firms in export-oriented industrial and industrializing districts in Punjab, Pakistan. Infrastructure Redux explores infrastructure's affect in two ways: (1) by examining the impact of poor infrastructure on different sized firms in diverse export-oriented industries, and (2) by analyzing the conditions through which the workings of infrastructure, its disruptions and facilitations, bring to the fore struggles to reshape modern industrial life in contemporary Pakistan. The author argues that in the present conjuncture of an infrastructure crisis the apparent absence of the state in the planning and provision of industrial infrastructure is somewhat deceptive. Although the state is not absent, its presence is re-configured through a variety of firm-led infrastructural initiatives. Furthermore, the strategies of capitalist firms operate within a moral economy in which a pervasive narrative of national moral decline and uncertainty explains the disintegration of a specific type of public infrastructure: electricity. This study will appeal to students, scholars and researchers interested in industrialization and globalization"--

This article argues that conventional approaches to infrastructure reform in developing countries underestimate the agency of local actors and organisations in assisting small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) to surmount problems. It uses case study material based on Sialkot's City Package Project to illustrate how state initiatives combined with SMEs' efforts engendered a group-based coordination process for an endogenous solution to upgrade infrastructure. This process generated social benefits for the entire industrial district. By using ideas from the learning-centred approach, this article analyses the micro-processes and institutional arrangements of building state–SME relations for solving infrastructure problems. It concludes by reflecting on the need to rethink the strategic role of actors and institutions for SMEs' infrastructure needs in industrial and regional development.

The private costs of electricity supply failures are
substantial and inimical to industrial productivity. Using results from
a small sample survey of manufacturing firms in Karachi, the study
documented the causes, extent and incidence of the failures, identified
and classified the firms' private responses, and estimated the capital
share of internally produced power and the associated costs. The results
are reported here to engender discussion for developing a policy model
of infrastructure provision suited to a developing country like
Pakistan. The most encouraging options are those that allow for
cooperative provision amongst firms with concurrent reforms in the
regulatory and institutional environments. An optimal policy will allow
inter-firm trading of electricity making the power market competitive.
Those firms that already have extensive private generating capacity due
to weak public supply will realise scale economies by selling electric
power to lower the costs of private provision. Competition in
electricity supply implies that industrial users will find attractive
substitutes in the private sector. This will lead to a reduction in the
demand on public service, already limited in quantity and quality in key
urban-industrial locations like Karachi.

This article provides new insights into the politics of water provisioning in Karachi's informal settlements, where water shortages and contaminations have pushed ordinary citizens to live on the knife edge of water scarcity. We turn our attention to the everyday practices that involve gendered insecurities of water in Karachi, which has been Pakistan's security laboratory for decades. We explore four shifting security logics that strongly contribute to the crisis of water provisioning at the neighbourhood level and highlight an emergent landscape of 'securitised water'. Gender maps the antagonisms between these security logics, so we discuss the impacts on ordinary women and men as they experience chronic water shortages. In Karachi, a patriarchal stereotype of the militant or terrorist-controlled water supply is wielded with the aim of upholding statist national security concerns that undermine women's and men's daily security in water provisioning whereby everyday issues of risk and insecurity appear politically inconsequential. We contend that risk has a very gendered nature and it is women that experience it both in the home and outside.

Abstract
The delivery of projects for the coproduction of services raises multiple questions about how different structural barriers prevent and hinder the participation of various sectors of the population. Intersectionality theory provides a critical lens to examine the delivery of such coproduction projects to refine any strategies to include vulnerable perspectives or perspectives that get silenced by existing hierarchies. This paper presents an intersectionality-led analysis of the delivery of a project to improve public safety in Pakistan. The project mapped existing concerns about urban violence of different groups of the population. The project used a multilayered approach to facilitate the engagement of excluded views, both in the constitution of the research team and in the involvement of communities. An intersectionality framework is applied to analyse the deployment of the project in terms of design, innovation, planning, and signification. The analysis shows that there are limitations to how far coproduction exercises can challenge existing social structural barriers.