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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.

Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. This is the rare issue on which government and private sector can unite, and it is the cause of suffering for rich and poor alike across the entirety of the country. 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 still stifles economic and social life across the country. This book explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. It 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. Electricity shortages are one of the many poor governance outcomes characteristic of low- and middle-income countries. Standard development thinking points to an absence of institutions in comparison with an idealized and distant other country, with governance reform programs formulated accordingly. However, an orientation toward what Pakistan is not takes us away from how it actually functions and to whose benefit. Electricity governance in Pakistan reinforces relations of power between provinces and the federal center, contributes to the marginalization of subordinate groups in the city, and orients citizens toward a patronage-based relationship with the state through encounters with street-level bureaucrats. Looking through the lens of the electrical power sector reveals how Pakistan works, and for whom.

Studies of informal housing and urban citizenship in South Asia frequently link the precariousness of squatter life with the struggle to formalize engagement with the state. However, this article argues that the transition to a more formal mode of making claims on the state is a shift in terrain that is no less negotiated and contested. Through an ethnography of access to electrical power in Islamabad, Pakistan, this article explores the pervasiveness of informality in access to service delivery for a squatter settlement and its bourgeois neighbors. The politics of access to urban infrastructure reveal a state of pervasive predation and a collective imaginary which puts little credence in formality.

Development actors are regularly aware of the shortcomings of governance interventions before, during, and after development assistance is introduced, yet those programmes continue and are even revisited. Why? This paper uses the Pakistani experience with power sector reforms to illustrate how the donor-led reform agenda had readily apparent shortcomings. A new wave of development thinking responds to such failures by drawing on complexity theory and moving toward more local, iterative and experimental approaches. However, by highlighting how the awareness of problems with reforms isn't sufficient to avoid them, this paper points to a higher order of obstacles which remain unaddressed.

Existing accounts of how the urban poor in the global south engage with the state fall short on two fronts. Firstly, the literature lacks an overarching framework articulating the urban poor's strategies for engaging the state. Secondly, these accounts typically capture singular instances of state engagement pursued by the urban poor and theorise on that basis. Using Partha Chatterjee's distinction between civil and political society as our theoretical point of departure, we draw on ethnographic evidence from Chennai's informal settlements to demonstrate how and when the urban poor deploy different strategies of state engagement to advance their claims to urban citizenship. We do this by proposing a typology that relates the seemingly distinct strategies of claims making for urban citizenship to each other, and identifying a trajectory of change for strategies deployed in the Indian metropolis of Chennai.

Islamic parties have won parliamentary elections in several countries in recent years, leading some observers to speculate that Muslims vote Islamic whenever they are given the chance. However, a review of every parliamentary election in Muslim societies over the past 40 years shows that Islamic parties often compete and rarely win—and the freer the election, the worse these parties perform. In addition, an unprecedented collection of Islamic party platforms shows that Islamic parties have transformed since the 1980s, publicly endorsing democracy and women's rights and de-emphasizing shari'a and jihad. This record suggests that Islamic parties have embraced elections more than engulfing them.

Do Muslims automatically vote Islamic? That's the concern conjured up by strongmen from Tunis to Tashkent, and plenty of Western experts agree. They point to the political victories of Islamc parties in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey in recent years and warn that more elections across the Islamic world could turn power over to anti-democratic fundamentalists.

The inadequate supply of electricity in Pakistan disrupts everyday life and hampers industry and business; in this it is an emblematic indicator of the poor quality of urban governance pervasive in much of the Global South. We focus on the governance of Karachi's electricity distribution system, and its spatial unevenness across this sprawling metropolis of 15 million residents which encompasses huge informal settlements alongside upscale housing and commercial plazas. Using a dataset with granular, neighborhood-level electricity data, we apply spatial and statistical modeling techniques to understand how transmission and distribution losses, i.e., the utility's ability to bill for the electricity it supplies, vary across the city. These electricity losses provide a useful lens on the unevenness of urban governance in the city, especially where other sources of detailed socio-economic data are scarce. Our models link losses to higher proportions of residential consumers rather than commercial or industrial. Moreover, based on an analysis of model residuals, we can start to specify the degree to which urban governance is driven by the underlying characteristics of the neighborhood and bring some precision to understanding the spatial distribution of urban governance. Our findings reinforce the importance for governance reforms to be locally situated and informed, while also opening up new possibilities for visualizing electricity governance at a very local level and thus promoting democratic transparency.

Despite its global rise in popularity, a significant number of people still oppose democracy. The present study evaluates three competing theories of opposition to democracy—developmentalist, culturalist, and elitist—using a series of multilevel regression models that combine individual- and country-level variables. Results of our statistical analyses suggest that (1) country-level indicators of social, political, and economic development are unrelated to individual support for democracy; (2) macro-cultural factors have mixed effects on individual support for democracy; and (3) individual income and education have strong effects on individual support for democracy, but this relationship is mediated by country-level economic development. Specifically, we find that, in relatively underdeveloped countries, high-income individuals are more likely to oppose democracy than low-income individuals. These results suggest that economic, social, and political development do not necessarily go together, most strongly supporting elitist approaches to studying opposition to democracy.