Salman Rafi Sheikh is an assistant professor of politics at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Pakistan's latest debate over creating new provinces is asking the wrong question. The country does need a major redistribution of political power, but not simply from Islamabad to more provincial capitals. It needs power to move downward, from provincial governments to the citizens.

In July, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi declared Pakistan's governance system had "collapsed," and called for an administrative "reset" requiring new administrative provinces. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has since gone further, proposing either 12 to 15 new provinces or more empowered local governments in about 160 districts. The debate is gathering momentum. Pakistan's parliament is expected to take up the issue in October.

There is little denying that the crisis Naqvi identified is real. Pakistan's social indicators remain poor, while powers and resources transferred from the center under the 18th Amendment in 2010 have largely remained concentrated in provincial capitals. But that points to a different diagnosis. Pakistan's main problem is not having too few provinces; it has too little devolution below them.

The constitution already provides the framework for a remedy. Article 140-A requires provinces to establish elected local governments and devolve political, administrative and financial authority to them. Yet provincial governments have repeatedly weakened, delayed or denied resources to local institutions. A 2026 task force on local governance found that no province had implemented Article 140-A in a constitutionally compliant manner. Even after substantial federal devolution, provincial finance mechanisms have generally failed to ensure that resources and authority travel further downward.

Creating new provinces will not address this lacuna; it could compound it. Every new province would acquire a chief minister, cabinet, assembly, bureaucracy and political elite. The new provinces would merely reproduce provincial centralization on a smaller geographical scale.

This matters particularly in places such as Balochistan and Kashmir, where political alienation cannot be reduced to administrative distance. The deeper issue is whether communities can influence decisions affecting resources, services, security and their political futures. Redrawing boundaries without redistributing authority risks creating new centers of patronage rather than new forms of public influence on government.

Flags fly outside the Parliament House building in Islamabad in October 2024. The Pakistani government is pushing to create new provinces to decentralize political power in the country.

There is another contradiction in Pakistan's decentralization debate. Unless this contradiction is addressed, devolution at any level will not resolve the country's crisis of governance. Its most recent manifestation is the Pakistani military's advocacy of a "hard state." Military spokesperson Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry recently defined the hard state in terms of constitutionalism and rule of law. However, given the history of the military's involvement in politics in Pakistan, there is little surprise in the military's having already positioned itself as a significant voice in debates about governance, administrative restructuring and responses to regional grievances.

A day after Naqvi's original proposal, Chaudhry publicly backed consideration of an administrative "reset," describing the military as a "primary stakeholder" in security and national stability.

Thus, the tension is institutional rather than semantic. Devolution is fundamentally about dispersing political authority. Its democratic purpose is weakened if administrative responsibilities are transferred downward while decision-making remains concentrated politically at the national level -- with the military retaining a central role in defining the parameters of governance.

This is precisely why Indonesia's experience after Suharto matters for Pakistan. Indonesia emerged from authoritarian rule in 1998 with an overcentralized state, powerful regional grievances, separatist pressures and a military deeply embedded in politics.

Reformasi the era of reform and democratization that began in 1998, addressed these problems by reorganizing power in two directions simultaneously.

First, power moved downward. Indonesia's landmark decentralization laws of 1999 transferred extensive responsibilities and financial resources from Jakarta to districts and municipalities. Provinces consequently became much less important intermediaries between the central and local government. The objective was not simply to redraw Indonesia's territorial map but to bring decision-making closer to citizens.

That distinction speaks directly to Pakistan. Creating additional provinces while allowing them to monopolize authority, as existing provincial governments do, would change the geography of centralization, not its underlying logic. Indonesia instead made the district the principal arena of decentralization.

But Reformasi also recognized that dispersing authority to lower levels first required restructuring power above. The military lost its reserved parliamentary representation. Its formal political role was progressively curtailed, and the 2004 Indonesian National Armed Forces Act further institutionalized its withdrawal from civilian politics. These reforms were incomplete, and Indonesia continues to debate the military's political reach. But their importance lies in the direction of institutional change: Decentralization occurred alongside a serious effort to strengthen civilian political authority. In short, reform at the bottom was connected to changes at the top.

Pakistan is currently discussing one set of reforms without seriously confronting the other. Creating smaller administrative units cannot fundamentally democratize governance if political authority remains concentrated at the apex of the system under military tutelage. Without changes at both levels, administrative decentralization, whether at the provincial or local levels, risks becoming largely symbolic.

The lesson from Indonesia is therefore larger than administrative restructuring. Bringing government closer to citizens requires more than drawing new lines on a map. Pakistan's governance crisis is ultimately not about how many provinces or districts govern its people. It is about where power resides, and whether ordinary citizens can exercise meaningful influence over it.