Constitutional devolution without design: Pakistan’s power sector

M. Siddique Ali Pirzada Pakistan’s constitutional order underwent significant political decentralisation fol-lowing the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (18th Amendment) Act, 2010, reinforced further by fiscal redistribution through successive National Finance Commission Awards. However, this constitutional transformation was not accompanied by a commensurate reconfiguration of the institutional architecture governing the electricity sector. As a result, while provinces acquired expanded constitutional and fiscal space, the electricity sector remained anchored in a centralised regulatory framework shaped by the institutional logic of the late 1990s. This disjunction has produced an increasingly unstable condition of institutional duality. On one hand, a historically entrenched centralized regime persists, structured around federal regulatory authority, system-wide tariff determination and nationally coordinated fiscal exposure. On the other, an emerging decentralized governance layer is developing through provincial assertions of competence in energy planning and administration. The coexistence of these governance logics risks undermining policy coherence and the attainment of core national objectives, including affordability, reliability and long-term sustainability of electricity supply. The foundational legal architecture of Pakistan’s electricity sector is established under the Regulation of Generation, Transmission and Distribution of Electric Power Act, 1997 (NEPRA Act, 1997), which created the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) as a unified federal regulator responsible for licensing, tariff determination and sectoral oversight across generation, transmission and distribution. The design of this framework reflected the political economy of its time, characterised by centralised planning, a single-buyer market structure and a uniform regulatory regime intended to ensure investment certainty, coordination and system stability.