There’s a lot of talk about democracy (procedural and otherwise), as is to be expected, but there’s usually very little talk about how the machinery of democracy works – or should work (the mechanics can be quite dull). Let’s take a look, for example, at the 18th amendment

which did end up devolving a lot of powers and responsibilities to the provincial assemblies. Maximalist positions were taken for and against, but one genuine question that came up was: ‘do the provincial assemblies have the capacity to deal with these new challenges?'

And in many cases, the answer was that they did not.
So does one leave it at that and move on? Luckily, behind the scenes and without much coverage there were projects aimed at building the capacity of prov assemblies and MPAs to be able to tackle the new challenges and one such

project was put in place by #EuinPakistan called @SUBAIPakistan which ended last month and i wanna share a few interesting things about this that I found out while discussing it on @ZaraHatKay_Dawn last week. So a lot of it looks like standard 'capacity-building' jargon but its

Got some pretty cool initiatives, like where they link young professionals to PA committees. Since committees are the 'brains' of the assemblies,. the q arises as to how familiar they are with the technical aspects of legislation they are discussing. So here Subai forms groups

Of Young professionals who are experts in their fields and attaches them to committees so that the legislators can benefit from their input, and vice versa, the professionals can see how government works and that they have actual stakes in the system. That's a big deal imo

ANothjer really interesting thing that I would like to see scaled up is that, apart from helping improve the websites of asemblies (that's a major point of contact for most of us), an effort was also made to make the assemblies more responsive to the people...by including a link

That allows people to submit a public petition opn any legislation that is currently being discussed or that they would like toi see. Sadly, this is only available abhi on the AJK, GB, and KP websites but hopefully others will also follow suit. Note that the public petition optio

has always been there, but this makes it easier and online. Other than thius @SUBAIPakistan also trained individual legislators in how to effectively draft bills so that they're not totally dependangt on the already overworked and very bureaucratic law depts. Good thing is that

this isn't just all on paper. In legislations like Amal Umar bill & Sikh marriage bill, these approaches worked. Need more of this, as while it may not be all exciting and eye-catching, this is the actual work of democracy. Like calcium for its bones. #strengtheningassemblies