Abstract
Although Pakistani Pakhtun-tribal belt or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is part of Pakistan yet it is governed differently from the rest of the country through the colonial era regulation known as Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) 1901. Local government system, which is considered as nursery for a participatory system of governance has never been introduced until lately in the FATA. Therefore, the tribal people have remained deprived of their rudimentary right of self-governance. However, the process of introducing local government began in FATA when the former President General (Retired) Pervez Musharraf pledged in January 2002 to have elected municipal councils in the FATA. Thus in 2002 the first draft for the current Local Government Regulation was prepared. Then in 2004, Local Bodies (LBs) polls with limited participation of tribal people were held in the FATA. More recently in 2012, another Local Government Regulation was drafted but the tribesmen are still waiting for the promulgation of an Ordinance, Act or Regulation for materialising the system in FATA. This paper attempts to analyse administrative structure of FATA and the importance of local government system as a basic step to introducing participatory governance and thereby bringing the FATA to the mainstream politics. The broader approach of the paper remains democracy where people share the right of rulership in a nation state and the theory of human development presented by Dr. Mebabul Haq and later evolved by Amrtya Sen advocating for good governance states that participation in local governance is the main indicator to measure the human development of a society. The research is purely qualitative in nature and the scholar has extensively used the research tools of interviews, focused group discussion (FGDs), personal interactions and observations, the unpublished documents and existing literature on local government. The key informants, politicians belonging to FATA, academicians, tribal students, tribal elders, legal experts and bureaucrats have been interviewed.