Since 1968, Arif Hasan has been working with rural and urban communities in Pakistan. This fascinating book brings together extracts from various reports, field notes, articles for the press and personal diaries written over a period of two decades. The book is organised by geographical areas, with the first five sections focusing on the main regions of Pakistan (the coast; the desert; the Indus delta; the Indus plains and western highlands; and the northern areas mountains). The last section includes five short chapters on Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

The key argument is that Pakistan’s profound socio-economic change has not corresponded with the creation of efficient and accountable state institutions. The feudal system, which long after independence dominated Pakistan’s society and economy, has not been replaced by a capable public administration, and while the state itself was at the origin of substantial transformations in the rural areas (the extension of irrigation systems, the introduction of green revolution technologies and the mechanisation of agriculture and transport), these changes have undermined the feudal system whilst not offering alternative governance structures. Feudal lords have been replaced by middlemen involved in the urban informal sector, most of them of rural origins, and to whom most of the rural population is now in debt. At the same time, agricultural infrastructure is not maintained, and assets, especially land, are taken over by the most powerful.

Several chapters in the book also make clear how socio-economic change and the degradation of natural resources are closely interconnected in ways that defy simple cause-effect explanations. For example, in the Tharparkar desert there have been dramatic changes in the lives of the local populations following recurrent droughts. However, while drought is a common occurrence there as in other deserts, its dramatic consequences in the past two decades, including famine, are the result of major on-going social and economic transformations in the area. Similarly, migration, once a key element of the survival strategies of rural populations, has become more permanent, with farmers and pastoralists leaving agriculture. A remittance economy has developed, and in many areas, migration to Gulf destinations has changed the appearance of settlements and local consumption habits. Lower-caste groups and elites are more likely to move to urban centres, with deep implications for social structures both in the rural areas and in the urban centres.

The section on Karachi describes the transformations in the city, whose population more than doubled in size, from 5.4 to 10 million, between the two latest censuses of 1981 and 1998. In the absence of adequate planning, the physical needs of this growth have been met primarily through densification and informal development. The vast majority of Karachiites live in informal settlements on government land, illegally developed by developers with the support of government officials and protected through bribes to the police. While this has resulted in growing spatial separation between the wealthy elites and the majority of the population, in the most vibrant settlements, life is increasingly cosmopolitan: more women work and own their own businesses, cable tv and eating out are more and more part of daily life. New Karachiites are fiercely upwardly mobile and keen to be part of the international global culture. However, given the permanent state of economic recession and inflation in Pakistan, this means resorting to second jobs, and more and more women entering the labour force, which explains the increase in the value of education for women. But these efforts are thwarted by conservativism and puritanism in state culture, and by corruption and nepotism. At the same time, globalisation increasingly marginalises informal sector entrepreneurs who had established links with formal sector enterprises, affecting