Female Leadership and Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice, And Institutional Development in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan has committed itself to Sustainable Development Goal 16, which asks states to build peaceful, just and accountable institutions, and women hold less than five per cent of senior positions in its public institutions. This research asks what female leaders do inside those institutions to advance the goal, and what decides how far what they do can reach. It draws on one part of a multi-site phenomenological study of sixty women leaders in Punjab: twenty in public-sector universities, twenty in political and policy-making institutions and twenty in the Punjab Police. Interviews of fifty-five to ninety-five minutes were conducted with a single twenty-question semi-structured guide and analyzed through interpretive phenomenological analysis, with themes generated by the six-phase procedure of Braun and Clarke (2006). The analysis reported here covers sixteen accounts of leadership practice, one from each of sixteen participants, read against the targets of SDG 16 and against three lenses: transformative feminist leadership, social contract theory and role congruity theory. Three results follow. First, the practices that produced accountability gains worked by making the reasons behind a decision open to review rather than by changing any rule; one participant states this directly when she says her promotion rubric did not change the criteria but made visible whether the criteria were being applied. Second, the reach of a practice was set by its authority route and not by the leader’s skill or intent: eight of the sixteen practices lay inside the participant’s own sphere, four required one named superior’s consent and four depended on peers or a collective. Third, eight practices were embedded in an instrument that could outlast their author, five were personal and three fell between, and all four practices that needed a superior’s consent were one transfer away from ending. Thirteen of the sixteen accounts report a concrete outcome. Almost all outcome statements rest on what participants reported, and no document was examined, so the findings are offered as propositions for testing against promotion criteria, posting records and case registers. The contribution is a distribution-of-authority account of how female leadership reaches SDG 16, in place of an account based on leadership style or personal values.

Keywords: female leadership, SDG 16, authority route, institutional development, interpretive phenomenological analysis, Punjab, Pakistan, accountability instruments

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23266058