SCO Commitments Tracker

Astana 2024 recorded only continuing consultations. At Tianjin 2025 all ten members approved proceeding and the proposal went to experts for conceptual elaboration. Kyrgyzstan intended to launch the bank during its 2026 chairmanship. It did not.

The Bishkek language is notably weaker than Tianjin's. Tianjin recorded a decision to establish the bank and to intensify consultations. Bishkek records progress by interested member states, which is the language of a file being kept open rather than closed.

New at Bishkek A contest over the headquarters opened in public for the first time. Kyrgyzstan proposed Bishkek and offered its Tamchy special financial investment territory. President Tokayev of Kazakhstan countered that "if there is consensus among the member states, Kazakhstan could host this institution, its headquarters", stated as Kazakhstan's own offer. A location fight is not progress towards capital, but it is the first sign that members are competing for the institution rather than merely endorsing it.

No member state has been identified in any source as blocking the bank. Every account describes unresolved technical questions: capital formation mechanism, currency mix, governance and headquarters. The absence of a named blocker is itself worth recording, because it points to collective reluctance rather than a single veto.

Astana 2024 paired the Fund with the Bank in a single formula: continuing consultations on the establishment of both. Bishkek breaks that pairing. The Development Bank appears in the declaration text; the Development Fund does not appear at all.

Regression A commitment that stops being mentioned has not been abandoned formally, and no member has said it is dead. But sixteen years of joint listing followed by an omission is the kind of quiet disappearance this tracker exists to catch. Uzbekistan's ambassador said in May 2026 that the bank and the fund both remained unresolved and were holding back infrastructure and industrial projects.

A caution against a misreading that has already appeared elsewhere. Bishkek did produce a Statement on Assistance to States Affected by Emergencies, which involves a special account for disaster relief. That is a different instrument. It is not the Development Fund and must not be coded as movement on it.

Bishkek reaffirms the roadmap without creating a mechanism, naming a participating institution or setting a target. The de-dollarisation discussion remains carried in declaratory language for a fourth successive year.

President Putin told the summit that more than 98 per cent of Russia's payments with SCO partner countries are now in national currencies. That is Russia's own bilateral trade statistic and is recorded here as Russia's claim. It is not an SCO settlement mechanism, and no SCO institution processes it. The distinction matters, because the figure is being widely reported as evidence of SCO financial integration when it is evidence of Russian sanctions adaptation.

Functions as a coordination body between member state banks rather than as a lending institution in its own right. At Tianjin 2025 China pledged CNY 10 billion, about USD 1.4 billion, in loans to consortium member banks across 2026 to 2029. No disbursement to any named bank has been reported. That is an absence of evidence rather than evidence of non-disbursement, since consortium operations are not comprehensively published.

New at Bishkek The declaration carries a single, revealing line about the consortium: member states want Iran's authorised banks admitted to it promptly. Iran acceded to the organisation as a full member in 2023. Three years later its banks are still outside the organisation's only functioning financial body, and the heads of state have had to say so in a declaration. For an organisation that presents itself as an alternative financial architecture, the inability to connect a member's banking system to its own consortium in three years is a more telling indicator than any trade figure quoted at the podium.

CNY 2 billion, about USD 280 million, in grants for 2025, and CNY 10 billion in loans to consortium member banks. These are Chinese bilateral instruments announced at an SCO event. They are not SCO institutional capital and should never be read as evidence that the organisation has acquired a financing capability.

New at Bishkek No new institutional capital was announced by any member at Bishkek. President Xi cited China-SCO trade growing from USD 12.1 billion in 2001 to USD 523.5 billion in 2025, which is a trade statistic and not a financing pledge. Recorded here as China's own figure.

Corrected Version 1.0 of this tracker recorded no activity since the regulations were approved. That was wrong. The Association held its inaugural session in Astana on 18 March 2025 under the Kazakh chairmanship, where delegations adopted a protocol and an annual work plan and visited the Astana International Financial Centre.

It remains coded at agreed because no permanent seat has been identified and no second meeting has been reported. The body appears to travel with the chairing state rather than to occupy a fixed institutional address, which is the difference between a standing committee and an institution. Bishkek produced no reference to it.

A functioning permanent body with a seat, staff, an intelligence-sharing remit and a numbered council that had reached its forty-third session by March 2025. Directed by Ularbek Sharsheev of Kyrgyzstan, a former head of the Kyrgyz State Border Guard Service. It maintains standing relationships with Interpol, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee.

This is the organisation's one unambiguous institutional success and the benchmark against which every later body should be judged. The relevant question for the four centres created since 2025 is not whether they were agreed, but whether any of them will look like this in twenty years.

Advanced a stage The Council of Heads of State approved the Provisions governing the centre at Bishkek, and its seat is Tashkent, built on the base of RATS. That is enough to move it from agreed to established. It is not enough to move it further.

No director, no staff appointment, no budget line and no announced entry into force date could be found in any source, official or otherwise. Ratification is confirmed for two of the ten members: Belarus, whose House of Representatives ratified on 13 March 2026, and Kyrgyzstan, whose parliament approved ratification in three readings in February 2026. No ratification record was found for China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Iran. That is a gap in the public record rather than a finding of non-ratification, and it is flagged as such.

Advanced a stage, and was reclassified This is not a standalone centre. The Chinese text of the Bishkek Declaration places it as a subordinate body under the Universal Centre, and Kyrgyz reporting describes it as a structural unit of that centre operating from Bishkek. President Japarov used the summit to announce Kyrgyz readiness to launch it, calling it the first permanently operating SCO organisation on Kyrgyz territory.

The reclassification matters for anyone counting institutions. What was reported a year ago as four new centres is emerging as two seated institutions, Tashkent and Dushanbe, with two subordinate units inside the first of them. An analyst counting Tianjin's announcements as four new bodies is overcounting by two.

Advanced a stage, and was reclassified Like the organised crime centre, this is a subordinate unit of the Tashkent-based Universal Centre rather than a separate institution with its own address. Bishkek separately approved an Information Security Cooperation Plan for 2026 to 2028, extending the plan agreed by foreign ministers at Cholpon-Ata in July 2026.

The declaration's information security language is unusually specific for this organisation. It asserts equal rights for all states to regulate the internet within their national segment, opposes unlicensed satellite internet services, and calls for signature and ratification of the UN Convention Against Cybercrime. It is paired with new artificial intelligence language prohibiting use of the technology for intentional harm to human life, national security, territorial integrity or state sovereignty, and foreshadowing a memorandum on artificial intelligence cooperation between member state governments.

Advanced a stage The only one of the four Tianjin bodies to emerge as a separate seated institution. Its seat is Dushanbe, consultations on establishing it there ran through 2024 and 2025, and the first expert meeting on the draft regulation of its Executive Committee was held in Beijing on 25 and 26 May 2026, chaired by Tajikistan. Bishkek approved the Provisions on that Executive Committee.

Belarus ratified the establishing agreement in February 2026. No other ratification record was found. No director, staff or budget line has been reported. Bishkek added two implementing programmes running to 2030, one on combating drug addiction and one on coordinating measures against synthetic drugs and precursors, which gives the centre a workplan before it has a payroll.

Document approved. Implementation runs through RATS, which gives it a better delivery route than the bodies created in 2025. No Bishkek document under this title was located, though adjacent counter-narcotics and organised crime instruments with 2027 and 2030 horizons were adopted. Recorded as a gap in the search rather than as evidence the programme has lapsed.

Strategy and action programme both approved at Astana. The implementing body, the Anti-Drug Centre, has now been established at Dushanbe but not funded. Bishkek added a cooperation programme on combating drug addiction through 2030 and a cooperation programme on coordinating measures against synthetic drugs and precursors through 2030.

The counter-narcotics file is now the densest in the organisation's paperwork: a strategy, an action programme, a centre, an executive committee, and two further programmes. It remains the file with no published budget attached to any of them.

Memorandum agreed establishing interaction between the SCO Secretariat and CARICC. No reported joint activity since, and no Bishkek reference.

Prediction failed Version 1.0 of this tracker assessed it as likely that the Bishkek Declaration would contain language on reactivating the Contact Group. It does not. The judgement was wrong and is recorded as wrong.

The basis for that assessment was a statement by SCO Deputy Secretary-General Ahmad Saeed Moradzadeh at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on 6 June 2026, that revival was being explored and that the Secretariat hoped the issue would appear in the Bishkek declaration. Consultations had restarted in Dushanbe on Tajik initiative. The error was to treat a Secretariat hope as a reliable indicator of a consensus outcome. In an organisation where every decision requires ten agreements, the Secretariat's preference is one of the weaker signals available, and this tracker will weight it accordingly in future.

No chairing state has been named. No meeting date, venue or agenda has been set. The dwell time now stands at six years.

The status was never formally revoked. It lapsed into vacancy, which is the organisation's characteristic method for handling a question it cannot resolve by consensus. No Afghan delegation attended Bishkek in any format. A pre-summit report that Afghanistan was expected at the SCO Plus meeting was not borne out, and the Islamic Emirate had not commented on that report at the time it was published.

The declaration addresses Afghanistan only as a policy and security question, not as a status question. It calls for an inclusive government with broad participation of representatives of all ethno-political groups, and commits members to helping Afghanistan become independent, neutral and peaceful and free of terrorism, war and drugs.

On the identity of the objecting state, this tracker states the position in full precisely because the Institute is Pakistani. On 24 June 2026 Zamir Kabulov, the Russian president's special envoy for Afghanistan, told Izvestia that the obstacle to Taliban participation is the explicit opposition of a single member state. He did not name it, and neither did the outlet. Several Afghanistan-focused outlets have since reported that unnamed experts, and in one case unnamed Afghan foreign ministry sources, identify Pakistan. Pakistan has denied this on the record: on 17 July 2026 the foreign ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said he was not aware of any blockade Pakistan had initiated or imposed, and said Afghanistan should first establish diplomatic relations with SCO member states.

No state has been named on the record by Kabulov, by Izvestia or by the organisation. The claim is contested, it is sourced to anonymous officials speaking about a third country, and it is recorded here as contested rather than resolved. IPDS takes the view that a tracker maintained in Islamabad is obliged to state the accusation against Pakistan more fully than it would state an accusation against anyone else, not less.

Dispute resolved against primary text Version 1.0 carried this entry as unverified because secondary sources appeared to conflict. The Russian text of the Tianjin Declaration, published by the SCO Secretariat, settles it. The member states did adopt a decision to merge the two statuses into a single SCO partner status.

The decision has not been implemented. The SCO Secretariat's own page on observers and dialogue partners, last modified on 10 July 2026, states that the current observers and dialogue partners retain their respective statuses pending formal amendment, and continues to list Afghanistan and Mongolia as observer states alongside fifteen dialogue partners. Bishkek contains no reference to the consolidation.

The consequence for Afghanistan is precise and worth stating carefully. Afghanistan is formally still an observer state, in practice vacant since August 2021, and the subject of a declared but unimplemented intention to reclassify it as an SCO partner. Anyone describing Afghanistan as already holding SCO partner status is running ahead of the organisation's own record.

All completed. The 2017 accession also imported the India-Pakistan dispute into the consensus rule, which has since shaped what the organisation can say about terrorism. Both leaders raised the subject at Bishkek in terms plainly aimed at each other and neither was named in the declaration.

New at Bishkek No new members, observers or dialogue partners were admitted. President Putin set out an explicitly cautious position, saying the organisation could not be allowed to become amorphous and that enlargement had been agreed gradually and without rushing. Recorded as Russia's stated position.

New at Bishkek Heads of state signed a protocol on amendments and additions to the founding Charter. This is the most structurally consequential document of the summit and the least reported. A charter amendment is the only instrument that can implement the partner status consolidation decided at Tianjin, and it is the instrument on which several other pending changes depend.

Indian outlets reported the protocol as bringing English into the SCO's institutional framework, a long-standing Indian objective. That characterisation could not be corroborated against the protocol text, the SCO Secretariat, or Chinese or Russian coverage, and is recorded here as an Indian media characterisation pending sight of the text.

The protocol requires ratification by all ten members before it enters into force. Tracking that ratification is the single most useful thing anyone can do with this file over the coming year, and nobody currently publishes it.

New at Bishkek The chairmanship passed from Kyrgyzstan to Pakistan for 2026 to 2027, confirmed by the SCO Secretariat. Pakistan will host the next Council of Heads of State meeting in Islamabad in 2027; no date has been announced. Lahore was designated SCO Tourism and Cultural Capital for 2026 to 2027.

Announced priorities, drawn from the prime minister's summit address and from statements by the deputy prime minister and foreign minister, cover information technology and artificial intelligence including a proposed sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure and governance framework, energy, poverty reduction, disaster management, health, culture and sport, counter-terrorism through RATS, and implementation of the Development Strategy to 2035 and the Development Bank. No separately titled chairmanship concept document could be located.

This tracker will assess the Pakistani chairmanship by exactly the tests set out at the foot of this page, which were written before the chairmanship began and will not be revised to suit its results.

Adopted as a document. Its implementation instruments are the bodies listed above, of which four have now acquired seats and none has acquired a budget. No Bishkek implementation document, review or progress report on the strategy was located. Pakistan's chairmanship names its implementation as a priority, which is a forward-looking commitment rather than a recorded step.

Approved as a document, with no dedicated implementing body identified. Bishkek produced a Statement on Energy Conservation and Efficiency and a Statement on Energy Systems Development, plus a Green Technology Corridor programme running 2026 to 2030. Whether these amend, extend or simply sit alongside the 2030 strategy is not established in any source, and the ambiguity is recorded rather than resolved.

New at Bishkek A memorandum of understanding between the SCO Secretariat and the African Union Commission, confirmed by the SCO Secretariat's own readout. The organisation's first institutional bridge to a continental body outside Eurasia. No work programme, funding or named focal point accompanies it, so it is coded at agreed.

New at Bishkek Seven further instruments, each approved as a document with no implementing body, budget or named lead identified. They are recorded together because they share a single coding and because listing them separately would overstate their individual weight.

Alongside these, government representatives signed a protocol amending the 2010 crime cooperation agreement and memoranda on climate change, artificial intelligence and cooperation in the information sphere. Sources differ on the total: the SCO Secretariat and most reporting record twenty-eight documents, while at least one Russian outlet reported twenty-nine. No source consulted publishes a complete official enumeration, and the discrepancy is left open rather than reconciled by guesswork.