SDG façade

BESET by the worst floods of its history in 2022, Pakistan approached the international community for help. As its delegation sought $10 billion in reconstruction pledges at Geneva, a local councillor in flood-hit Sindh said: “The SDGs came to us as a logo on a banner, not as a boat, a clinic or a school.” In a post-flood, inflation-hit city, a woman in a ration queue lamented: “Every year they say poverty has gone down; every year my queue gets longer.”

Pakistan adopted the SDGs as its national development goals through a parliamentary resolution in February 2016. Fanfare followed as a broad-based SDG institutional architecture was rolled out across the country, and the public sector agenda was reoriented around SDG “mainstreaming, acceleration and localisation”. Very soon, the SDGs became the language of bureaucracy — a new frame under which it could organise implementation activity, mobilise resources and channel policy innovations and experiments. For the state, they promised soft power: a way to signal alignment with the priorities of the rules-based international order. A decade on, Pakistan’s SDG ship is foundering; it is ahead of only Afghanistan as the lowest performer amongst South Asian countries.

One of the first countries to embrace SDGs, Pakistan now faces a troubling paradox between early commitment and service delivery outcomes. As India became the first South Asian country to enter the top 100 in 2025, Pakistan slid further from 137th (2024) to 140th place. Forty per cent of its children are stunted, an estimate that has remained largely unchanged over the last decade; the under-five mortality rate at 58.5 per 1,000 births is nearly double the regional average; 22.8 million children are out of school; and the literacy rate has stagnated at around 60pc. Only Nigeria does worse than Pakistan in getting its children into classrooms.

Meanwhile, India and Bangladesh, while not performing wonders, appear to be making a mark in similar areas within the SDG orbit. India’s bold claim on social progress is that in 2013-2023, it lifted a record 248m people out of multidimensional poverty.

Pakistan’s SDG ship is foundering.

Bangladesh reduced child stunting from 55pc to 28pc through community-based nutrition programmes and achieved gender parity in secondary education with targeted stipends for girls. Why is Pakistan lagging behind?

Development economists have a term for the situation Pakistan finds itself in. In 2010, Harvard economist Lant Pritchett coined the term ‘isomorphic mimicry’ which I’d like to borrow to define the technical failure that characterises Pakistan’s SDG experience. He suggested that governments adopt the appearance of successful institutional forms without developing the functional capabilities needed to realise the potential of those institutional forms. The idea is to look like a state more than performing like one. Pakistan’s government adopted the language in which SDGs were expressed, mimicking the successful SDG institutional structure but underinvesting in long-term improvement activities such as training bureaucrats.

Isomorphic mimicry is notorious for creating capability traps as countries focus too heavily on activities that provide short-term gains. Building capabilities is not easy as it involves navigating several road blocks all at once: power politics, bureaucratic inertia and fiscal constraints. Most important in this list are political factors, particularly the absence of a strong political will, that favour short-term heroics at the cost of building lo­­ng-term capabilities. Pakistan’s po­­li­­tical instability creates short horizons for politicians which significantly undermines the long-term commitment required for SDGs.

A more critical issue in Pakistan’s case has been the convergence of structural vulnerabilities like climate change and demographic pressures that have created cascading crises. These vulnerabilities were exposed by supply-chain disruptions and inflationary pressures during Covid-19, and then compounded by oil price shocks from the Russia-Ukraine war. These vulnerabilities, alongside the events that amplified their effects, have overwhelmed state capacity and political systems. Weak state capacity means that even with strong political will, implementation will fail more often than not.

Pakistan is stuck in a vicious cycle of underdevelopment. Recurrent macroeconomic crises, convergence of structural weaknesses and political instability have eroded state capacity and made the economy more vulnerable to shocks. If this cycle persists, embracing development ideas, creating new institutional forms or mimicking structural designs will not translate into real progress. Pakistan will continue to look like a reforming state without ever truly becoming one.

The writer teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts.

Published in Dawn, February 18th, 2026

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