By Asad Ejaz Butt, University of Massachusetts, Boston, US

Pakistan adopted the SDGs as its national development goals in February 2016. The country had fallen beneath expectations on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), finishing significantly behind all its eight goals. Despite the MDG experience, the SDGs were embraced with a sense of hopeful optimism by the upper echelons of decision makers. Their reaction stood in stark contrast to the tactical and street levels of the executive bureaucracy that hardly saw the Goals as an opportunity but rather as another aspirational framework that would force them to realign their business practices and invent new ways of accelerating progress.

This kind of optimism is uncharacteristic of the Pakistani bureaucracy that is otherwise cynical of international agendas. Evidence suggests that it could be a result of the structure of the state that was principally altered in 2010 when the executive powers of the federation were devolved to the provinces through the 18th amendment to the constitution. An evaluative presumption about the MDGs was that they could not be achieved due to the country’s failure to devolve them to the provinces and the districts and hence, with the new structure in place, the SDGs looked more achievable, inspiring hope amongst the planners and policymakers. The second reason is that disorganized and fragmented bureaucratic systems, like the one in place in Pakistan, where framework thinking continues to have its place as it provides direction and order in an otherwise disorderly setting.

Implementation model

The SDG implementation model developed in Pakistan is driven by three caveats:

• Divergence from the MDG implementation path to avoid repeating mistakes committed during the MDG era;
• Compliance with civil service rules and private sector regulations that have to be married with the new set of requirements brought forward by the SDGs; and
• Compatibility with the international best practices and the SDG framework to ensure that interpretive efforts to localize the SDGs do not distort the original meaning and spirit of the indicators.

These caveats have steered the formation of Pakistan’s homegrown SDG implementation model and principally led its response in the last eight years.

Mainstreaming and decentralization

The Government of Pakistan formed SDG support units in the federal (under the Planning Commission of Pakistan) and the provincial governments (under provincial planning and development departments) with a mandate to mainstream the SDGs within the planning frameworks and budgetary allocations, and to further devolve them to the districts within each province. The units perform both advisory and implementation roles. They jointly created the SDG monitoring and evaluation framework that mainstreamed the SDGs within the policy discourse and also within the delivery mechanisms of the executive branch. The provincial units were further supported by voluntary district SDG committees headed by the deputy commissioner in each district.

Mapping and localization

Goals, targets, and indicators were localized to suit the country and provincial contexts. Indicators not relevant to the geographic, economic, and social context of Pakistan were removed from the agenda. The government rules of business were studied to map the relevant SDG indicators with the business and mandate of the federal ministries, provincial line departments, and their subordinate offices and attached bodies. This process was helpful in breaking down the expansive SDG agenda into smaller and more achievable targets aligned with the mandate of the respective departments who were well positioned to make independent assessments of the amount of technical and financial resources at their disposal to plan and devote to the SDGs.

Data gap analysis and baselining

The lack of data availability is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that manifests in several different ways. The SDG-related data in Pakistan are either outdated, not credible, not available on a regular periodic basis, or available for certain disaggregation levels (unavailable in certain sub-categories: for instance, available for men but not for women). These data gaps prevent baselining which makes it difficult for the government to estimate baseline-goal distance, measure progress, set short-, medium-, and long-term targets and design result-driven and targeted development projects. If the government does not know where it currently stands against a certain indicator, it would not be able to determine the required level of effort and estimate the financing needs of the SDGs to put public financial resources to the service of the SDGs.

Benchmarking and goal setting

Not all SDG indicators define a numeric benchmark to be achieved by 2030. Some SDG indicators have quantitative targets, while for many others, the target for 2030 must either be estimated using an analytical methodology or inferred on the basis of national development needs or its realistic achievable potential. Thus, given their derived nature, SDG benchmarks are exposed to a set of arbitrary and whimsical experiments which vary greatly across countries. While such heterogeneity is desirable from the perspective of allowing countries the independence to set goals according to their specific development context, the variations in methodologies used to benchmark will always put some countries at risk of developing skewed priorities and setting too low, or too high, targets.

In Pakistan’s case, benchmarking began from an assessment of the development needs and realistic and achievable potential, which largely determined the numeric targets to be achieved by 2030. Goals were benchmarked for 2030 and then divided based on their short-, medium-, or long-term nature.

Target-level prioritization

The magnitude of the scale and coverage of the SDGs, and the concurrent limitations (resource and otherwise) of developing nations imply that not all targets can be dealt with at the same time, creating the need to develop priorities. In Pakistan, the understanding is, as is the case with several other countries, that setting priorities involves subjectivities of many kinds, and thus has to happen based on some technical methodology. Several methodologies were proposed by experts, economists, and international development partners, including the idea of low-hanging fruit, or usage of the baseline-target distance. However, a later recipe that combined realistic achievability and relevance of the targets was adopted to separate higher from lower priority targets.

Challenges ahead

The Government of Pakistan should have conducted a mid-term review of its SDG performance in 2023. The initial model developed in 2016 was on par with other models developed elsewhere in the world. However, lack of regular monitoring stands in the way of measurement of progress, SDG reporting, and determination of the level of effort required to achieve the Goals by 2030. Implementation gaps, fiscal limitations, and monetary shocks as a result of mounting sovereign debt and inflationary pressures may have undermined the potential of an efficient implementation model.

Some of the progress achieved in the initial years of SDG implementation was partially reversed firstly by the COVID-19 pandemic that turned several social indicators on their head, and later by the commodity super cycle that started in the aftermath of Russia-Ukraine war. While lack of SDG reporting does not allow one to be certain about progress, general estimates about society and the economy indicate that in terms of many SDG indicators, Pakistan would be much further ahead of where it was in 2016. However, the trajectory and pace of this growth also indicate that while goal thinking would have incentivized and accelerated progress, Pakistan would find itself far short of where it should have been to achieve the goals by 2030.

* * *

Asad Ejaz Butt is an economist specializing in public financial management reforms such as strategic planning and budgeting, development planning at sub-national levels, and macro-fiscal policies and regulations. Asad is an honorary/visiting fellow with several research institutes and think tanks including the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Mahbub ul Haq Research Center, and Prime Institute. He was an Economic Policy Analyst at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) working on the SDGs in Pakistan. He’s currently completing a doctorate in public policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.