Kazakhstan Consolidates Leadership at the Tianjin SCO Summit
The 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit, which convened in Tianjin (also known as Tientsin) in China from August 31 to September 1, was the largest in the bloc’s twenty-five-year history. It gathered more than twenty heads of state and institutional leaders, among them China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, Kazakhstan’s Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The agenda ranged widely: counterterrorism, supply chain resilience, energy transition, and climate cooperation all featured. For Beijing, the event was the centerpiece of its SCO presidency. Chinese officials cast it as a demonstration of “true multilateralism” at a time when protectionism and bloc politics are resurgent. The summit’s final product, the Tianjin Declaration, mapped strategic priorities to 2035. It stressed four pillars: collective security, economic integration, digital transformation, and sustainable development. Underpinning this ambition was trade estimated to be worth over $512 billion between China and SCO members in 2024, illustrating the economic weight now embedded in the organization. Over the past year, Kazakhstan’s policy entrepreneurship has heightened the significance of its spell as chair spanning 2024-2025. The country's prominence derives not only from these initiatives but also from its structural position as the largest economy on the Caspian Sea, endowed with the world’s largest reserves of uranium and significant critical minerals. Thanks to its successful implementation of a multi-vector foreign policy aligning with its national strategy priorities, including new energy and transportation agendas, Kazakhstan was able to consolidate its leadership profile. Policy Initiatives and Prolific Activism As one of the six founding members, Kazakhstan had chaired the SCO through 2024. At the 2024 Astana Summit, Tokayev unveiled initiatives that set the foundation for Tianjin. He called for the establishment of a UN Regional Center for Sustainable Development Goals in Central Asia and Afghanistan, arguing that the region’s fragility requires a dedicated UN presence. He also proposed an International Agency for Biological Security, intended to manage risks exposed by the pandemic era, and the creation of an SCO Investment Fund to finance joint projects in infrastructure and technology. During that year, Kazakhstan organized over 140 events in security, economic, and cultural fields, a scale that exceeded most previous chairs. This activism reinforced Astana’s image as a policy entrepreneur within Eurasia’s multilateral institutions. Energy cooperation emerged as the most concrete innovation. In 2024, under Kazakhstan’s presidency and at its motivation, the organization produced a new “SCO Strategy for Energy Cooperation to 2030” committing members to mutual coordination not only in hydrocarbons but also in renewable energy deployment, cross-border grids, and green finance. In Tianjin in 2025, this framework was carried forward as members endorsed an action plan translating the strategy into specific mechanisms for project financing, technical standards, and pilot cross-border infrastructure. In this way, Kazakhstan’s energy agenda was embedded into the SCO’s medium-term program going forward. Cultural diplomacy was another theme. The “Spiritual Shrines of SCO Countries” project, launched under Kazakhstan’s chairmanship, sought to catalogue and promote shared civilizational heritage. Tokayev also advanced...
