Author: Kubatbek Rakhimov, PhD in Economics — Institute for Strategic and Academic Studies (ISAS), Bishkek
In May, the first working-level dialogue between RCEP and CPTPP met in Suzhou — a first attempt to link two large trade architectures without merging them or reopening either one’s membership. The continental analogue has now happened, on a larger scale and closer to home. On 31 August–1 September, ten SCO heads of state met in Bishkek for the organisation’s twenty-sixth summit, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev used the accompanying SCO Plus session — attended by UN Secretary-General António Guterres — to propose two new standing structures: a “Partnership Network of Regional Organizations,” linking the secretariats of the SCO, the CIS, the CSTO, the EAEU and CICA around shared UN-aligned priorities, and a permanent “SCO Plus Forum of Cultures and Civilizations,” with Khiva named to host the first session. Both push SCO+ further toward what this platform has called cooperative mega-regionalism: connective tissue between blocs rather than another bloc.
One thing did not extend. The summit’s twenty-eight-document package — the Bishkek Declaration, decisions of heads of state, intergovernmental agreements on transport, digital policy, energy and climate — left the SCO Development Bank where it stood after Tianjin a year earlier. Members reached political consensus on the bank in 2025. A year on, its membership, governance, capital structure and location are still under negotiation, and Kazakhstan used the Bishkek summit to lodge a competing bid against Kyrgyzstan’s own to host the headquarters. On the single question that would have required every member to commit capital rather than a signature, Bishkek matched Tianjin exactly.
This is not paralysis, and reading it that way misses what actually happened. Set the multilateral package beside what the same two days produced bilaterally: Kyrgyzstan and China alone signed on the order of thirty-two documents around President Xi Jinping’s accompanying state visit — more, by simple count, than the summit’s entire multilateral output. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway, under construction since late 2024, is the same channel in physical form: a route roughly 900 kilometres shorter than existing alternatives, capacity for up to 15 million tonnes a year, financed and built without waiting for any pooled regional instrument. Beijing does not appear to need a bank it would have to share. It has something that works faster — finished infrastructure, delivered on its own schedule, bilaterally.
That is the half of the picture a purely institutional reading of SCO+ leaves out. The Partnership Network and the Khiva forum build connective architecture at the level of secretariats and declarations, and the region needs both. But the test of hemispheric governance in continental Eurasia is not whether such a network convenes. It is whether the physical economy underneath it gets built, on whose terms, and through which channel — when the multilateral financial layer keeps not arriving on schedule.
Central Asia’s C5 format is where that resolves into something measurable. The five states sit at the point where every current in this picture — the stalled multilateral bank, the thickening bilateral rail and power links, the institutional scaffolding SCO+ now proposes — has to turn into something a freight forwarder or a power utility can actually use. Two indicators will show it before any declaration does: whether the railway reaches its stated capacity, and whether cross-border electricity trading scales past pilot volumes.
There is a third, and it is political rather than technical. When the next major continental infrastructure project comes up for negotiation, does the region arrive as five states speaking together, or as five separate bilateral counterparts to the same partner? Nothing in the Bishkek package answers that. Everything in the region’s next five years depends on it.
Author: Kubatbek Rakhimov, PhD in Economics — Institute for Strategic and Academic Studies (ISAS), Bishkek
Image by Hans_Waehrisch via Pixabay