By Yaroslav Lissovolik

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit that is set to take place in Taijing, China on August 31-September 1, 2025 may bring a number of breakthroughs in transforming the bloc in the direction of prioritizing economic cooperation. One of the possible decisions at the summit may be the launching of an SCO development bank that would expand the array of Eurasia’s development institutions. Another important turn in SCO’s evolution this year will be the expansion in the SCO+ format that is to include representatives of regional and international organizations. These and other developments point in our view to a rising similarity in the transformation experienced by the SCO and BRICS – something that we believe will be conducive to forming a closer SCO-EAEU-BRICS partnership that has been widely discussed within the Eurasian circles in recent years.

Throughout the past several years the SCO like the BRICS grouping was in expansion mode. In 2017 the SCO widened it ranks to include India and Pakistan, Iran joined the group in July 2023, and Belarus in July 2024. In the case of the SCO as well as BRICS, apart from the expansion in the core membership, there was also the creation of a partnership belt. After the expansion of BRICS and the SCO in the past several years, both platforms are broadly on par in terms of the number of countries in the core and the partnership belt. Both now have 10 developing economies in the core, with the partnership belt in BRICS currently consisting of 10 members (together with Vietnam that joined the partnership belt in the summer of 2025) and several more that are yet to accept the invitation, while in the case of SCO the number of dialogue partners amounts to 14 countries.

Apart from the synchronicity in the expansion mode across the two blocs, there is also a rising convergence between the SCO and BRICS in terms of membership in the core and the partnership belt. At this stage four BRICS core members – India, Iran, China and Russia – are also members of the SCO core. The BRICS core now also includes two dialogue partners from the SCO – the UAE and Egypt (three in case Saudi Arabia becomes a full-fledged BRICS member). The newly created BRICS partnership belt also included two SCO core members from Central Asia – Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – as well as one core SCO member from Europe, namely Belarus. Also, some of the SCO core members and partner economies in recent years were granted membership in the BRICS New Development Bank – specifically Uzbekistan (core member of the SCO) and Bangladesh (applied for dialogue partner/observer in the SCO).

With SCO expanding to cover more Eurasian economies, the bloc launched an SCO+ format in 2024 that is to be further broadened in terms of its scope this year during the SCO summit in China. The Chinese authorities expect nearly 30 representatives of countries, regional blocs and international organizations to attend the SCO+ meetings. The launching of this SCO+ format is line with our calls to create an SCO+ platform for the regional arrangements in Eurasia back in 2018 and further in 2022 and 2024. This emerging SCO+ platform bears resemblance to the evolution of the BRICS+ format whose theoretical foundations we also developed in the beginning of 2017 and whose practical implementation was launched by China in the fall of 2017. Since then the BRICS+ format experienced several waves of expansion, with regional integration blocs and regional organizations starting to play a more prominent role within this track of BRICS outreach. Similar trends appear to be in motion in the case of the SCO+ format that is to widen the array of regional arrangements that are to participate in the SCO+ summits.

We have also recently reported on the likely announcement of the creation of an SCO development bank that is expected to be made at the SCO summit. Back in 2024 we called for the establishment of the SCO development bank as well as a platform for Eurasia’s regional development institutions to co-finance priority projects. The creation of the SCO development bank would be in line with the pattern observed in the BRICS space, where the launching of the operations of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) bolstered investment cooperation among its members. The SCO development bank if in fact created could serve as one of the coordinating mechanisms for the regional development institutions of the Global South in Eurasia, working closely with the likes of the New Development Bank and the Eurasian Development Bank.

As we have noted in the past, the convergence in the modalities of operation of BRICS and the SCO blocs – as evidenced by the launching of the SCO+ format (similar to BRICS+) as well as the possibility of the creation of a SCO development bank (similar to the BRICS NDB) – is conducive to greater coordination and alignment between these two platforms going forward. It also lays the groundwork for the implementation of the stated goal of forging closer cooperation within the EAEU-SCO-BRICS triad. This greater alignment between the three blocs may shed light on the further evolution in the integration impulses across Eurasia and the Global South. In particular, the EAEU-SCO-BRICS platform may bring on board the regional integration blocs from outside of Eurasia (such as Mercosur or AU/AfCFTA) leading thus to the creation of a broader BRICS+ platform for regional integration arrangements. Another possible implication is that further developments in the evolution of BRICS may be influenced by the advances made by the EAEU and/or SCO (just like the BRICS impacted SCO development as argued above). In particular, BRICS institutionalization may follow in part the patterns of institutionalization within the SCO and the EAEU, including with respect to the creation of a Commission/Secretariat.

Yaroslav Lissovolik is Founder of BRICS+ Analytics.