In Pakistan, the shocks of the 21st century are often felt long before the rules that govern them are written. Floods erase years of development in a single season. Heatwaves test the limits of cities. Health emergencies reveal how quickly borders lose meaning. At the same time, quieter decisions made elsewhere, on technical standards, digital systems, or access to technology, shape what is possible at home, often without Pakistan having had a real voice in the process.
These experiences point to a deeper truth. Today’s defining challenges are not only geopolitical. They are scientific and technological in nature, and political in their consequences. Climate instability, public health risks, artificial intelligence, food security, water stress, and energy transitions no longer belong to separate policy silos. They shape national security, economic resilience, and international standing all at once.
Yet many states, including those under the greatest pressure, still behave as if science belongs to one corner of government and diplomacy to another, intersecting occasionally and usually too late. That separation no longer reflects how power actually works. In practice, it leaves countries reacting to crises shaped elsewhere, rather than shaping the conditions under which those crises unfold.
When Knowledge Shapes Power
This is why science diplomacy has moved from the margins to the centre of serious statecraft. Not as a slogan, and not as an optimistic story about cooperation, but as a form of state capacity. It is the ability to integrate knowledge into decisions before crises escalate, to keep technical cooperation alive when politics becomes strained, and to manage interdependence in a world where no serious problem stops at the border.
The past decade has been unforgiving on this point. During COVID-19, the world had extraordinary scientific knowledge but struggled to organise trust, logistics, and access. Climate governance tells a similar story, with overwhelming evidence and uneven action, especially where adaptation is most urgent. As digital systems are deployed at speed, governance frameworks lag behind technical reality. In each case, the obstacle was not ignorance, but the absence of durable interfaces between science and policy, and between national priorities and global mechanisms.
Fragmentation as Strategic Risk
Meanwhile, the international environment is hardening. Research ecosystems are increasingly entangled with strategic competition. Technology supply chains are treated as security assets. Cooperation that once felt routine is now filtered through suspicion. Some of this is unavoidable. But when fragmentation becomes the default setting, the costs rise quickly. Shared vulnerabilities become harder to manage, and the margin for miscalculation narrows.
Science diplomacy exists to protect that margin.
It does not pretend that science is neutral or detached from politics. It recognises that evidence, standards, data, and technical infrastructures now sit at the heart of geopolitics itself. If that is the terrain, states need professional and institutional ways to operate on it. Without them, they are left with improvisation, personal networks, and crisis responses that arrive after damage has already been done.
History offers a useful reminder. Even in periods of intense rivalry, scientific and technical cooperation has sometimes remained one of the last functioning bridges, whether in public health surveillance, environmental monitoring, or nuclear risk reduction. These channels did not resolve political conflict, but they reduced misunderstanding and helped prevent catastrophic failures of coordination.
Pakistan’s Underestimated Leverage
This is where countries outside the superpower bracket are often underestimated. Being in the middle is not only a vulnerability. It can be an advantage. Such countries can convene, broker, and host. They can offer platforms for cooperation in areas where the cost of non-coordination is simply too high for everyone involved.
Pakistan fits this profile more than is often acknowledged.
Geographically, it sits at the intersection of South Asia, Central Asia, the Gulf, and Western China. Substantively, it shares with its wider neighbourhood the pressures that will define the coming decades: climate exposure, water stress, demographic growth, public health risk, and a rapidly shifting technology landscape. Pakistan does not need to insert itself into these conversations. It is already living them. That lived exposure can be converted into influence, because countries on the frontline of global risk are well placed to shape agendas on resilience, adaptation science, and disaster risk governance.
There are already signs of movement in this direction. Science diplomacy has begun to acquire institutional recognition within Pakistan’s foreign policy ecosystem. Regional and multilateral science cooperation platforms linked to Pakistan exist and can be used more strategically. Pakistan also occupies a distinctive position as a host and connector in wider South-South and Islamic-world science cooperation, giving it convening capacity that goes beyond participation and into agenda-setting.
A scientific diaspora with experience across major research centres represents an underused bridge of trust and capability. Within the country, a growing policy community understands that science, technology, and foreign policy can no longer be treated as separate domains. In practice, much of this work is already carried by cities, universities, and research hubs, where international collaboration is negotiated daily, even when national politics is constrained.
From Exposure to Choice
The real question is not whether Pakistan engages in science diplomacy. It already does. The question is whether that engagement remains fragmented and dependent on individuals, or whether it becomes something more durable: a coherent instrument of state capacity.
This does not require grand declarations. It requires a change in how government organises itself and its partnerships. Scientific and technological capability must be treated not only as a development objective, but as a component of national power. In the 21st century, strategic autonomy increasingly rests on knowledge sovereignty.
It also requires bringing evidence upstream into decision-making, rather than invoking it downstream as justification. When scientific advice is present early, negotiations look different. Risks are anticipated rather than explained away after the fact. Diplomatic systems that can draw routinely on technical expertise are better equipped to negotiate climate finance, health cooperation, technology standards, and regional risk reduction. Public trust in expertise must be treated as strategic infrastructure. In international cooperation, credibility and reputation are not soft assets. They determine who is trusted, who is listened to, and whose proposals shape outcomes when material power is unequal.
Pakistan also has an opportunity that should not be overlooked. Climate and health risks are shared across its region, yet they are politically sensitive to address collectively. Science diplomacy offers a practical way forward. Technical cooperation can create structured engagement around shared problems even when politics is tense. When this opportunity is missed, coordination failures translate into higher human and economic costs borne at home.
The coming decades will not be shaped only by who controls the most advanced technologies. They will be shaped by those who can organise cooperation around these technologies without losing stability, security, or legitimacy. Science diplomacy is not about prestige. It is about governing interdependence.
For Pakistan, the choice is no longer abstract. It can allow global shocks and standards to continue shaping its options from the outside, or it can invest deliberately in the capacity to shape cooperation around the forces already transforming its future.