BISHKEK (The Thursday Times) — Lahore has been designated the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Tourism and Cultural Capital for 2026-2027, under a resolution signed at the SCO’s Bishkek summit, the same gathering where Pakistan formally assumed the organisation’s rotating chairmanship.
The resolution, one of roughly 30 documents signed at the conclusion of the two-day summit, formally designates Lahore for the title covering Pakistan’s chairmanship period. Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon referenced the designation directly in his own remarks to the summit, congratulating Pakistan on assuming the SCO chairmanship and voicing support for declaring Lahore the organisation’s tourism and cultural capital.
Pakistan had been laying the groundwork for the designation for weeks before Bishkek. In July, the federal minister overseeing the effort told the SCO Secretary-General that Pakistan planned to organise four flagship cultural events in Lahore, complemented by a year-long calendar of smaller programmes, alongside major cultural activities in Islamabad and Karachi. Embassies and consulates of SCO member states based in Pakistan are to be invited to take part through cultural performances, exhibitions, and visiting cultural troupes. Islamabad separately plans to host the annual Lok Virsa Folk Festival in November, to which SCO member states have also been invited, and Pakistan is due to host the 24th Meeting of SCO Ministers of Culture.
The designation is distinct from another title Lahore already holds: the Economic Cooperation Organisation named Lahore its Tourism Capital for 2027 in April 2025, a separate honour from a separate regional body. The two titles cover overlapping but not identical periods and were awarded by different organisations, worth keeping distinct given how easily the two could be conflated in coverage.∎
