The quality of state planning ultimately shapes the quality of state governance itself. If a system is built around processes, activities and the commissioning of infrastructure, the entire administrative machine begins to function within the logic of budget execution and formal target delivery. But when people become the center of planning, public policy starts being judged through a very different lens – quality of life, demographic sustainability and the ability of territories to retain people. And this is where Kazakhstan’s main contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.
For years, the country has spoken about human-centered governance and results-based management. These principles are embedded both in the architecture of the State Planning System and in the country’s strategic development documents. Yet in practice, the transition from managing activities to managing real outcomes never fully happened.
Today, the system flawlessly records the opening of clinics, schools, roads and engineering infrastructure while entire regions continue losing population. Kazakhstan has built an almost perfect paper architecture of strategies, concepts, national projects and development plans where every element is reflected in reports and indicators.
But one simple question remains outside the system itself: Will people actually want to live there? The old model of what could be called “administering concrete” is no longer enough.
That is why reforming the State Planning System is no longer a technical bureaucratic issue. It is increasingly becoming a question of long-term national sustainability. The state must learn not simply to manage projects, but to manage public value – creating conditions people, especially younger generations, are willing to stay for. Otherwise Kazakhstan risks becoming a country with perfectly designed strategic documents governing territories people continue to leave behind.
At the same time, it would be wrong to claim that no progress has been made. Regional authorities carried out enormous work while preparing development plans for 2026-2030. A fully integrated planning vertical was built, stretching from the National Development Plan’s key indicators down to regional targets, implementation measures, investment projects and priority-zone maps. But paradoxically, it was precisely this depth of decomposition that exposed the State Planning System’s deepest internal flaw.
Methodologically, the system is still designed around managing activities and processes rather than measuring final public outcomes. In other words, it answers the question “What was built?” extremely well, while struggling with a far more important one: “What actually changed for people?” The problem is not incompetence at the regional level. The problem lies in the system’s underlying logic itself.
Kazakhstan gradually built a governance model where process began replacing meaning. The methodology demands flawless implementation of activities and achievement of indicators, yet barely evaluates whether territories are becoming more attractive places to live.
In practice, the current architecture of the State Planning System has created a vertical of administrative execution. At the top level, the National Development Plan defines strategic priorities such as human capital, quality of life and public well-being. Through decomposition, these priorities are transformed into targets, indicators, activities and investment projects. But as the system moves downward through administrative layers, it slowly loses its original purpose.
At the final stage, success becomes measured through commissioned facilities, spent budgets and completed indicators. A kind of methodological “matryoshka effect” emerges: the lower the governance level, the less space remains for the actual human being inside the system. As a result, the value of human development is gradually replaced by the value of a signed completion certificate.
This becomes especially visible in the monitoring system itself. Today, monitoring primarily evaluates implementation schedules, project delivery and budget execution. The system rarely asks whether these investments generate a meaningful long-term effect for territories and populations.
In practice, the logic looks like this: the state sets a target to build rural clinics, the facilities are completed, the reports are approved and the indicator is formally achieved.
But the system never asks the most important question: Did people’s lives actually improve, and will they still want to live there ten years from now?
Take the Aksuat district in the Abai region as an example. Under the National Project for Rural Healthcare Modernization, large-scale infrastructure projects are actively being implemented there. From the perspective of the State Planning System, this is considered successful execution. But at the same time, 928 people left the district in 2025, while the birth rate declined from 17.33 to 15.9.
In other words, the state continues investing in infrastructure while the territory itself continues losing population. The Abai region is only one example among many where formalism increasingly defeats strategy.
Kazakhstan’s planning system is gradually falling into what could be described as “infrastructure fetishism.” The state continues investing in physical assets across territories that are rapidly losing their most important stakeholder – people themselves.
We continue planning “objects,” but still do not plan “human retention.” There is no real methodological connection between building a clinic and a citizen’s decision to remain in a village. That is why the next stage of reform should involve a transition from managing activities to managing public value itself.
This does not mean abandoning infrastructure development. It means changing the philosophy behind the system. Infrastructure should no longer be treated as a goal in itself, but as a tool for achieving sustainable social outcomes.
That shift would fundamentally change the logic of planning. Key indicators should no longer focus only on construction volumes or the number of completed facilities. They should increasingly reflect the real condition of territories – migration dynamics, accessibility of services, human capital quality, purchasing power, demographic sustainability and overall life satisfaction.
Kazakhstan has reached a point where further complicating the planning architecture no longer automatically improves governance quality. The country can continue expanding indicators, deepening decomposition and refining reporting systems. But without a genuine shift toward outcome-based governance, Kazakhstan risks creating a perfectly administered system for territories that are gradually emptying out.
The time has come not only to inventory projects and infrastructure, but to reconsider the very meaning of the State Planning System itself. Because in the end, the winners are not the countries with the largest number of documents, strategies and reports.
The winners are the countries capable of retaining people and creating conditions for the future.
Bayan Abdrakhmanova, National Bureau of Economic Research, specially for economyKZ.org
