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EACH budget season brings the same complaint: climate finance is inadequate. As allocations fall short of commitments, the adaptation gap widens. The complaint is legitimate. The diagnosis is wrong.
Most of Pakistan’s climate policies are neither formally approved nor notified. The Federal Appropriation Act can only fund programmes anchored in policies duly approved by the relevant forum and notified in the Gazette of Pakistan. A ministerial press release cannot be a budget line. A strategy launched at a COP pavilion cannot be a PSDP entry. The budget reflects this accurately. Tight fiscal space is only a secondary reason. Where is the architecture of climate-smart budgeting?
Pakistan’s policy landscape has five tiers of approval, each carrying different legal weight. At the top sit policies enacted as acts of parliament, carrying full legal force on all ministries and provinces. Below these are cabinet decisions gazette-notified as statutory regulatory orders (SROs), binding the federal executive and judicially enforceable. Then come cabinet decisions that were never gazette-notified, binding on paper but unenforceable in court and invisible to the budget process.
