In Pakistan, ESG can sound like corporate jargon imported from international consulting firms such as Bain and McKinsey. It seems a world away from the dusty files, tangled paperwork, and bureaucratic language of government offices. The recent revival in my country has complicated things even further. At a time when development financing is becoming increasingly constrained, the question of how countries define their own policy priorities and development approaches takes on added significance. 

According to the OECD, official development assistance (ODA) from countries belonging to the Development Assistance Committee fell by 23.1 percent in real terms in 2025 compared with 2024, reaching US$174.3 billion—the largest annual decline on record. Against this changing international backdrop, the push for self-reliance in policy matters and a drift away from donor-orientated guidance have encouraged a more inward-looking approach, with greater attention to local priorities, domestic circumstances, and context-specific solutions.

So, the heads of various economic institutions in my country seem to be asking, what's the point of applying international frameworks to local problems when we can generate our own homegrown solutions? Then there is the public-versus-private-sector dichotomy. The term has generally been applied to cases where there is a need to introduce social conscientiousness into a private-sector organization that is typically considered to be profit-driven.

Yes, but the tenets of organizational health in this day and age of corporatized and enterprise-level management are also relevant. The increased number of receipts and cases across all walks of life, geographies, and populations—and that, too, internationally—has massively increased the workload of most organizations, forcing them to reorganize, re-strategize, and possibly add more resources and departments, creating a rather diverse organogram composed of various subdivisions and sub-offices. The basic purpose is to increase organizational efficiency in dealing with the large volume of receipts. That is a rather simplistic understanding.

But the increased subdivision of labor within an organization does not necessarily mean that equivalent efforts are being made to coordinate across all its subdivisions and subject areas, or that the same degree of empathy—or lack thereof—is being applied to every individual client or their problems.

Yet the idea of applying ESG metrics to assess an organization's internal health is potentially helpful and can, at least theoretically, be applied to both the public and private sectors. It is also general enough to be applied toorganizationss in the Global North as well as the Global South, as we know them.

The three letters bundle three questions about any organization. How does it affect its surroundings? How does it treat the people it serves? How does it make and disclose decisions? Take a shared water supply. Whether the water is safe is an environmental matter. Whether residents are protected and kept informed is a social one. Whether anyone is accountable for testing it and reporting the results is a matter of governance. Each answer depends on the others. The same holds for public and private bodies alike. In large organizations in both sectors, work is divided into departments, and each unit answers for its own tasks, while few answer for what falls between them.

A case from the ground

Consider a government-owned residential building in Islamabad, home to more than 300 residents plus staff. Many are civil servants who move between postings and arrive assuming the housing has been checked for them. Its food and water are managed by an informal committee, not a statutory body. A resident who had studied water treatment and sanitation through online civil engineering courses examined conditions there. The findings concern everyone in the building.

Water. The drinking water was stored in a plain concrete-lined tank, not a filtration system. A pipe above it was leaking, and the tank stood over a badly fouled drain. A laboratory analysis from the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources classified the water as unsafe. Total coliform was 32 CFU/100 ml against a standard of zero (though no fecal coliforms were found), and turbidity was 11.2 NTU, another finding of note. Coliforms indicate possible associated findings of fecal contamination, and turbidity matters because suspended particles can shield microorganisms from disinfection.

Kitchen. There is no refrigeration or climate control, so in hot weather bacteria multiply faster on food. The garbage point is next to the cooking area; raw waste and prepared food share the same space, and stray animals can reach food-preparation items.

Built to be seen: Emphasis on Aesthetics Rather than Substance

The building stands in an isolated, scenic part of the city, with the Margalla Hills visible from its windows. It sits among government buildings and research organizations that regularly host foreign guests, and it was built to accommodate diplomats, ambassadors, and students of the foreign service academy. Because so many visitors pass through, the emphasis is on how the building looks: the paint, the car parking, the guards' uniforms, and whether food is available at most hours of the day and night. In effect, it functions like a guest house without being called one.

What gets less attention is whether the people living inside can stay healthy. Water, air, light and noise are left for residents to cope with on their own, so the cost of environmental survival is passed to them. The building is valued for its appearance more than for how well it works as a place to live.

The governance question

A resident who asked for a copy of the water report was refused. Complaints about the food and the water odor led to routine filter changes, not investigation, and there was no formal channel through which anyone could have the problem examined.

Secrecy has a further cost. When an organization does not disclose its environmental conditions, a resident who falls ill has nothing to compare against, and neither does the doctor or the institution. The illness is treated as one person's misfortune, an isolated case, and the rest of the building is presumed fine. A pattern can only be seen if the data is shared. Without it, each incident stands alone, and any shared cause stays hidden.

This is where the three questions meet. The environmental question is whether the water is safe. The social question is whether residents are protected and informed. The governance question is whether anyone must test, report, and act. When the third is left unanswered, the first two cannot be answered either.

Public advocacy on environmental issues and the practical management of a building's water, kitchen, and waste are different skills, and one does not guarantee the other. Institutions admired for their stated commitments still need someone who can read a laboratory report and act on it.

What should change? 

• Publish test results to residents in plain language.

• Test regularly with an accredited laboratory, and inspect and clean tanks on a schedule.

• Put food and water under a body with formal accountability and a complaints channel.

A debate over water is really a debate over whether an organization treats environmental conditions as isolated technical matters or as part of how it is governed. I raise it in the hope that the building will choose the second.