In brief. Gulf national strategies are rarely short of ambition, funding or political sponsorship. Where they stall is the space between the strategy document and the ministries, authorities and companies that must deliver it. Closing that gap is a design problem: fewer priorities, one accountable owner per outcome, a steady rhythm of review, deliberate coordination across mandates and the capability to solve problems, not just report on them.
National strategies in the Gulf are some of the most ambitious public programmes anywhere. Saudi Vision 2030, Qatar National Vision 2030 and its Third National Development Strategy, Bahrain Economic Vision 2030, We the UAE 2031, Kuwait Vision 2035 and Oman Vision 2040 each set out long-horizon goals that reach across the whole of government and much of the economy. Our view is simple: when these strategies slow down, the cause is seldom the vision itself. It is the delivery machinery underneath it, the routines, roles and relationships that turn a national outcome into decisions made every week inside dozens of institutions. That machinery is rarely designed with the same care as the strategy, and it should be.
Why do national strategies stall after launch?
National strategies stall because the strategy is designed at the centre while delivery happens in institutions with their own budgets, mandates and timetables.
At launch, a strategy has maximum clarity and maximum attention. Within two or three years, it is competing with budget cycles, leadership changes, new national priorities and the day-to-day demands on every entity involved. Targets that were shared at the centre become, in practice, the responsibility of everyone and therefore of no one in particular. Reporting multiplies while decisions slow.
This is the central problem of public administration everywhere. What is specific to the Gulf is the scale and pace of ambition, which makes delivery machinery matter more, not less.
How many priorities can a government actually deliver at once?
Fewer than it usually announces. The discipline lies in separating the small number of national outcomes that leadership will personally track from the much larger portfolio of initiatives that serve them.
Saudi Arabia shows what this looks like at scale. Its Vision 2030 Annual Report for 2024 records 1,502 active initiatives, and reports that 93% of Vision Realization Program and national strategy KPIs were either fully achieved or on track, and 85% of initiatives completed or progressing on track. The lesson for other governments is less the figures themselves than the fact that a system exists to produce them, consistently, every year.
Qatar’s Third National Development Strategy takes a related approach, organising the agenda around seven strategic national outcomes, from sustainable economic growth to government excellence, each with its own 2030 targets. Framing priorities as outcomes rather than programmes forces a useful question: if this outcome is not moving, which few initiatives matter most, and who will decide to change them?
What should a delivery unit actually do?
A delivery unit should help a small number of priorities move faster by solving problems across institutions, not by becoming another layer of reporting.
Research from the Blavatnik School of Government and the Education Commission groups the functions of delivery approaches into five categories: prioritisation and target setting; monitoring and measurement; drawing on political sponsorship; accountability and incentives; and problem-solving. The same research distinguishes two pathways. One relies mainly on accountability and incentives to increase effort. The other relies on organisational learning, coordination and problem-solving. Most real delivery units combine both.
The authors are also candid that rigorous evidence on what makes delivery approaches effective, especially outside a handful of well-known cases, remains limited. That is a reason for humility in design. A delivery unit copied from another country without adapting it to local mandates and working culture tends to become a reporting office. One that is designed to unblock, with direct access to leadership and the authority to convene ministries, tends to earn its place.
How should governments measure outcomes rather than activity?
Governments should track a short chain from activity to output to outcome, and give each outcome a named owner who answers for it.
Most performance systems are rich in activity measures (workshops held, systems launched, regulations issued) because those are easy to count and quick to turn green. Outcomes such as service satisfaction, productivity or private-sector employment move more slowly and depend on several entities at once. Qatar’s strategy sets outcome-level targets of this kind, including satisfaction with government services above 85% and a place among the top 10% on the Government Effectiveness Index. Targets like these are the right ones to set. They also cannot be delivered by any single ministry.
The test of a good measurement system is whether a red indicator triggers a decision within weeks. If it only triggers a better explanation in the next report, the system is measuring activity, whatever its labels say.
Who is accountable when an outcome spans several ministries?
One named owner should be accountable for each cross-government outcome, with contributing entities bound to that owner by explicit commitments rather than goodwill.
Qatar’s strategy is direct on this point: it commits to reinforcing central planning, budgeting and policymaking functions “by reducing mandate overlaps and ensuring clear allocations of functional accountability across the government”, and to centralised performance tracking for government services. Overlapping mandates are the most common reason cross-government outcomes drift. Each entity is accountable for its part, and nobody is accountable for the whole.
Accountability also has to survive change. Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030, launched in 2008 around the principles of sustainability, competitiveness and fairness, has outlasted many organisational changes. Long-horizon strategies need accountability designed into roles and routines, not dependent on particular individuals remaining in post.
Where does capability come in?
Capability is what turns a delivery system from a monitoring exercise into a problem-solving one, and it needs to sit both at the centre and inside the delivering institutions.
The centre needs people who can analyse a stalled priority, convene the right officials and broker a decision. Delivering entities need programme managers, data owners and operational leaders who can act on what the centre finds. Where capability exists only at the centre, the centre ends up doing the work. Where it exists only in ministries, nobody joins the work up. We explored a closely related issue, how technology programmes outrun organisational readiness, in Why GCC governments are rethinking digital transformation.
What does a working delivery system look like?
A working delivery system has five connected elements, which we call the DBU Delivery Spine. When we look at how a national strategy is being delivered, we test each one. If any one is missing, the others carry more weight than they can bear.
| Element | The question it answers | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Priorities | What will leadership personally track? | A short list of national outcomes, separated from the wider initiative portfolio |
| 2. Owners | Who answers for each outcome? | One named owner per outcome, with contributing entities committed in writing |
| 3. Rhythm | How often are decisions made on progress? | Regular, short stocktakes that end in decisions, not presentations |
| 4. Coordination | How are overlapping mandates resolved? | Explicit agreements between entities, with a route to escalate quickly |
| 5. Capability | Who can solve problems, not just report them? | Delivery skills at the centre and in each delivering institution |
What should leaders do in the next 90 days?
- Name the vital few. Agree with leadership the short list of outcomes it will track personally, and separate them from the rest of the portfolio.
- Assign one owner per outcome. For each priority, name a single accountable owner and list the entities whose contributions they depend on.
- Test your indicators. For each priority, check whether the indicators measure outcomes or activity, and whether a red result has ever triggered a decision.
- Map mandate overlaps. Identify where two or more entities share responsibility for the same result, and agree who leads.
- Reset the review rhythm. Replace long progress reports with short, regular stocktakes that end with decisions and named actions.
- Assess delivery capability. Identify where problem-solving skills exist and where they are missing, at the centre and in delivering entities.
What does this mean for Gulf governments?
The Gulf’s national strategies have set a high bar for ambition. The next decade will be judged on delivery: whether outcomes promised in long-horizon visions show up in the daily experience of citizens, residents and businesses. At DBU, we approach this through our Government & Public Sector and Governance & Execution disciplines, alongside Strategy, because delivery is where strategy is tested.
If your institution is reviewing how a national priority is being delivered, a DBU partner would welcome the conversation.
