The Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries held consultations aimed at "improving the activities" of the group and implementing the mandate of the heads of state at the Samarkand Summit last September, as per an official statement.
The first-of-its-kind meeting was convened at the request of Kazakhstan in Astana.
A Kazakh foreign ministry statement noted that national coordinators of the SCO states, representatives from government agencies, the leadership of the SCO secretariat and the executive committee of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure attended the meeting.
At the consultations, the Kazakh side stressed the "urgency and scale" of implementing the mandate of the grouping, which it said required "comprehensive approach and in-depth analysis" activities of various SCO agencies.
"Kazakhstan presented a conceptual vision and a specific algorithm of joint actions to conduct an inventory of the regulatory framework, optimize the work of the main SCO bodies, human resources policy, financial system, as well as further interaction with observers and dialogue partners," according to the statement.
The meeting comes amid increasing concerns among SCO states about the political instability in Afghanistan as well as over the presence of trans-national terrorist networks in the country.
SCO Top Security Officials Meeting in New Delhi
The meeting in Astana took place after the 18th Meeting of the Secretaries of the Security Councils of the SCO states in New Delhi this week.
The meeting of the top security officials was chaired by Ajit Doval, the National Security Advisor to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
At the meeting, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev told his counterparts that the situation in Afghanistan was beginning to look like a "protracted crisis", noting it is posing a "major threat and risk to the security" of SCO states, according to media reports
The participants of the meeting agreed on "improving interaction" in the field of security, according to a statement.
The SCO states discussed cooperation in countering-terrorism and addressed the threats from extremism, separatism, terror financing, drug trafficking and the emergence of new technologies for terrorist purposes in that meeting.
For its part, New Delhi also called for enhanced cooperation in boosting regional connectivity.