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🇳🇵 Nepal /Economy & Trade

The continued decontextualisation and depoliticisation in Nepal’s development

From Kathmandu Post · () English

Summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

Analysis Sources not specified Context piece
  • Nepal's development has historically been hampered by decontextualization, importing foreign frameworks without considering local realities, and depoliticization, treating political issues like inequality as technical problems.
  • Early development plans, starting with the First Five-Year Plan in 1956, overestimated institutional capacity and underestimated structural barriers, while ignoring root causes of poverty like land distribution and caste discrimination.
  • The Panchayat system (1960-1990) reinforced these trends, with development programs ignoring Nepal's diversity and Western donors prioritizing stability over social equity, a pattern that continued even after the 1990 democratic transition.

Nepal's development journey has been consistently marked by structural contradictions, regardless of political systems or development approaches. Two persistent issues are decontextualization, the adoption of universal models without regard for Nepal's specific social, ecological, and historical context, and depoliticization, which reframes political challenges like inequality and power imbalances as mere technical problems solvable through project-based interventions.

Development interventions have repeatedly decontextualised Nepal’s social realities and depoliticised its structural inequalities.

General statement on the nature of development in Nepal.

Historically, before 1951, the Rana regime viewed the state as extractive, not developmental. The 1951 political shift coincided with the Cold War, making development aid a strategic tool. This era introduced global development frameworks assuming universality and linear progress, disregarding Nepal's unique history and local knowledge. The First Five-Year Plan in 1956, influenced by state-led planning, exemplified this decontextualization, overestimating institutional capacity and underestimating structural barriers. Poverty's root causes, such as land distribution and caste discrimination, were reframed as infrastructure or technology issues, leaving political questions unaddressed.

The specific history, social structure and cultural dynamics of places like Nepal were irrelevant, and local knowledge was viewed as an obstacle rather than an asset.

Describing the approach to development during Nepal's opening to the world post-1951.

During the Panchayat system (1960-1990), "centralized bikas" (development) became state ideology, reflecting "high modernism", a belief in top-down societal reorganization. Development programs continued to ignore Nepal's diversity, using a simplistic rural-urban template. Depoliticization intensified as the system reinforced existing hierarchies. Western donors furthered these dynamics, prioritizing Nepal's role as an anti-communist ally over social equity concerns. The 1990 democratic transition brought neoliberal trends, but the fundamental issues of decontextualization and depoliticization in development interventions persisted.

These plans overestimated institutional capacity and underestimated its structural barriers.

— Professor Nanda R ShresthaDocumenting the shortcomings of Nepal's early development plans.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Kathmandu Post. Summarized and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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