Nepal: The Beauty & Politics of a Fabled Land

A Look at Development Politics in Nepal

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the underdeveloped world. Since the development enterprise involves the exclusion of the third world masses, civil society’s inclusion takes the form of partnerships with NGOs as “apolitical” and “responsible” representatives of disenfranchised people. In many small countries, they have, as “genuine representatives” of civil society, acquired a quasi autonomous status; the larger among them being treated practically at par with the state, particularly by multilateral aid organizations. It is only recently that the activities of these development organizations have attracted critical scrutiny, and some of these studies see NGOs as purveyors of donor country agendas and various other formulae that pass in the name of international consensus. The historian, Akira Iriye, for instance, argues that more than any other US enterprise in the 20th century, NGOs have shaped the “American Century” by transporting the core American values of association, civic culture and democracy to the rest of the world. While Iriye’s conclusions on the origins and forms of NGOs are debatable, his recognition of the growing significance of NGOs in modulating North-South relations is incontestable. NGOs have become crucial agents in sustaining the rhetoric on democracy, development, civil society, human rights and good governance around the world. These dominant discourses become powerful lubricants facilitating the day-to-day interaction between the donors and the recipients. Nepal’s own experience and transformation in the past decades is intelligible only against the backdrop of this transnational flow of ideas and agendas.

As in many third world countries, the relationship between the Nepali state and NGOs is often uneasy and contentious. The tension emerges primarily from the fact that both the government and the non-government sectors often compete with the same donors for funds. Having been the sole conduit for Western development aid until the relatively recent advent of NGOs, the government sees the latter as a rival in times of shrinking resources. The growing trend among donor countries to channel development funds through NGOs, coupled with the numerous structural adjustment requirements of the Fund-Bank, has led to a scaling down or even complete termination of many government-run services and programmes, even as NGO operations are on the rise.

The exponential growth in the number of NGOs has been matched by the range of issues they are currently engaged in. They work not only in traditional sectors such as education, agriculture, irrigation, forestry, drinking water, health and nutrition but also in newer arenas like environment, income generation, gender mainstreaming, trafficking of women and girls, micro-credit, democracy strengthening, human rights and AIDS. As the NGO system continuously reinvents itself to fit the ever fickle funding priorities of the donors, “civil society”, “transparency” and ”good governance” have become the cutting edge of NGO discourse since the late 1990s. The built-in obsolescence of the NGO mode of development has given rise to a unique form of development entrepreneurship that has to keep up with the shifting fads of funding .

There are other consequences of the growth of the NGO-development economy such as in the hotel-seminar industry. Organizing conferences, workshops and other talk-shops – especially in hotels and their in-house conference rooms and restaurants – is a phenomenon largely popularized by the development industry in Nepal. In the past few years, hospitality services targeted to NGO clientele and their budget have begun cropping up even in district headquarters and towns.In the public imagination, there is perhaps no more powerful an emblem of “development” than the shiny late-model four-wheel-drives in which development professionals ply back and forth. These fuel-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) are the defining signatures of the development establishment in Nepal and there is no sight more seducing than development’s hot wheels cruising through Kathmandu’s pedestrian alleyways. The large all-terrain vehicles were introduced and popularized by the development sector in the 1990s – ostensibly for use in the inhospitable hinterland but curiously seen mostly in the capital city. The development NGOs and donor agencies have been the ones to have introduced new tastes and high consumer aspirations among the upwardly mobile classes of the country.

The degree of disillusionment comes partly from the way development advertises itself as the cure-all for the third world. Given the inherent contradictions and limitations of the development project, it is too much to expect the development NGO band-aid to cure the economic, political and cultural ravages of the world systems and comprador collusions. In some ways, development efforts are an eerie throwback to the poorhouses, orphanages and soup kitchens of the Dickensian era: services intended to address the worst abuses of bare-knuckle capitalism and defuse urban disorder without having to rectify the processes that produce the injuries in the first place. The late capitalist order also finds itself in the same position of having to pursue similar fire-fighting gestures in the global village to normalize itself.
Obviously, the one-size-fits-all approach to development and deregulation is not working for Nepal. Two decades of NGO-led development and a decade of market economy have amply demonstrated that there can be no substitute for a reformed and enabling state and its constructive role in society. A socially conscious engagement must transcend both the limitations of traditional party politics and a cynical rejection of the state in addressing the basic questions of the Nepali polity.