A monitoring framework can count toilets built, but not whether people use them, they’re well located or work for women.

Development research in Nepal must prioritise methodological rigour and treat it as an equity issue.

Nepal has benefited from decades of development investments, but the frameworks organising those investments have been designed and evaluated externally.

Seven decades after the start of Nepal’s development history, the gap between ‘development’ as a global discourse and ‘bikas’ as a lived aspiration remains.

For Nepal, the central question is no longer simply how to achieve ‘bikas’, but how to rethink it.