Until just before the First World War, Nepal maintained a largely self-reliant socio-economic system rooted in cotton cultivation, local iron extraction and brass-based artisanal industries. Across the hills and Tarai, rural households and communities produced their own clothing, kitchen utensils, agricultural tools and basic construction materials using locally available resources and indigenous technologies. These practices sustained local value chains, supported intergenerational transmission of skills, and enabled communities to retain a high degree of economic autonomy.

I still remember sitting beside my grandad as a child, in the near darkness of the evening, lit only by a dim 10-watt electric bulb, listening to stories that did not sound like ‘policy’ at the time. They were simply stories of everyday life. My grandad spoke of how people grew cotton, wove their own clothes, forged iron tools locally and stored grain, not only for difficult years, but for the disasters they knew would come. Sometimes, he would go further back, recounting the memories and experiences of his own grandfather, carrying those stories across generations.

Looking back, nearly 46 years later, and reading today’s disaster science and earthquake research, I realise how accurate those stories were. Earthquakes were never unexpected events in Nepal. They were part of a collective memory. Preparation for them was not framed as ‘risk reduction’ or ‘resilience’, but was quietly woven into everyday life, livelihoods and community institutions.

What struck me most, even then, was how deliberately communities planned for loss. My grandad often described how families set aside a small portion of their harvest or income for the local Guthi, not as charity, but as community responsibility. When an earthquake or natural disaster struck, those pooled resources were mobilised to rebuild homes, repair temples, and support families who had lost everything. No external aid appeals. No project proposals. Just institutions built on trust, obligation and local production.

Today, as a disaster risk researcher and practitioner, I find myself returning to those conversations with new urgency. Nepal is now far more dependent on imported food, construction materials and post-disaster assistance than it was in my grandad’s time. Yet the frequency and intensity of earthquakes and climate-related hazards have not diminished. Somewhere along our development journey, we gained access to global markets. However, sadly, we lost locally embedded systems that once made recovery faster, fairer and more dignified.

This locally grounded production system was also closely tied to local risk management in a seismically active and climatically fragile country. Nepal’s long history of major earthquakes and recurrent climatic stresses meant that disasters were understood not as exceptional events but as recurring realities. In response, communities institutionalised precautionary practices by setting aside a proportion of agricultural production and household surplus. According to oral histories, including accounts passed down by my grandad, these contributions were pooled into local Guthis, community-managed socio-religious institutions that functioned as collective savings, risk-sharing and redistribution mechanisms.

Guthis played a central role in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, particularly following major earthquakes. Resources accumulated through these institutions were mobilised to rebuild houses, repair temples and communal infrastructure, support affected households and restore livelihoods. In this sense, Guthis operated as an endogenous system of social protection and disaster governance, long before the emergence of formal state-led disaster management structures.

The gradual erosion of this integrated system accelerated in the decades that followed, shaped by shifts in political authority, economic centralisation and later by neoliberal development trajectories. Trade liberalisation, market deregulation and an increasingly import-oriented development model displaced home-grown industries and undermined local productive capacity. Locally produced textiles, metal tools and construction materials were rendered uncompetitive, not due to inefficiency, but because of structural policy shifts that privileged external markets.

The decline of local production simultaneously weakened the material base that had historically sustained Guthis and similar community institutions. As surplus generation and collective savings diminished, so too did the capacity for locally driven post-disaster response. Over time, Nepal became increasingly dependent on external supply chains for everyday necessities, construction materials, and post-disaster recovery inputs. These dependencies have repeatedly proven fragile during large-scale disasters.

Consequently, Nepal’s transition away from locally embedded production and governance systems has not only reshaped its political economy but has also hollowed out indigenous mechanisms of disaster resilience. The weakening of Guthis reflects a broader loss of community-based institutions that once linked production, surplus management and post-disaster reconstruction. This historical shift provides critical insight into contemporary challenges in post-earthquake recovery, where affected communities are now far more reliant on external aid and centralised bureaucratic processes than on locally mobilised resources and collective action.

So, what does this mean for those of us working in disaster risk reduction, humanitarian response and climate resilience today?

First, we must stop treating resilience as something that arrives through projects. Nepal already had functioning, locally governed resilience systems long before the language of Disaster Risk Reduction existed. Policy must shift from replacing community institutions to recognising, revitalising and legally protecting them, including reimagining the role of Guthis and other collective mechanisms in contemporary disaster governance.

Second, disaster policy needs to reconnect local production with risk reduction. Over-reliance on imported construction materials and external supply chains creates avoidable vulnerabilities after disasters. Supporting local net-zero-based manufacturing, traditional building skills and circular economies is not nostalgia; it is strategic resilience planning.

Finally, practitioners and policymakers must move beyond short-term recovery metrics and invest in institutional memory and social infrastructure. Earthquakes and climate shocks will continue in Nepal. The real question is whether we rebuild dependency or rebuild the capacity of communities to recover on their own terms.

Perhaps the most important lesson my grandad left me is this: Resilience is not something we invent after disasters happen. It is something we either nurture quietly over generations or dismantle without realising what we are losing.