Before a single rupee of development funding reaches a Nepali community, a decision has already been made elsewhere—not about budgets, but about vocabulary. That vocabulary comes packaged as frameworks and concepts—tools that determine the problem, prescribe the solution and measure the progress between them. They are generated in specific power centres and arrive in communities carrying a particular hierarchy of knowledge.

This article focuses on how frameworks and concepts have structured Nepal’s development experience, tracing their routes, adoption, and contestation, and shows how coloniality reasserts itself through these new development vocabularies. The decontextualisation and depoliticisation tendencies discussed in the previous article are not accidental; they are embedded into the very frameworks and concepts through which development is imagined and delivered.

Each generation of framework carried a new set of organising concepts. In the 1950s and 1960s, state-led development plans carried the concepts of ‘modernisation’ and linear economic growth institutionalised through the Bretton Woods system. In the 1970s and early 1980s, market-led structural adjustment carried ‘privatisation,’ ‘market efficiency,’ and ‘trade liberalisation’ imposed through World Bank and IMF conditionality. The 1990s NGO-led development brought concepts like ‘participation,’ ‘empowerment’ and ‘civil society.’ Sustainable Development Goals now provide the master framework, accompanied by concepts such as ‘resilience,’ ‘sustainability,’ and ‘leaving no one behind.’

Each shift reflects the intellectual development in how poverty and inequality were understood, but it also reflects the institutional interests of those who fund, implement and evaluate development programmes. Those who receive frameworks (government and local institutions in Nepal), access resources by aligning themselves with whatever framework is dominant. Therefore, as Prof David Mosse has argued, this is not primarily a system for achieving development outcomes; it is a system for maintaining institutional relationships and allowing each party to claim success. Frameworks provide the architecture for these claims, and concepts provide the vocabulary.

One documented case of framework institutionalisation in Nepal and the illustration of coloniality is Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Pioneered by Prof Robert Chambers and popularised globally by ActionAid and Oxfam, PRA came with transformative ambitions to give communities real voice in identifying priorities and designing solutions. It argued that the concept of ‘participation’ was explicitly political, and development had failed because it listened to the wrong people. However, as ‘participation’ became a standard requirement of donor project documents, it was progressively emptied of its political content. Scholars have termed this as ‘participatory tyranny’—externally designed participatory processes that required communities to ‘perform’ participation rather than exercise real power. Reports on PRA practices in Nepal had shown that they were being driven by donor requirements rather than community needs.

Similarly, ‘good governance’ introduced through World Bank is another example. Emerging from neo-liberal assumptions that markets function best when supported by transparent, accountable, rule-based state institutions, ‘good governance’ in Nepal translated into reforms promoting decentralisation, anti-corruption measures, civil service reform and institution strengthening. Some of these reforms had useful merits. However, the concept systematically framed Nepal’s political problems in technical terms rather than as problems of unequal power and contested legitimacy, and provided a vocabulary for development agencies to engage with Nepal’s governance without engaging with its politics. This trend of seeking technical solutions in the name of ‘good governance’ continues to this day.

Resilience follows a similar trajectory and features prominently in disaster and climate change discourses. In Nepal, remote mountain communities are not more vulnerable to climate shocks simply because they lack resilience capacity; they are more vulnerable because they have been systematically excluded from resources, services, and political representation over generations. Hence, this framing of ‘building resilience’ rather than ‘dismantling the structures that produce vulnerability’ redirects development effort from structural change to adaptive management.

At the same time, Nepali communities have shown active engagement with, adaptation of, and resistance to these conceptual imports. The Female Community Health Volunteer (FCHV) programme offers the most instructive Nepal-specific counter-model. Rather than delivering health knowledge from outside through trained professionals, FCHVs worked through existing female social networks and community trust relationships. Unlike imported frameworks, it built on what the communities already knew and valued.

Likewise, community forestry is internationally recognised as one of Nepal’s most significant development achievements, and it worked because the framework adapted to the local practice of community ownership and resource governance. However, this trajectory is being reversed. The framework of REDD+, with its carbon accounting methodologies and verification requirements, has introduced external political agendas replacing the needs and interests of local forest users.

This article offers two concrete reorientations for development practitioners in Nepal. The first is conceptual scepticism. Every concept entering Nepal arrives with its own set of assumptions about the problems and potential solutions. Practitioners have a professional responsibility to interrogate those assumptions before deploying concepts as analytical or programming tool. Conceptual scepticism means treating the arrival of a new concept not as an answer, but as a way to ask new questions about what it reveals and what it conceals.

The second is epistemic humility. This means treating the knowledge produced by Nepali researchers and community members (as well as the knowledge produced in many languages of Nepal) analytically; rather than just being incorporated as local data. For every new framework or concept, epistemic humility requires asking whether it transfers authority to local institutions or only transfers the language of ownership while retaining the substance of external control.

Nepal has benefited from decades of development investments, but the frameworks organising those investments have been designed and evaluated externally. More importantly, the coloniality that operated through Nepal’s development landscape has created a knowledge hierarchy that situates outside expertise above Nepali knowledge, global comparability above local relevance, and institutional performance above community accountability. However, this is not an argument against international resources, expertise, or collaboration. Instead, it is an argument for a fundamentally different relationship in which Nepali knowledge is treated as expertise rather than context, accountability is towards communities rather than donors, and frameworks are adapted to local realities rather than applied to them. Whether that happens depends on the collective willingness of Nepali institutions, international partners, and practitioners to treat these not as abstract values, but as political and professional commitments.