What is needed is a paradigmatic shift – from piecemeal, project-driven initiation to integrated, system-based solutions. Resilience should be considered not as a mere appendage, but as the foundation of all development planning
Premier Balen Shah will be addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to attract the attention of the world community about the astronomical loss that Nepal has incurred due to the recent Himalayan tsunami of August 26. Needless to say that it has been caused by climate change-induced disaster albeit for none of Nepal's doing. It is now widely accepted that the surge in disasters around the globe, whether them be wildfires or floods, is due to climate change, for which carbon emission is responsible. Nepal emits less than 1 per cent of the world emission but ended up facing unprecedented damage.
The Himalayan tsunami has exposed in a matter of seconds the extreme fragility of the country. The very existence of 24 vulnerable glaciers in Nepal and another 22 in Tibet, likely to burst any time through Nepali riverbeds, is a testimony of this harsh reality. If it rains cats and dogs over the mid-week as predicted, it might trigger yet other similar disaster. There is now a need to transform a disaster-vulnerable Nepal into a disaster-resilient country. Balen thus has a Herculean task ahead of him.
Resilience is the capacity of a system to bounce back not only to its original situation but to a state better than before. Resilience, however, is unlike a simple equation which has only one unknown. It is rather like a multi-headed chimera and needs attack from several fronts.
Problems of varying scale and size exist in the world, but the beauty is that corresponding solutions are also available side by side. Accordingly, Dr. Kamal Rijal in a lucid book entitled 'Nepal: Sustainable and Resilient Development' has highlighted on ways and means to attain resilience from a state of fragility.
Dr. Rijal has proposed a grand vision of "from a project state to delivery republic", according to which we have to abandon measuring progress by the number of announced projects but by their completion. He has named it a system blueprint for climate, infrastructure, and governance reform, built around three pillars. The first is engineering with nature, rather than against it, as is currently the case. The second is a digital nervous system – the software of transparency. The third is carbon recycling and carbon sovereignty – the finance of the transition.
Though one can find these concepts scattered in reports and journals in different guises, Dr. Rijal has accumulated them and presented them with a user-friendly mode within the covers of a 250-page book which can be read in one sitting. This is a third book that Dr. Rijal has been published under Amazon. The earlier ones were entitled 'Asian Vision 2100' and 'Beyond the Borders' which were reviewed by this columnist in these columns.
What makes this book more interesting is that it contains the perspective of a Nepali engineer, a development economist, and a global reform advocate. He carries years of experience working in national and international institutions like the National Planning Commission and UNDP, bridging energy, policy, and technology. The rare blend of his technical and moral depth makes the book different from others and also enjoyable to read.
He writes that infrastructure virtually increased at a geometric pace, but vulnerability did so exponentially. Policies were framed in innumerable numbers, but delivery was comparatively few. Investments surged, but the outcomes fell far short of expectations. This gap has raised a fundamental question: "Are we building systems that can withstand the future we are entering?"
Dr. Rijal thinks that Nepal today stands at a critical crossroads. Whilst the climate volatility is escalating and the natural systems are overburdened, the development trajectories are becoming increasingly intricate. There is thus a need to rethink how we address development in such a scenario. What is needed is a paradigmatic shift – from piecemeal, project-driven initiation to integrated, system-based solutions. Resilience should be considered not as a mere appendage, but as the foundation of all development planning.
The book is spread over six parts and 30 chapters, but two main problems rocking our country right from its spine, disaster vulnerability and bad governance, have been addressed in Parts 1 and 5. The most enlightening aspect of the first part is the myth of the past – a thinking that the future will emulate the past, which is not the case at the present. About governance, which he has coined as governance for resilience, Dr. Rijal thinks that the primary hurdle to Nepal's transformation is not technical capacity or financial limitation. Instead it is institutional inertia. The current administrative system is structured around compliance, hierarchy, and procedural correctness, rather than performance, speed, and outcomes.
He has proposed Administrative Muscle 2.0 which is a governance framework designed for a climate-volatile, infrastructure-driven century. It calls for a shift towards mission-oriented delivery systems, digital transparency, and technical empowerment. A Finished State he says cannot be built with slow-moving institutions. On the contrary, governance itself must become resilient, adaptive, and accountable.
This is only a bird's eye view of the book, but a patient reading will unfold several illuminating ideas which at the end provides a sense of enlightenment. Unfortunately, the nation has not benefitted from such Nepali individuals who have made a mark in the national and international arena. New faces who take over end up making the very mistakes which the earlier generation made, pushing the country into a vicious cycle of blunders.
This book could be a good read for anyone, including the Premier, for transforming Nepal from fragility to resilience.