Nepal has survived things that would have broken many countries going through similar situations. A decade-long armed conflict, two devastating earthquakes, frequent political protests, seven constitutions in seventy-five years, dozens of governments that rose and fell before completing a single term, and yet the country persists—borders intact (more or less), democracy functioning if imperfectly, institutions battered but breathing.
This resilience is real and worth acknowledging. Nepal has been remarkably good at surviving. It has been considerably less good at thriving. The question worth asking, especially as a new political chapter opens with the RSP-led majoritarian government, is this: why has Nepal been unable to turn its resilience into genuine transformation? The answer is not complicated, but it is uncomfortable. Nepal has struggled to thrive not primarily because of its geography, or its neighbors, or the indifference of international donors. It has struggled because of its own politics and the historic regime changes could not deliver the promises.
The problem is closer to home than we pretend.
Look at where Nepal stands on the indices that matter. According to the recent Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, it ranks 109th out of 180 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit classifies its democracy as a ‘hybrid regime’. No government since 1990 has completed a full five-year term. The average tenure of a Prime Minister has been under a year and a half. These are not statistics exclusively produced by geopolitics. They are largely produced by political elites who have treated governance as a bargaining chip rather than a public duty.
The consequences have been predictable. Citizens have lost confidence in state delivery of basic services. Young people, over 1,800 of them every single day, are leaving the country. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranks Nepal 131st out of 184 nations, classifying it as ‘mostly unfree’. Social inequality remains stark: Dalits, Janajatis, Madheshi communities, and women have been historically excluded from wealth and opportunity despite a constitution that promises otherwise.
This is the central tragedy of Nepal’s last few decades. The country completed a historically remarkable triple transition—from monarchy to republic, from Hindu state to secular state, from unitary to federal system—and then largely squandered the political goodwill and institutional energy that transition generated. The problem is not that the transformation happened. The problem is that it was left half-finished and elite-captured.
Democracy needs deeper roots
Political change in Nepal has repeatedly meant a change in faces rather than a change in systems. Parties have rotated through power. Coalitions have formed, collapsed, and re-formed. New political movements, including the RSP and independent candidates, have emerged with genuine public enthusiasm. But enthusiasm is not a governance system. The hard work of democratic consolidation such as building independent institutions, protecting press freedom, strengthening accountability mechanisms, expanding civic participation has lagged far behind the political drama.
This matters enormously because a democracy that exists only on paper cannot generate the moral authority a country needs to actually lead itself, let alone engage the world with confidence. The Economist Intelligence Unit places Nepal 98th on its global democracy index. According to Reporters Without Borders, its press freedom score, once the highest in South Asia, has declined in recent years. These are not minor footnotes. They are signals of a democracy that is, at best, stagnant.
Until domestic politics is genuinely reformed, and until democracy is deepened rather than just performed, leadership changes will not translate into different outcomes. The problem is not who sits in Singhadurbar. The problem is what kind of political culture surrounds whoever sits there.
A civic gap that nobody is filling
Equally important, and often overlooked, is the question of citizens. Nepal's social transition has created a curious paradox: rights consciousness has grown considerably in the recent decades, but civic responsibility has not kept pace. Rights discourse is strong; the culture of civic duty is weakening. Unionisation has advanced, but at times at the cost of civic engagement. Social media has amplified both information and misinformation. Young people are politically aware but institutionally alienated.
Nepal needs not just better politicians. It needs more critically engaged citizens who hold politicians accountable between elections and not just during them. The 2025 GenZ protests signalled something important: a generation that is deeply frustrated with the gap between what the constitution promised and what is actually delivered. That frustration is politically valuable only if it produces sustained civic participation rather than one-off street protests that fade without follow-through.
Foreign policy: Neither loudly sovereign nor quietly dependent
Nepal’s geopolitical position is one of the most discussed features of its situation, and also one of the most misunderstood. The country sits between India and China, two of the world’s most consequential powers, while also navigating pressure from the West on various occasions. The temptation, in such a situation, is to either double down on nationalist defiance or quietly accommodate whoever offers the best deal.
Both approaches are traps. Ultra-nationalist posturing has real costs. It closes off productive economic and development cooperation. It makes it harder to attract investment, build connectivity infrastructure, or engage in regional and global trade agreements. The strong nationalist sentiment that has helped Nepal resist outright capture has, when taken to an extreme, also prevented the country from seizing legitimate strategic opportunities.
On the other hand, excessive deference to any single power, whether India, China, or the West, erodes the sovereignty that gives small states their only real protection. Nepal has already experienced what happens when infrastructure built with one neighbour's investment struggles to function because of another neighbour's policies. Dependence is not neutrality; it is vulnerability with a friendlier name.
The real path forward is a balanced, sovereignty-oriented foreign policy built on something Nepal currently lacks but desperately needs: moral credibility. A Nepal that ranks higher on governance, lower on corruption, deeper on democracy, and more inclusive in its economic distribution is a Nepal that can engage India, China, and the West from a position of earned confidence rather than transactional dependency. Foreign policy strength begins at home.
The questions that cannot be avoided
Nepal's situation also raises harder, longer-range questions that politicians prefer to leave unanswered. Can a landlocked country build genuine economic sovereignty without trading away meaningful autonomy in the process? Can political stability be sustained without first achieving social stability and completing a genuine post-conflict reconciliation? As the global rule-based order weakens under great-power competition, what protections actually remain for small states that cannot offer military alliances or large markets?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent ones. And the fact that Nepal has arrived at this political moment, with new leaders, renewed public energy, and real expectations, without clear answers to any of them suggests that the country may be about to repeat a familiar pattern: change at the top, stagnation underneath.
Survival was never the final goal
Nepal has earned its reputation for resilience. But a nation of thirty million people, sitting on enormous hydropower potential, possessing extraordinary cultural heritage, and home to a young population that is globally connected and politically awakened, deserves more than a reputation for surviving.
The test for this generation of leaders is whether they can move Nepal from a country that endures to a country that delivers. That means fixing domestic politics in a way that is structural and not cosmetic. It means deepening democracy beyond elections. It means cultivating civic culture as seriously as economic policy. And it means pursuing a foreign policy that is neither reflexively defiant nor quietly submissive, but grounded in the kind of governance and moral credibility that gives a small nation real standing in a competitive and turbulent world.
Nepal has always found a way to stand back up. The more important question now is whether it is ready to actually move forward.
The author is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA
