Nepal, July 2 -- 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...