A Larger Perspective on Nepal’s Transitional Strategy to Graduate from Less Developing Countries (LDC) to Developing Country (DC)

Abstract

Given the fact that Nepal is right on the cusp of exclusively graduating from the Less Development Countries (LDC) category to Developing Countries, as the assessment by the United Nations. It is time to reorient, revamp, and re-caliber Nepal’s policies to achieve the sustainable, fair, just, and inclusive growth that Nepal and its people so aptly deserve. Nepal has opted to graduate in a peculiar time, where the world seems to be facing huge impending problems such as climate change which has fundamentally changed how we view development as a process. Nepal is eligible to secure graduation with two criteria human assessment index (HAI), and the environmental vulnerability index (EVI). For most of the process, in modern times, Nepal has mostly been reliant on its development partners and donors to catch up, mostly because this old historic state has always been rather reactive in terms of disruptive transformations of the industrial age. Now Nepal has caught significantly up to a threshold that it can begin to forge its path ahead for the development and realization of its national goal. For this, the time to think bigger, and larger and the time to compete with the world has arrived. Nepal should find a way forward that stays true not only to its rich heritage, identity, history, and resources but also to match its development mechanism, framework, and process largely with the world, as the development paradigms transit to a sustainable mode of development, given the backdrop of human-induced climate change. In such a scenario, the paper tries to highlight the need for a “pivot” in the Nepalese economy for a sustainable LDC transition for larger national rejuvenation. It tries to show how a pivot strategy in such a reality would look that matches such complexity and nuances of modern times and likewise puts the transition in perspective.