Image: Bloomberg
When Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials began flooding Harvard’s Kennedy School in the 1990s, they were not there for democracy lessons. They came for something more subversive: competence. Over the next three decades, they would quietly absorb best practices in governance, regulation and policy delivery: then repackage them to suit the Party’s iron grip. The outcome was a generation of Chinese mandarins better equipped to run a modern economy, if not a liberal polity.
Nepal, too, is ruled by a cadre of unelected officials. Unlike China’s, they rarely improve. Shielded by weak oversight, political patronage and a culture of inertia, Nepali bureaucrats muddle through with stunning mediocrity. Policy is drafted by committee; implemented by accident; and evaluated by no one. As politicians squabble over who gets to form the next short-lived coalition, the real bottleneck is the civil service, which is sprawling, under-skilled, hostile to reform.
That is why Nepal should consider a remedy: send its bureaucrats to the West. Not to learn how to vote, but how to govern.
The logic is not new. China has long pursued what scholars call “authoritarian learning”, absorbing foreign ideas while retaining domestic control. Since the early 2000s thousands of Chinese officials have studied at Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. They return armed with technical toolkits: how to regulate monopolies, incentivise local governments, build social safety nets and attract investment. The CCP has no illusions about turning liberal; it merely wants results.
Nepal, by contrast, is liberal in principle and dysfunctional in practice. Since becoming a republic in 2008, it has cycled through 13 prime ministers and a series of unwieldy federal restructurings. Each change brings fresh rhetoric but stale governance. Implementation is left to a permanent bureaucracy whose incentives are perverse and skills often frozen in time.
Senior bureaucrats are routinely reshuffled across ministries for political convenience not professional development. Training programmes, when they exist, are local and perfunctory. The fallout is what one former finance secretary described, only half-jokingly, as “tribalism in suits”: career officials fiercely protective of turf, allergic to evidence and convinced that being difficult is the same as being important.
Send them to Harvard, not the next ministry
China’s approach—sending mayors, regulators and economic planners to the world’s best policy schools—provides a useful contrast. Nepal does not need a “party school” abroad, but it does need a policy school that works. A targeted fellowship programme could expose mid-level Nepali bureaucrats to Western practices in public finance, regulation, service delivery and crisis management.
Lessons need not be copied wholesale. No one expects Nepali municipalities to function like Boston or Bergen. But exposure matters. One Chinese deputy mayor, after attending a programme in New York, realised that foundations and NGOs could help solve urban unemployment. Another learned how anti-trust rules worked in America and applied similar principles in regulating Chinese state-owned enterprises. Transfer, not transplant, is the goal.
There are, to be sure, pitfalls. Some Western universities might worry about reputational risk after controversies around CCP-linked programmes. Yet Nepal poses no such geopolitical headaches. Its civil service is more neglected than nefarious. Besides, teaching governance to poorly run democracies is a nobler use of Harvard’s tuition fees than helping authoritarians govern more efficiently.
Domestically, such an initiative would face institutional resistance. The Public Service Commission, an opaque relic of British-era bureaucracy, guards its turf jealously. Politicians might resent anything that makes bureaucrats more independent or harder to manipulate. And a handful of foreign-trained officials—there are some—often find themselves isolated upon return, their ideas met with glazed eyes and sabotage.
But incentives can be reshaped. China, again, presents a clue. There, training at a top international programme has become a stepping stone to promotion. Nepal’s Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration could do the same—tying overseas exposure to merit-based career advancement. Partnering with institutions such as the Kennedy School, Sciences Po or LSE would add prestige, and perhaps pressure to deliver.
The benefits transcend individual capacity. In a polity where ministers change with the seasons and reform plans are printed more often than executed, a better bureaucracy would be the ultimate public good. Trained officials could improve tax collection, digitise land records or nudge municipalities to spend their budgets before monsoon. One well-placed policy technocrat may matter more than ten tweeting ministers.
Some will argue Nepal should focus on internal reforms: improve local training institutes, digitise administrative processes, curb corruption. It should. But those efforts have limped along for decades. In the meantime, why not expose Nepali bureaucrats to functioning models elsewhere?
Others will worry about brain drain. But public officials are not private-sector techies. With the right contracts and incentives, they can be bound to return. China’s success suggests overseas training, if structured well, boosts loyalty rather than undermines it. Besides, the greater risk is not that Nepal’s bureaucrats leave. It is that they stay—and are untrained.
The Kathmandu School of Government?
If Nepal takes itself seriously as a modernising state, it must take its civil service seriously. That means treating governance as a profession, not a post-retirement plan for political hangers-on. Exporting a slice of the bureaucracy for education abroad could make domestic reform more likely. It would also send a message: competence is not optional.
Nepal has already borrowed China’s political vocabulary—five-year plans, people’s commissions, even the odd communist in a luxury SUV. Borrowing China’s capacity-building strategy, however, might do more to improve governance than any number of donor-funded conferences in Nagarkot.
Harvard may never become Nepal’s “party school”. But it could be something more useful: a finishing school for a civil service that desperately needs to begin. ■
