Author: Sudeep Uprety
A glacier collapse on August 26, 2026, at the Nepal-Tibet border sent a wall of water and debris down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers, killing at least 1,410 people as of September 17, 2026 (NDRRMA, 2026), leaving thousands more missing, and erasing entire settlements in Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha and Tanahun within hours. It is, by most measures, one of the deadliest disaster incidents in Nepal’s recorded history, and the ongoing search and rescue, relief and early recovery efforts shed light on the broader disaster governance agenda for wider debate and discussion.
A governance system still finding its footing
Nepal’s disaster governance has moved through several distinct paradigms from disaster risk reduction and management after the 2015 earthquake to efforts for climate change adaptation and recently to a federalized model that pushes disaster authority down to provincial and local governments. A study tracing this evolution found that multiple state and non-state actors are still competing over resources and institutional mandates, with civil society repeatedly pushing disaster risk reduction up the agenda and concluded that it remained too early to say whether federalization had reduced disaster risk for vulnerable communities (Vij et al., 2020). Rasuwa flood became a litmus test to this question.
Local governments constitutionally designated as Nepal’s first responders were themselves physically incapacitated: rural municipality offices and ward offices in Rasuwa were swept away, and elected representatives were among the missing (BC, 2026). For the first several days, the federal government bypassed local structures altogether, relying on a centralized, security-led relief channel; only after mounting criticism from rights activists and local leaders did it hand relief distribution back to local governments (Neupane, 2026). Such tendency of centralization of authority, and federalization paradigm still finding its footing, in the middle of a disaster has questioned the very notion of decentralized governance.
Lessons from Gorkha Earthquake 2015
The 2015 Gorkha earthquake provided ample valuable lessons to prepare for future disasters. The government’s own review, prepared by the Ministry of Home Affairs with UNDP support, examined governance, institutional mechanisms and coordination. A 2016 rapid review of the earthquake response recommended, explicitly, a “one door system for relief provision” run through Disaster Relief Committees under local supervision (Grünewald & Burlat, 2016). The government this time, learning from this experience, initiated this delivery mechanism a decade later in the case of Rasuwa flood response. Rasuwa had disaster response committees on paper in every municipality. What it lacked was not the committees themselves, but the automatic infrastructure meant to trigger them. For instance, the flood-monitoring gauges on the Bhotekoshi were swept away before they could send an alert, forcing officials to detect and relay the danger by phone instead (The Kathmandu Post, 2026a). By the time warnings reached people, the local government structures meant to act on them had, in several wards, already been physically destroyed.
Shortages of resources and lack of coordination have also been key areas of concern, which haven’t been adequately and timely addressed. An assessment marking the earthquake’s tenth anniversary found Nepal still lacked a nationwide early warning system a decade on, that the Department of Mines and Geology remained underfunded and understaffed, and that coordination between scientific agencies, local governments and emergency responders was still weak (Nepal News, 2025). Assessments of the 2015 response documented friction between Nepali authorities and international search-and-rescue teams operating under “soft coordination” rather than clear command structures (Cook et al., 2016), and Rasuwa reproduced a version of the same friction, with an initial hesitation before foreign search-and-rescue offers were accepted. Writing in The Kathmandu Post after the 2015 earthquake, I argued that Nepal’s recovery aid was becoming “dissected,” delivered in fragmented, uncoordinated packages across dozens of parallel projects in the same district, and proposed a shared knowledge-management platform to give policymakers and the public a single, real-time view of what was being done and by whom (Uprety, 2016).
Response and anticipatory action
The IFRC released nearly a million Swiss francs from its Disaster Response Emergency Fund on the day the flood struck (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2026), and Start Fund Nepal, a member-led, FCDO-backed pooled fund built to get money to local and national NGOs within few days of the disaster exists precisely for crises of this kind. Yet, anticipatory and forecast-based financing, the kind that could have paid for better river gauges, community sirens or evacuation drills, remains a marginal fraction of Nepal’s disaster finance. Start Fund Nepal’s newer arm, FOREWARN or the Forecast-based Warning, Analysis and Response Network, is a genuinely welcome step toward correcting that (Start Network, n.d.).
Nepal’s early warning debate around this disaster has produced two claims that are both true and hard to reconcile. The Kathmandu Post called the roughly 38-minute gap between detection and public alert “a monument to bureaucratic negligence,” and pointed to a deeper legal vacuum: the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology can forecast a flood but has no legal authority to order an evacuation, so warnings depend on individual discretion rather than automatic, legally binding triggers (The Kathmandu Post, 2026b). A survivor account offers a different emphasis: the deeper problem was not the alert’s speed, but what people did in the ten seconds after receiving it. Those who recognized the danger and ran uphill immediately survived, while those who hesitated did not (Dhungana, 2026). Reporting on Nepal’s informal warning networks found that community-based alerts such as a trusted teacher’s phone call, a relative shouting from upstream arrived faster and were acted on more reliably than the official SMS system, whose generic wording failed to convey either urgency or which households were at risk (Mongabay India, 2026).
The trust deficit in disaster governance
A study examining public trust across three earlier climate disasters in Bagmati Province viz. the 2021 Melamchi flood, the 2024 Kathmandu urban flood, and the July 2025 Rasuwa glacial lake outburst flood found that Nepal’s disaster governance is “visible but superficial, more performative than protective” (Tripathi, 2026). Citizens, the study found, consistently trust the visible, immediate acts of rescue: helicopters overhead, security personnel wading into debris, soldiers carrying the injured to safety. What they show little confidence in is the governance that happens out of sight such as the planning, the warning systems, the recovery financing that is supposed to make rescue unnecessary in the first place.
In Melamchi, local early warnings saved lives, but prolonged displacement and delayed compensation revealed how thin the state’s commitment to recovery really was. In Kathmandu, encroachment and poor drainage persisted despite years of warnings, because no one had the political will to enforce urban planning against powerful interests. In the 2025 Rasuwa glacial lake outburst flood, absence of cross-border data-sharing from China exposed the limits of Nepal’s sovereignty over its own risk (Tripathi, 2026). Each case shows the same asymmetry i.e. visible performance at the point of rescue, and weak, invisible performance everywhere ‘upstream’ of it.
Similar arguments can be found in Vij et al.’s (2020) “administrative struggle” between competing state and non-state actors to Tripathi’s (2026) “visible but superficial” governance. Institutions are good at the dramatic, photographable moment of rescue, and consistently under-resourced when it comes to unglamorous, anticipatory and preparatory work such as automated gauges, legally binding evacuation triggers, cross-border data agreements, disaster financing. Prioritization on the latter would make rescue less necessary in the first place. Rasuwa did not fail because Nepal lacked institutions, but the contestation of institutions regarding who gets to act, and citizens can tell the difference.
Time to unlearn and relearn
It would be wrong to conclude that Nepal has learned nothing since 2015, or since Melamchi in 2021. From NDRRMA’s robust data infrastructure to expedited mobilization of security forces and swift humanitarian relief aid, there has been a significant improvement. What Nepal has not done effectively is convert this into a structural or ‘muscle memory’ that survives between disasters. Similar gaps have resurfaced from having an early warning system that cannot see a flash flood coming, local committees that do not activate on their own, a coordination policy that only works if local governments choose to make it work.
The solutions have been identified from having a legally binding framework that lets hydrological thresholds trigger mandatory local evacuation without waiting for bureaucratic sign-off to technological advancements that lead to better gauge and sensor networks, built for flash surges, not just gradual monsoon rises. Likewise, having early warning messages that name a specific place and a specific action rather than a generic advisory have also been discussed. Furthermore, the need for well-resourced community-based callers and local gauge-readers to monitor such environmental imbalances is also felt. Moreover, a well-planned disaster financing framework that treats anticipatory action as a standing budget line rather than a pilot program reannounced after every flood would help in timely resource mobilization. It is high time that we unlearn and relearn from these experiences for better disaster governance so that we are better prepared the next time a disaster incident occurs.
References
BC, G. (2026, August 29). Floods wipe out local governments’ ability to lead rescue, relief. The Kathmandu Post. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/floods-wipe-out-local-governments-ability-to-lead-rescue-relief
Cook, A. D. B., Shrestha, M., & Htet, Z. B. (2016). International response to 2015 Nepal earthquake: Lessons and observations (NTS Report No. 4). S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. https://www.rsis.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NTS_Report_4_Nepal_final_04Oct2016.pdf
Dhungana, M. (2026, September 2). Nepal’s devastating floods: 10 seconds could save lives. PreventionWeb. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/nepals-devastating-floods-10-seconds-could-save-lives
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The Kathmandu Post. (2026a, September 3). Nepal sent its disaster alert 38 minutes after the glacier collapse. It wasn’t enough. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/09/02/nepal-sent-its-disaster-alert-38-minutes-after-the-glacier-collapse-it-wasn-t-enough
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Uprety, S. (2016, October 25). Dissected development. The Kathmandu Post. https://kathmandupost.com/opinion/2016/10/25/dissected-development
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Author Introduction
Sudeep Uprety is a Kathmandu-based researcher and development practitioner. He has academic publications on climate change and sustainable development, international relations, public health, among others to his credit. Sudeep can be reached at: sudeepupretyko@gmail.com