How We Work | Shaasan

Shaasan, like CEI, is guided by key values and principles that lead and undergird every work it conducts.

Systems Thinking

Civic disengagement is a first-principle problem. This means that other critical systems like inclusive healthcare, equal right to education, or mountainous climate change don’t get resolved until we fix civic engagement first.

Systems thinking allows us to disentangle the complex, wicked problems of civic disengagement, disinformation, and governmental opacity. This also means that a systems-level understanding of civic engagement and its constituent parts will galvanize the power to amplify action on multiple public systems that are in dire need of transformation.

Citizen-Centered Design

People lie at the heart of Shaasan. This includes the thousands of citizens and dozens of elected representatives we work with.

All of our projects, activities, initiatives, and outreach are ideated and implemented with their perspectives, needs, and feedback in mind. This allows us to reflect, focus, and innovate solutions that make a tangible positive difference to the lives and livelihood of our people. Our motto in Nepali translates as “From the People, For the People”

Participatory Democracy

We at Shaasan believe that democracy and democratic values are the cornerstone for positive socio-economic change in Nepal and the rest of the Global South.

Shaasan works to bolster democratic values and strengthen democratic institutions through improved accountability, transparency in the public systems, and alleviating public apathy through constructive and meaningful civic engagement.

Inclusion

Every citizen's voice matters. Therefore, we seek to ensure proper representation across multiple levels in every initiative, community work, and training we do.

We are deeply enmeshed in our community, and every action we take is based on constant reiteration and adaptation where both community members and independent civic experts play an instrumental role in decision-making.

Our Core Principles

Evidence

Evidence and data are crucial to our work. Much of our innovations and practices are informed from rigorous interventions and social experiments done in Nepal and across the developing world.

Experimentation

We approach our work with an attitude of experimentation. We constantly search for and learn from experiments that have and haven’t worked across the developing world. This allows us to innovative, and reiterate solutions for the most wicked of problems.

Eclecticism

A mix of disciplines informs our practices – developmental economics, behavioral science, emergent technology, PDIA approach, pro-poor marketing, and adaptive leadership, among many others. This is possible because of our core commitment to diversity – of both people and ideas.