This article attempts to unpack the policy vision and discourse driving community management of schooling in Nepal and to consider the ways in which these policies are being experienced by bureaucrats, teachers, parents and children. The focus is on the World Bank funded Community School Support Project (CSSP) launched by the Government of Nepal in June 2003 and currently being used as a basis for extending community management to all of the country's 26,000 public schools. The article illustrates how national level policy prescriptions lead to a range of outcomes, many of which are unintended. Community-based schooling in Nepal is intended to shift the role of the State from manager to facilitator of schooling. However, the article suggests that reforms carried out in the name of greater efficiency, accountability and empowerment are driven primarily by a desire to limit the role of the State in the provision, but not necessarily control, of public education. The consequences of this include the on-going marginalisation of many of the country's poor and disadvantaged groups, a de-motivated and further politicised teaching force and continued chronic under-funding of public education. (Contains 2 notes.) [An earlier version of this paper was presented at the United Kingdom Forum for International Education and Training (UKFIET) International Conference on Education and Development (Oxford, 2005).]