In recent years, Disaster Risk Governance (DRG) has gained significant policy traction in developing countries worldwide. This article focuses on the 2023 Western Nepal Earthquake, which claimed 154 lives and injured 366 people. It was the second major Earthquake for the country in eight years, following the 2015 Central Nepal Earthquake, which killed and injured nearly 9000 and more than 22,000 people, respectively. However, an analysis of how a developing country responds to a new disaster while grappling with the ramifications of an earlier disaster remains scant. This article addresses this gap and employs the DRG lens to conduct a strategic analysis of the response to the 2023 Earthquake. Despite having experienced one of the deadliest earthquakes only eight years earlier, the findings indicate that the country had failed to learn its lessons, primarily due to the underlying political causes. This article contests the narrative of strengthened DRG in Nepal and discusses the potential way forward to improve DRG on three fronts: a) introducing a code of conduct for politicians and bureaucrats, b) cultivating the soft capacity of local administrative bodies, and c) bolstering strategic alignment to foster coordination amongst vertical and horizontal actors. The findings reported in the article are likely to be of interest to disaster management scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.