This thesis explores how heterogenous social agents experience and make sense of “development” in their own terms in Kyrgyzstan. Specifically, my ethnography focuses on accounts of ordinary people who are often portrayed as potential partners/entrepreneurs and victims as well as largely ignored accounts of people who do not directly engage in or actively resist development projects. Empirical findings for this study were collected through the multi-sited ethnography based on fifteen months period of fieldwork. I developed a methodology which includes but goes beyond treating development in the context of the field of development cooperation and power relations within polarized view of the world population. To examine heterogenous lived experiences of “development” in people’s own views and terms, I used “moral anthropology”. As a framework, “moral anthropology” allows me to consider moral proposition of different sides. The ethnography of the lived experiences indicates that the “development” policies, favouring liberal market have created conditions which brought new encounters with “Islam/s”, “reinvention of Kyrgyz nomadic culture/s” and “reinterpretations and deconstructions of the Soviet past” along with diverging liberal frameworks. These “orientational knowledges” based on different normative philosophies are historically known for competing for the hegemonic ordering of human lives. Based on the lived experiences of different social agents, I argue that the orientational knowledge systems do not only provide meaning, hope and moral grounds but also serve to misunderstandings, tensions and conflicts within a person, families, and broader interrelationships.