Aid, Technology and Development: The Lessons from Nepal

Dipak Gyawali is a hydroelectric power engineer trained at Moscow Energy Institute and a political economist trained at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley and was Nepal’s Minister of Water Resources in 2002/2003. A Pragya (Academician) of the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, he conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface of technology and society, mostly from the perspectives of Cultural Theory. He has been a visiting professor/research scholar as well as member of advisory boards throughout various universities and international organizations, including UN University in Yokohama, Battelle Pacific Northwest National Lab and Mekong’s MPower. Currently he is on the advisory committee of UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program, Stockholm International Water Institute’s Scientific Program Committee, and IDS Sussex STEPs Center’ advisory board. He chairs Nepal Water Conservation Foundation as well as Inter Disciplinary Analysts.

Michael Thompson has had a long association with Nepal: first as a teenage soldier in the Malayan "emergency" (where he served in the British army's Gurkha Division), then as a Himalayan mountaineer, and subsequently as an anthropologist-cum-policy analyst. Trained at University College London (B.Sc, Ph.D) and Oxford (B.Litt), he is currently a senior researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a global change think-tank in Austria. There he develops and applies the concept of "plural rationality": people doing very different things and yet still behaving rationally, given their different sets of convictions as to how the world is and people are.

Marco Verweij is Professor of Political Science at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. He holds a doctorate in social and political science from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and previously earned his keep at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany, and at the Singapore Management University. In his research, he attempts to understand how ‘wicked’ social and environmental problems can be resolved through the combined forces of (inter)governmental action, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, as well as civil society engagement. He also explores the possible synergies between social and political theory, brain research and the analysis of human complex systems.