Brief Profile:

Dipak Gyawali is a hydroelectric power engineer (Moscow Energy Institute), political economist (Energy and Resources Group, University of California at Berkeley), and academician of the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, as well as chairman of Nepal Water Conservation Foundation. A former minister of Water Resources in Nepal, who introduced community electricity giving control over distribution to the rural consumers, he conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface of technology and society, primarily on water, energy, natural resources as well as ethics and philosophy, basically from the perspectives of cultural theory of plural rationalities. Currently, he is on the advisory committee of UNESCO's World Water Assessment Program, IDS Sussex STEPs Center, and in Nepal he was the founding chairman of a grass root NGO dedicated to the task of poverty alleviation, the Rural Self-Reliance Development Center (Swabalamban).