Dikshya
Thapa

Dikshya Thapa completed her PhD in sociology at Brown in September 2012. She is currently with the World Bank’s Social Development Unit where her work focuses on discrimination and exclusion among minorities in Eastern Europe. Her areas of research have been gender and development, political economy of NGOs, community development, and good governance. Her doctoral thesis examined the idea of development as a “field” – in particular – in explaining the shift from traditional state led social service provision towards community and NGO led service provision and used the rural water sector in Nepal as a case study. She joined the GPD program in 2007 and is very grateful to have benefitted from its summer research awards, that allows students to test out preliminary ideas that are crucial towards developing a comprehensive thesis outline.