Dikshya Thapa is Adjunct Professor in the Global Affairs Program in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is currently teaching the MA Program course GLOA 600 - Global Competencies.
She specializes in Political Sociology, Inequality, Globalization, Gender, and Mixed Methods. Her dissertation was a comparative historical analysis of development as a ‘field’ (Bourdieu) between 1960 and 2008 where she argued that the discourse of development reproduces itself overtime resulting in a structural weakening of the developmental state in Nepal.
Her research interest are in foreign aid, institutional change, politics of service delivery and participatory governance, gender and development. She has led the following research projects on:
1) Women's leadership in Indonesia's participatory water governance. The research uses a mixed methods design of panel data analysis followed by in depth participant observation to understand conditions that enable women's leadership, the impact of this on rural water services in the long term, and on women's empowerment.
2) Understanding Variation in Bureaucratic Performance. The research identifies variation in civil servants’ performance at local government level in delivering basic services in urban slums successfully. The paper uses the technique of shadowing bureaucrats in their daily work to try to uncover conditions that explain this variation.
3) State Embeddedness and Service Delivery in Indonesia. The study first explains why there is variation in sustainability outcomes of a ten-year nationwide community driven water project in rural Indonesia using quantitative techniques. We then identify positive and negative deviance cases (villages) and use qualitative techniques to explain these. We find that over and above structural factors (geography and socio-economic conditions), a strong role is played by street level bureaucrat-community embeddedness, which impacts initial conditions for project implementation, and thus the quality of participation and ability for community collective action.
PhD Sociology, Brown University
MSc Gender Development & Globalization, London School of Economics
BA Economics and International Relations, Lancaster University