We are very happy to announce that the Spring Term 2023 Ragnar Nurkse Visiting Professor will be Lhawang Ugyel from the School of Business of UNSW Canberra, Australia. A prominent expert on Non-Western Public Administration, Dr. Lhawang is one of the leading academics globally specializing in the public management, and public management reform, of his home country of Bhutan, about which he has written the most important monograph, Paradigms and public sector reform: Public administration of Bhutan (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
His outstanding PhD thesis, under Janine O’Flynn, at ANU Crawford (where he previously taught as well), entailed including Bhutan into the Hofstede framework of cultural dimensions. He also has significant practical experience in Bhutanese PA, having i.a. been the Senior Human Resource Officer for the Royal Civil Service Commission Secretariat for several years. Bhutan also braved the pandemic storm in a particular way as regards both vaccination rates and keeping deaths low, and Prof. Ugyel has studied and published about this as well. Given the significance of the Kingdom of Bhutan in pioneering a policy-relevant happiness orientation via its Gross National Happiness concept and its key position within Buddhist Economics and Governance, both generally and for the research program at the RND NWPA research stream, we are especially happy to have a leading expert join us in Tallinn.
Professor Lhawang’s competence is not limited to Bhutan however. Rather, he has also researched and published widely about Oceanian PA and Policy, and here especially about the fascinating cases of Papua New Guinea (at whose main university he also taught for some years as a visiting lecturer) and Vanuatu. He will therefore teach both the Bhutan and the Oceania sessions of the course from a particularly erudite and informed perspective. But his general work on NWPA and non-Western paradigms, based on thorough empiricism paired with a particularly sophisticated theoretical lens, renders his an especially significant contribution to our research and graduate teaching program in general.
As usual, Professor Lhawang Ugyel will co-teach the “Implementing Governance in a Diverse Globalized World” course with Professor Wolfgang Drechsler during Spring Term – with a Bhutan and Oceania focus, of course –, as well as give a public lecture on a topic of his special area, interact with students, and consult and discuss with colleagues.
Lhawang follows Professor Pan Suk Kim from Yonsei University, former Minister of Public Management of the Republic of Korea, as the 2022 Nurkse Professor, and Professor Hiroko Shimada Logie from Kyoto University, formerly of the Japanese Personnel Authority, as the 2021 one.