Gyawali is a hydropower engineer (Moscow Energy Institute) and Political Economist of Resources (University of California at Berkeley), Academician of Nepal Academy of Science and Technology and former chair of Nepal Water Conservation Foundation. He served as Nepal’s Minister of Water Resources in 2002-2003 and has been vice-chair of the technical advisory committee of UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program. He was founding Chair of Duryog Nivaran, a South Asian network of scholars and practitioners advocating an alternative perspective on disaster resilience. He was a member of the high-powered advisory board in the US Pacific Northwest National Lab and US Department of Energy funded effort that produced the 4-volume Human Choice and Climate Change in 1998, where, for the first time, social sciences took a hard look at climate change. In 2006 he chaired an international EU panel that reviewed 12 years of international water research cooperation of the European Union across the globe. He was also a member of an independent external evaluation committee for UNESCO and the Dutch government (2007) which reviewed institutional arrangements of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education at Delft, and has chaired the review of UNESCO’s Sixth Phase of its International Hydrological Program (2011).

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