Background: Girls and women face substantial menstrual hygiene management (MHM) challenges in low- and middle-income countries. These challenges are related to inadequate knowledge and insufficient water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities. Currently, the literature on MHM among college-attending women in Bhutan is scarce. We aimed to explore the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) of female college students from all the 10 government colleges of Bhutan, documenting the conditions of available MHM facilities, from August to September 2018.Methods: A cross-sectional KAP survey was conducted with a random sample of female students from all years and a random sample of MHM facilities at each college and hostel. A questionnaire was adapted from a similar study conducted with school students in Bhutan. Socio-demographics, overall KAP findings, and differences in KAP between first and final year students were analyzed; college and hostel toilets were self-reported and directly observed.Results: In the survey, 1,010 participants completed the self-administered questionnaire. The comprehensive knowledge of menstruation was found to be low (35.5%) among participants. Half of the participants (50.3%) reported their mother as the source of information, and 35.1% of the participants agreed that women should not enter a shrine during menstruation. It was also reported that approximately 4% of median monthly pocket money was spent on the absorbents, and 96.9% of absorbents were wrapped before disposal. Half of the participants (55.1%) reported that their daily activities were affected due to menstruation, and 24.2% of the female students missed college due to dysmenorrhea. One-fifth of the participants (21.3%) reported unavailability of water in college, 80.1% of the participants reported absence of soap for hand washing, and 24.1% described no bins for disposal. The participants also reported that in 33.7% of hostel toilets, the door locks were missing. The direct observations also had similar findings.Conclusions: Female students living in hostels during college years lose considerable resources during their formative years of learning, such as time, energy, and money, due to issues of menstruation management. Although the overall understanding of menstruation was low, the MHM practices of our participants scored highly, and the vast majority of them asked for a platform to discuss menstruation. Despite some agreement with menstrual taboos (e.g., visiting shrine), only 5.1% of the participants were uncomfortable conversing about MHM. Improved public health knowledge, psychosocial/medical support, and WASH infrastructure with freely available menstrual products could lead to more effective MHM practices among female college students.

Bhutan is endowed with abundant hydropower potential and harnessing it has assumed national strategic importance as it is the backbone of Bhutan’s economy. Given the importance of hydropower, the Sustainable Hydropower Development Policy was adopted in 2008 to accelerate hydropower development and achieve economic self reliance. However, the acceleration generated a lot of controversy undermining the confidence of the Bhutanese people from all fronts, such as anticipated lower returns to investment, unstable future markets, threats from climate change, cost overrun, and delayed completion of projects. These are the emerging policy discourses among the Bhutanese bureaucrats, politicians, policy analysts, researchers, and independent thinkers concerning the hydropower future. However, a lot of what is discussed and published often comes in the form of general commentaries, media interviews, conference presentations, and official policy documents. A limited number of research papers either publish or unpublished comes from the graduate students’ thesis which are based on data and documents available in the public domain. Correspondingly, this paper engages in implementing this significant agenda with scientific enquiry on Bhutan’s investment in hydropower projects and its sustainability. Employing transdisciplinary research methodology, this paper debates why Bhutan needs to continue investing in accelerated hydropower development.

Nations, institutions and researchers around the world are increasingly demanding their governments set out a systemic change to humanize the present order of the world. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) index is a deliberate attempt to embed Bhutanese values into national governance structures. GNH provides clarity of what it means to be a politician, a public servant as citizens and government machineries and as individual human being, and that clarity is primarily the need to pursue everything in moderation, and the need to provide policy, focus and sharpness. Bhutan measures happiness through nationwide GNH surveys every five years. The latest GNH survey report shows that the perception of government performance is among the lowest of the 33 indicators, and was the most prominent decrease in the sufficiency level on people’s perception of the government performance across the 33 indicators. For Bhutan to achieve GNH, this indicator must be investigated in depth, therefore, this thesis centres on a significantly understudied context of government performance as it explores the nature of GNH qualitatively. This work is of national importance to Bhutan, representing a high-level and intellectually rigorous engagement with national policy for social good. The qualitative exploration in this study offers a unique examination into the interpretations and complexities of perceptions of the political economy of GNH, underpinning an intricate and textured picture of the lives of Bhutanese. The greatest strength of this thesis is that I have been able to conduct in-depth interviews with policy experts: such as the Presidents of political parties, Members of Parliament, Chief Policy Officers of government, and leadership of government, corporate and private institutions. In addition, this study has wider educational, economic, and social policy implications for countries seeking to structure national identities which go beyond employability, clearly aligning with AUT’s vision for its graduates.