In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon: Happiness, History, and Environment in a Changing Bhutan by Betsy Bolton ISBN 9781643150826, 9781643150833, 1643150820, 1643150839 instant download

In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon: Happiness, History, and Environment in a Changing Bhutan by Betsy Bolton ISBN 9781643150826, 9781643150833, 1643150820, 1643150839 instant download

A journey through Bhutan that looks at the Buddhist mountain kingdom's recent history, gross national happiness, ethnic conflicts, and biocultural heritage.
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Landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by global giants India and China, Bhutan has provided remarkable leadership on both climate action and human happiness, despite its pre-2023 status as a least-developed nation. Bhutan was the first country to be internationally recognized as carbon neutral; it is also the birthplace of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH), a pointed alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a means of measuring the success of national policies in promoting citizens’ wellbeing. Yet Bhutan has also been a site of ethnic conflict, with roughly tens of thousands people displaced into refugee camps in the 1990s and eventually resettled abroad.
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International views on Bhutan tend to be sharply split between admiration for its democratizing development strategies and opposition to its human rights abuses—a division partly maintained by Bhutan’s tight limits on immigration and foreign travel within the country. In the first book-length study of its kind, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon explores the tensions and contradictions of Bhutan’s rapid political and economic transformation from the perspective of a Fulbright scholar helping start a new master’s program in the remote east of the country.