Dr. Ritu Verma is Director of Out the Box Research and Action, Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and Associate Professor at College of Language and Culture Studies. She has served as member of the International Expert Working Group of the Secretariat for a New Development Paradigm for the Royal Government of Bhutan, Lecturer at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Board of Directors of the Land Portal Foundation, Senior Research Fellow at International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), among other high-level positions. She has written widely on wellbeing, degrowth and beyond-GDP alternatives, impacts of climate crises on indigenous people and environments, and decolonial, anthropological and political-ecological perspectives on infrastructure and agriculture in international development. Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, international development scholar and civil engineer, she has led ethnographic research in the Pacific Islands, the Himalayas, and East and Southern Africa, and published extensively in professional journals and written several books.