In 1984 my colleague and friend Colin Rosser, who has died aged 86, created the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a thinktank, research and training centre covering the Hindu Kush Himalayas and based in Kathmandu. It introduced programmes for rural energy provision, watershed management and information systems for international development. Launching the centre was a heroic exercise in diplomacy, involving all the governments of the region – from China, Russia, India and Pakistan to Afghanistan, Outer Mongolia and Bhutan.
Born into a mining family in south Wales, Colin won a scholarship to Cambridge University to study anthropology, which he did after his military service as a Gurkha officer in India in the second world war. This began a lifelong involvement in and passion for the Himalayas.
Undertaking a DPhil in the Kullu valley in the western Himalayas, Colin and his wife, Tessa, whom he married in 1950, trekked over the 12,000ft pass to get there and lived under canvas for two years to compile a dictionary of the language and research an account of the people.
Colin taught at the University College of Swansea (now Swansea University) and published, with Christopher Harris, The Family and Social Change: A Study of Family and Kinship in a South Wales Town (1965). He also continued his Himalayan research, this time on the Newars of the Kathmandu valley.
In 1961, he became a consultant in social planning in a major Ford Foundation project, the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organisation, which led to his interest in urbanisation in developing countries, urban poverty and housing. He went on to write a major report for the foundation on third world urbanisation.
In 1976, he became director of the development planning unit at University College London, devoted to training graduates from developing countries in the issues related to urbanisation. He won for the college a major World Bank-funded contract to create master's programmes in highway engineering and transport planning at the Institute of Technology, Bandung, in Indonesia. He recruited nine academic teachers and himself went to Bandung to establish the programmes.
It was from there that he moved back to the Himalayas to launch ICIMOD, his biggest project, which he created from scratch. He devoted the last years before his retirement to establishing the centre on a firm footing.
He is survived by Tessa and his two sons, Jonathan and Vivian.