Oral History Archive

Conversation with Yves Daccord. Recorded 10 January 2024, online.

00:00:00 JE 

Welcome, Yves Daccord, former Director General of the International Committee of the Red Cross between 2010 and 2020, with around 20,000 staff, mostly in war zones all around the globe, a leading senior figure in the humanitarian aid sector with over 20 years of experience with emergency relief operations across the world from Yemen to Chechnya and from Congo to Palestine. Hello and welcome, Yves. 

00:00:27 YD 

Thank you. Very happy to be with you. 

00:00:30 JE 

Just before we get our conversation started, could you very briefly summarize what you do in your own words? And tell us why thinking about global shocks, crises, emergencies matters to you personally. 

00:00:42 YD 

So I'm Yves, Yves Daccord. I'm a Swiss citizen, I'm 59 years old. I'm the father of three daughters. And I should maybe start with that because it was, you know, as a father that when I looked at my daughter, I always thought that their life would be more complex than mine, especially related to climate change, but also to, I would say, the polarization I was looking at and seeing, since the early 2000s. And what I realized over the last 10 years, and it was Africa, East Africa, that really taught me that, climate change, to start with that, migration, would be a shock that I would live in my generation still, together with my daughters. So, and, I do believe we've seen only the beginning of that kind of shock. 

So I've worked in the humanitarian [sector] and that has been an extremely rewarding – tough, but also rewarding area. And I've decided to move outside and now to look to anything that somewhat help us to live together. I'm intrigued by how our social fabric in our society are [sic] very fragile. So I'm looking at information that we need to live together. So I'm the chair of a media group. [There] I'm looking at our social contract and how our social contracts, somewhat informal and formal, can evolve due to the digitalization of our world, especially to the digitalization of security. So I'm leading a Harvard Pop-up Research Institute about it. [At that institute, ] I'm looking at how do you create conditions, systemic conditions to improve peace treaty and peace negotiations. So I'm a lead in one organization called Principle for Peace that is working on that. And I'm also looking at all the questions related to climate. 

To end, I'm interested about [sic] the people that feel that and see that there's a climate crisis or disaster, but feel somewhat alienated by the one who's proposing solutions. They feel alienated by urban people. They feel alienated maybe by the activist, by the green. And I feel it's important to create an organization that somewhat are reaching out to them. So reaching out to the farmer in Brazil, reaching out maybe to the Catholic Church in Poland, reaching out to a different kind of, what people could say, conservative society. And here all that is a different way to try to help and try to understand how do you manage, in fact, live together in a time of shock. And I think we will see a series of shock that are coming closer and closer to us, us meaning our Western society. 

00:03:20 JE 

Clearly, you're someone who thinks in terms of crises that relate to other crises, intersections between many different problems at a global scale, particularly if we go back to your experience at the International Committee of the Red Cross, about which I want to speak with you in more depth. So if we think about global shocks, and you mentioned climate change as one example, something that affects basically all sectors across different societies across the globe – during your time working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, what was the most challenging, or maybe one of the most challenging global shocks, if we will, that you had to manage, that the Red Cross had to manage? 

00:04:02 YD 

You mentioned climate change, and that's true. I've worked in the 90s already, and I think we started to see behavior of the nomads and of the farmer in part of Africa after they were changing, but we were not aware that the change will be so radical. And it would really dramatically change the way they operate, the way they are connecting with other parts of society, and the level of violence. So I never thought in the 90s that climate change would propel, in fact, millions of people to migrate and to put a lot of pressure to other societies where they have to migrate. 

But this is, I don't … I'm not sure we should call it the shock. This is maybe, a long-term shock. Now, the real shock for me is the 9-11 attack against the Twin Towers. And not so much the attack, the attack was absolutely a shock, but the fact that there was really an after, a before and after, and what it meant. For me, this is a moment that has really created an amazing polarization. And that was, by the way, the purpose of the people who did the attack. It created a polarization between somewhat the US and country that are connected to the US, and I would say society that are connected to US, versus suddenly the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world. And we all know that things have been much more complex than that, but that has been a shock. 

That's, imagine as a leader of the Red Cross, suddenly you realize what the Red Cross means. It means an organization, but it means also a very powerful symbol. And it's a symbol of help and care in the 20 and 21st century. But at the time, it was also a symbol of crusader. You know, suddenly when you talk about, you know, the Red Cross in the Muslim world, and especially with extreme people that are playing with it, we had to immediately rethink the way we were projecting ourselves, the way we were connecting ourselves. And I do remember 10 years later when I became director general, already 70% of the context where we operated were Muslim contexts. 

So it tells you also clearly that the 9/11 really put fire in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, but certainly much more if you look also East Africa and down, you know, Central African Republic, Sahel, the entire Sahel, the Chad, all that. So that has really changed dramatically the way a lot of people were perceiving each other, the way they were relating to an organization like the Red Cross, as an example, and the way they were related to international humanitarian law. Because one thing, when you were the lead of the international Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross, you also have the responsibility to somewhat develop, but also promote the international humanitarian law. So you don't only operate, but you also have that diplomatic legal role and responsibility and the international remaining law regulate war. And when 9/11 came, the US, and not just the US, the US only used a different set of thinking about war in international law. 

And for example, one thing that is still known today is Guantanamo and the prisoner of Guantanamo, that the US decided at the time to hold outside of international remaining law, which was, what are you talking about? So back to 9/11, that was certainly during my time, the biggest shock that changed really the line, if you want, of tensions in the world, but also in the diplomatic world, in the legal world. 

00:07:40 JE 

Right, so it's fascinating that you mentioned 9/11 as something that affected not only the action capacity of the Red Cross, but also the image of the Red Cross and how people relate to the Red Cross. Cultural divides across the planet, divides that are, on the one hand, targeted by the terrorists behind 9/11. But at the same time, of course, they had ripple effects and 9/11 created lots of discussions in the public sphere across the globe exactly on these questions of identity or context where the ICRC acts. 

00:08:11 YD 

Yeah, and somewhat brought back again the religious factor as an identity factor at the global level. The religious factor has always been there, but certainly not at that same level. And suddenly it created this kind of … “the Muslim” against the rest. And of course, we know if you're a Muslim, that there's nothing like “the Muslim”. There is a lot of differences between the Sunni and the Shia, for example, and the way they will look at that as an example. There's, of course, moderate and extreme and whatever. And suddenly it was all that in the same bucket almost. And it has become, over the last 20 years, a crucial factor to define who is us, or, to define who is not us, right? 

If you look at the numbers of relationship between the Muslim factor, religious factors, and migration, for example, in the Western world, that has increased dramatically, as an example. So that has also created that. And my point, too, is exactly what you mentioned. I would make a difference between a shock, which is something that happened and sometimes really shaken and synchronized, that's what I find interesting with the shock. The shock synchronized because it creates an experience that is similar. Doesn't mean that you react the same way, but 9/11 is … we all have seen it, you know? So it synchronized that moment. 

COVID, by the way, COVID has been very similar in that sense. So COVID happens. So suddenly we have a synchronization, whatever the functions, whatever is your responsibility, wherever you are in the society, somewhat you experience that moment. And then, of course, you will then live through very differently. But this is what I consider a shock versus phases, right? Where you see phases that will have an influence. I mean, I would say when Russia, for example, decide to invade Ukraine, that is a shock that defined dramatically somewhat all of us. The way that this plays out are, I would consider much more phase on the consequence of the shock. 

00:10:10 JE 

So, I'm sure we'll get back to that one because I think it's a very good point. Just briefly on 9/11 still, I'm curious to hear what specifically had to change for the Red Cross, or how did the shock in this case challenge the Red Cross and its operations and what did it do specifically in response? How did you deal with this? 

00:10:31 YD 

So, I think it made several changes. The first one was to see the US as a major nation, one of the P5 being at war – but not at war in a classical way. So, it was when they were not going officially after a state, they were going after a non-state armed group, Al-Qaeda. And they didn't know exactly how to do it. So, they used the theory of war on terror around the world. And they somewhat attacked state and territory because they had to do it. But they used the fact that Afghanistan, for example, was a place that hosted Al-Qaeda, right? So, it was interesting to see a big, a major state who knows how to do interstate war, moving into themselves, a war that was somewhat much more complicated to describe, right? And to explain to the public opinion, to their public opinion. 

And by the way, the way you start to announce war on terror, I mean, this is an endless war. I mean, where do you start? Who are the warrior[s]? And of course, that has a second impact for us, for the International Red Cross, was: how do you define then a combatant? Because as you know, international humanitarian law, the law of war, allow[s], in fact, to target military objective and ask to make a very big difference between military and civilian objective. And it comes the same, of course, about people. So suddenly, that came blurred and to see a country as important as the US. And then bringing into the equation also NATO, starting to play with a different role. That was a major change, major shock in a way, and had a huge consequences for our legal team, for our diplomatic, for our communication. And it put us sometimes in tensions with the US and the people that push in that direction. 

At the same time for the ICRC, we had to learn and understand quickly how to deal with an organization like Al-Qaeda, that doesn't own a territory, that is going for a global ummah. So how do you deal with them? And who are the people who can influence these people, right? We are not interested about Osama bin Laden as such, but we were interested about much more the people that would feel what he represents needs to be continued. And what does that mean? How does that work? 

So, we had to apply and learn what we've learned in Afghanistan. We had to apply that and understand that throughout our entire operation. We had, for example, to know how do you engage with it very quickly and at the highest level with, in fact, religious leaders across the board to understand what could happen and how to deal with that and make sure that they would understand also our position, making sure that they understand the impartiality, neutrality, that they could translate that if they're necessary in the language. So, it radically changed the way we were connected and our network operation around the world. 

And last but not least, it changed also, over time, the people that are International Red Cross delegates. Because what happens is over time, we started to realize that it was more and more difficult to have people coming from some Western country, because this Western country were [sic] challenged and perceived as being part of that war against “the Muslim”, again, into bracket [viz. in brackets]. So, it also, we really had to thought, okay, how do we, who is us and move represent the International Red Cross? What kind of nationality can we have? Knowing maybe that when we intervene, we intervene without bodyguard and without protection. 

So, I think we use, if you want, our vulnerability, the fact that we are vulnerable as a strength compared to other organizations like the UN, all that, will go and bunkerize themselves. We did the contrary. But it was a complicated one. So yeah, it changed quite a bit the way the organization was projecting its, its identity and the way we're related to a lot of people. 

00:14:34 JE 

It does sound like it's a very challenging kind of shock that goes, runs across so many different levels, so many different layers. Your legal team, your diplomatic team, everyone has to get involved in many different ways, respond to it, think about their position and possible institutional reforms that might need in order to deal with a very different kind of threat, in this case, al-Qaeda as a non-state actor. 

00:14:55 YD 

Yeah, and not just al-Qaeda, I would say, because I think what is interesting is it's an entire priority shift, from the US, from different actors that oblige you as an organization to engage in this shift and to accept that it will last. 

00:15:12 JE 

And can you give us an example of field experience from your time working at the ICRC around those years after 9/11? Where something practically in the response of the ICRC changed – in terms of, before 9/11 things were done in this particular way, [and] after 9/11, we suddenly saw this as a new priority, or we suddenly got these particular kinds of actors involved. 

00:15:34 YD 

I can give you a surprising example, which is related to social media. Because it was a time also where social media start to come in. And we, as an organization that also make [sic] some choices sometimes to be very confidential, we do understand the importance of silence, at a critical moment when we have to negotiate all that. 

So, they knew we were confronted with the groups and government that we're using, and here I'm talking about early 2000s, so really the beginning of the social media, really, we're using very aggressively social media to put the position, but to challenge us. I do remember, for example, in Somalia being challenged by one specific group, Al-Shabaab, who suddenly on Twitter just sent an image of a lorry and says, this is [inaudible] that the ISIS is bringing to Somalia to kill the Somalians. Boom, like that. Which normally, in a normal situation, you would have rumor, and then you would start to engage with the local leaders, try to understand what happened, was there a mistake, and engage with other, and then ask the leaders maybe to say, no, it was a mistake, whatever. All that was gone in one minute, and then you have to learn really quickly how do you engage on Twitter, right, or on other places, let's say another platform, in order to somewhat deflate the pressure, and at the same time, manage the discussions that you will have with elderly and the leaders and the important people. 

So that was interesting to observe, and that change, it was not related only to 9/11, but it was related to the fact that you had the American[s] being involved, for sure. And you had also a very smart group that were using communication, communication means to put pressure. So that's a good, interesting example that changed totally the way we had to relate with communication and social media. 

00:17:29 JE 

Very interesting. I mean, you're just saying it changed totally how you had to engage with this. I'm curious, was it a kind of experience of making things up on the spot? Was it improvisation, or was there any kind of past experience that you could draw back on in order to come up with a good response? 

00:17:44 YD 

It's interesting. No, we decided to maintain discipline, not just all over the place. We decided to also have one golden rule that was whatever communication, public communication we would do, including a fast one, because sometimes you have to be fast. We would always informed or try to engage bilaterally before the communication. Yeah. So even if we would respond to this tweet very rather quickly, we would make sure that one of our message [sic] would go beforehand to the people. So, we would try always to use communication, probably coming to back up if you want, I would say private communication. 

So, I think so we maintain[ed] that. And then we had to take some decision over time because we had to learn. And I know some organizations are doing differently. So, one thing we decided was that we would allow our staff also to have social media presence, because we decided that's also an interesting way. You can't imagine if you, Jan, you would represent the ICRC in Yemen, for example, or in Sahel, somewhat if you don't have yourself a presence that is known not just as the ICRC, but also as Jan, the head of the ICRC in Yemen. You would lose somewhat your authority because this is the world in which you operate. 

So, it's interesting, we had to learn that. So, it means that we allow you to do that. And at the same time, we had to do that smartly, accompany our staff to be able to do that. 

Because we also knew if you would think, if you would react badly or you made a mistake, the cost would be enormous for the organization. So, very interesting learning as an organization. How do you collectively move and play with that. 

00:19:24 JE 

It's a fascinating example about [sic] social media and how the organization needs to find some kind of response, and then that response creates new conditions. And in this case, [it] creates [sic] the question of, are we going to let our staff have social media presences online or not in their official capacity? And a connected question, I can imagine that it creates new vulnerabilities to have staff have social media presences. They can be sort of attacked on social media. They face the question of how do we communicate, [how] we're doing. How did you experience that? 

00:19:54 YD 

So maybe I should say three or four things. The first one is let's recognize, and I've seen that myself during my time as a CEO of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Trust is becoming a rarer commodity. And of course, when you work for the Red Cross, trust is at the core of what you do. You have to somewhat manage if it's not acceptance, at least to be tolerated by the government to work in a very complex environment, right? And you need to be somewhat trusted by the people that you try to help. So we've seen over time how much trust has become more difficult to gain, and not just because of us, because in the world in which we operate, I think, because of the polarization, because of the segmentation maybe, of the world. So that's just as a background to remember that. 

Point two is, if you don't communicate yourself, somebody else will communicate about you. That's the problem. There's not anymore the world where you can say, “oh, I don't communicate. That's okay. Oh, no problem.” You have constantly, especially these days, people that are communicating about you and then nobody knows if it's you or not anymore. So, controlling the message becomes much more important. So how do you pass the important message that has been very central? 

And last but not least, you create some element of rules and I would say principle. And one of the guiding principles, whatever the communication is, whatever the situation is, create predictability. As an organization, you can't, even if the situation is very unpredictable, that's one of the reasons why you need to be predictable and you are predictable by your methodology. And it's not because it's Jan or Yves or Eloise or whoever. It is about a delegate, a person working for the International Red Cross. And this person, whoever the personality, has a certain methodology and follow the same methodology and we can connect them. Super important. 

So, you should allow, of course, the people to be personally engaged. It's important. And at the same time, follow a specific methodology. And we were very careful about that. So instead of controlling very specific, no, you can't say that or not. You allow the people, but … and they need to follow a methodology that is clear. 

And why do we do that, is because centralization of communication can be useful from time to time, but in a given context also, you need to be able to be fast. 

And if you centralize everything in Geneva, you can't, as an example, or in New York, or – you can't be fast enough when, or maybe contextual enough when you need to respond to something specific in a given place or in a given situation. So, I think there is this dynamic that you need to manage, what needs to be centralized, what needs to be decentralized. And having a staff that are able to engage in social media allows you, if they know the methodology and they follow certain discipline, allows you also to be able to play and to be much more closer to the people when it's necessary. Otherwise, a message coming from Geneva to talk to the Somali people or to talk to Washington, to example, that doesn't really work anymore. 

00:22:57 JE 

Right. So, you mentioned the necessity, the need for speedy reactions. And we talked about shocks and moments in which there was a lot of stress on the organization. Of course, also on the humanitarian situation. One interesting aspect of this is that there's debate as to what counts as a crisis and when something counts as a crisis and why we suddenly label something as a crisis. So, we can think of relief operations, of course, in the context of your work. Aid organizations such as the Red Cross often refer to crises that they tackle, solutions that they have on offer. Whereas on the receiving end of these operations, critics, other actors, actors in the field, might speak instead of humanitarian interventions or even intrusions, and the language can be completely different. So, I'm curious to hear how, on the one hand, you experience this kind of tension, and on the other hand, second point, how did your organization go about, the Red Cross, go about interpreting what the crisis was about? 

00:24:00 YD 

So firstly, whatever the language you use, you need to reflect about for whom and by whom is it used, right? So, it's very useful, right, to know, because you can talk about the crisis, absolutely. And say, oh my God, there is a crisis. But then for the very same people where it's happening, it's not a crisis. I mean, think about emergency. When we say, my God, there is a, right now, if you think, for example, there was this terrible disaster in Turkey and in Syria, right, where the house is a major shake of the earth. And what is interesting, if you look at specifically Syria, that's a disaster, absolutely crisis. The problem is, this is an emergency that is just built over the other emergency of the situation. 

So, you have to somewhat be very careful to talk about, yes, it's a crisis, it's an emergency in Syria in that specific place, where, of course, you immediately understand that the crisis will not be dealt with and will not start and finish the same way that this was in Turkey, for example. So, when I'm thinking crisis or shock, I'm always thinking, who has defined the crisis and the shock? Who called for it? And what does that mean for the people? And that helps you then to manage. 

For example, it's true when you think about humanitarian, still, I would say the large public things, humanitarian, are about a crisis, right? And for the people, a crisis is a shock. It's a moment where you have a natural disaster, for example, or you have a bomb, or, you know, there is a moment X, something happened, a lot of people are hurt, then the Red Cross come in almost as a fire brigade, comes in, bring expertise and leave. You know, that's a little bit the vision. And what is interesting, in the world where I've operated, and where my colleagues still operate, is a world where emergencies last, crises last. 

Think about Afghanistan. When was the crisis started and when it ended? When, you know, there emerged … think about Myanmar. Think about Ukraine. Take three very different examples. So, I think what has been new is also to understand the importance of crisis and emergency, including to mobilize people's interest, but to know what it means for the people's needs, right? And that leads me nicely to the second question. You said, how do we deal with it? What does it mean? For us at the Red Cross, at the core of all crises, what you start as, what are the needs of the people, really? And it's very helpful. How does that change their needs? What do they request? What is important for them? 

And you don't start with you, uh, with, you know, the feeling that, wow, there's a crisis. No, you really start with, what does that mean for them? And if you're able to assess the need of the people, really, and listen to them, not just assess, but listen to them. What are they telling you? That allows you then to understand possibly what could be the response and what could be relevant for them. And I think there has been too many tendencies when there is a crisis to try to rush and to bring your own services that you have deployed and defined in London, maybe, or in Geneva, versus trying to understand what really people are willing [sic].

I'll give you two or three examples that really struck me. I do remember, for example, we were able to rush and to come to Syria, to a place that was besieged for months, and we were able then to come into that. And we were really expecting the people to ask us, of course, for water, medicines, maybe food. And interestingly enough, the first request absolutely was Wi-Fi and electricity. Really? You have nothing else? No, for them, Wi-Fi was much more important than anything. Water was there. And I do remember also they were asking, please help us to deal with our people who died. So, the way you are managing dead people is very crucial. And that was an absolute priority for them because they were stuck for three months, completely busy. 

So, you know, suddenly you said, oh, dead management, Wi-Fi is a priority? You would never ever define that in London or in Geneva. But if you listen to the people, that helps you then to define what the crisis is and how it works. 

00:28:02 JE 

So, there's a tension between the kind of field-level experience, the sort of first-hand experience, the first-hand perspective that gives you the best picture, that is available of the needs in a given situation. And then on the other hand, we've got the organization that has its kind of perspective, has its kind of set of methodologies that you mentioned earlier. And then there's a balancing act between those two poles – it's very important for the Red Cross in Yemen, in Syria, to go in not with too much of a preconception. Is that what you're saying? 

00:28:42 YD 

Yes, and it's a complicated balance. And I think what you need as an organization is to reflect where the balance is defined, where is it? And you need to define also what's important, what's not. I'll give you one example, which is an interesting one. I think 15 years ago, there was several issues, especially related to Afghanistan and Iraq. And one of the terrible issues was the bombing of the Iraqi delegation of the UN. And I think 36 UN colleagues died. And I think it was really a shock. And I think there was also reflections about the way the UN would then deal with its own security. And since then, it was already the case, but now it has been confirmed, since then, the UN is in fact managing security centrally. 

So, Jan, if you would be the head of UN humanitarian affairs, you have a colleague in the UN that is the head of security that is the same level than you, that you don't control, right? And if you would be the head of the UN, [the] other way, in Myanmar right now, you would have to, in fact, ask every day, what's the assessment by the UN security people? And they would say, today it's three or four, level four. So, if it's level four, you can't go out of your house. And you can say, no, but I'm on the spot. I see, I can do [it]. [They] Say I'm sorry, globally, and we've decided it's four. 

So whereas we at the ICRC did exactly the contrary, we decided that the person that would define the security context, if you want, would be the person that leads, in fact, the response, which means, Jan, if you would work for the ICRC, you would have the right, you would define yourself, the level of risk that you would take and you would say, maybe this morning I can go because I can meet this important person that allows me to access this hospital. Whereas if it would be defined centrally, the definition comes once a day and tells you level five.

And the problem is, of course, the measure of success is very different. You are measured against the ability to reach out to people, to provide relevant aid. Whereas if you would be in charge of security centralized in New York, you are measured against the level of wounded and people that have been your organization, have been killed or put in danger. And of course, the person in charge of security, then his or her objective would be to create a condition that reduced the risk. So, I'm just giving you an example to explain to you that the balance is always there, but, uhm, the decision you take, who has the, at the end of the day, the decision to define where the balance is, a crucial part of the humanitarian response. 

00:30:58 JE 

Can you pinpoint a moment during your position as a director general between 2010 and 2020, when it struck you that this was the way in which the ICRC is learning exactly this? You just outlined in very interesting detail how the Red Cross has a need to sort of straddle these lines. Has that changed over the time that you were Director General, or would you say this has always been around, this is a sort of standard feature of the Red Cross?

00:31:39 YD 

No, what has changed is the fact that you are suddenly, your security can be, including when you are locally driven, to be affected by something global. I can give you an example about Afghanistan. I do remember that suddenly there was a rumor that one guard, American guard in Guantanamo, flushed in a toilet a Koran. Then I tell you, in 30 minutes, there was pressure, people in the street, willing to attack anything that was related to the U.S., but also to Guantanamo, and we were visiting Guantanamo and protecting prisoners, so ... we had to very quickly inform our colleagues in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, how to deal with that as an example. 

So, it's not just, we're living in a world where a global anecdote, if I may say, or rumors or fact, could have a huge impact and you need to be able to play with it. So, and being smart about it. But at the end, it's still the people in charge of the relationship and create an environment that is conducive for humanitarian affair, that's what I would call, that would make a difference. So, in that case, it would be the head of delegation of the ICRC in Afghanistan that would really reflect what is the best strategy and to whom to talk and who to engage, because that's what it is, and explain very quickly what happens, what we've seen, what are we doing, how it works, in order to create the kind of interesting relationship and dynamic around that. And so that's one. 

What we've learned also is that we, these days you have to be very local, but also being able to work on, at the same times, on somewhat global network. So, to give you an example, UK before the Brexit, you would engage with special forces of UK in Iraq, for example, around this very specific issue. You would also understand exactly how to talk at the headquarters about ... maybe not the specific issue, but the trend, and being able to combine that smartly, right? And if you want to have an influence on a network or on the government, you can't anymore just focus on one target person or target population. You need to think this person part of a much more complex ecosystem. True in Afghanistan with the Taliban, very true also with the Special Forces in UK. They give you two examples, very different. And you need as an organization to be able to think about it. 

00:33:49 JE 

I'm very interested, and we as a project are generally very interested in the question of how international organizations not only experience shocks, crises, turbulence, protracted complexity, but also how they then adapt their responses and possibly do that in coordination with other international organizations and agencies. And so, you just mentioned how there's this need for coordinating action in a kind of global perspective in order to properly understand the problem, but also, of course, to carry out a response. 

And I know that from 2014 to 2019, you were chair of the steering committee for humanitarian response, one example of a coordination platform between different humanitarian organizations, in this case, an alliance, a voluntary alliance of, in this case, nine leading organizations. And another example is in 2015, you were appointed by the World Health Organization as member of the advisory group on reform of the World Health Organization's work in emergencies. And these are different examples of how the Red Cross interacts and coordinates its action with other agencies, other international organizations, whether it's in the same sector as in the first example, the steering committee, or it's with other sectors, other agencies that work on different areas, but that are connected given the overlap in what different sectors are affected by a crisis. So, can you tell us a little bit about your experience with that and how that might have changed over the time that you worked as a director general? 

00:35:49 YD 

So, several examples. The first one, and it's the obvious example, is there is no way that you're able to respond as an organization to all the needs of the people. No way, no way, no way. So, I think there is a responsibility to you as an organization to create, again, the condition to partner. And you can't just comment, “hi, I'm partnering.” That needs to be prepared. There needs to be trust. There needs to be understood [sic] about that. 

And it's two level. One, partnering locally is absolutely central. So being the Red Cross, International Red Cross, one of the beauties that you can really partner with your local Red Cross. And I'm really thinking about partnering, which means also, you know, it's a peer-to-peer, sometimes difficult, but it's an important one. But it means also partnering with, you know, local association, with, in fact, groups that are very central to you. 

And at the same time, partnering internationally is super central. And the partnering internationally, most of the time is about, A, assessing the situation, very important. How do you read the situation? What's important? What's not? B, influencing the actor, and not just the actors on the ground. So, we, the ICRC, we're doing that well, was influencing the donors, the way the donors would look at us, the way they would request us to do something or not, the level of risk they were ready to go. 

So, I was a chair, as you mentioned, of the steering humanitarian of response, which brought, in fact, eight alliances and one organization, the ICRC, but the alliances were very important. So ICVA, for example, or Oxfam, that are very important. And this organization will play a critical role into understanding what's happening, but also reflecting about that donor. So, we would also agree, what do we want, what needs to happen in terms of behavior? Because I think one thing we've seen over the last ten years is a trend for donors to somewhat being very risk averse and wanted to transfer risk to the human response organization. So how do we deal with that? So that was very useful. So that's, I would say, the first bucket of partnering with your peers internationally and locally and trying to make your response more relevant both internationally and locally. 

The second level is partnering with people that have much more capability than you in a specific domain, both intellectually, or sometimes concretely in terms of production. One example is I've been the director general of an organization that had to go through the transformation of data. You know, when I started in 2010, data were important, but there was nothing close to a real protection data strategy office where we had to completely rethink how do you manage data, whereas as an organization like the ICSE data are central to a work of protection because we follow the people through the data, their data. 

But we had to realize, oh my God, yes, we want to protect their data and we don't want them to be hacked. How do we do that? How do we reflect about that? How do we think about protection of data, you know, on a daily basis, you know, in a situation as complex as Syria or Ukraine, you know? So, we, and here we work with top level university, for example, in terms of blockchain, in terms of trust, in terms also of, we also worked with policy maker. We work with the European Union, for example, to really influence the GDR policy around protection of data. So here it's a domain, for example, data, protection of data, where you as an organization, you want to somewhat influence the way people think about data, but you also want to learn and you want to build, in fact, the best protection and best service possible. So that's the second one. 

And the third one is much more about our own people, our own staff. And you need somewhat to think also how do you partner with your own staff. The time is over where you just have a staff and you pay them or the volunteers. You really need to think about their quality, their competence, and they come in. And of course, they come in and they paid. And they have a contractor relationship with you, but you also need to think about partnering. I've seen how much the people were more intrigued about their own ability to grow. What can you offer them in terms of training? 

So, as an example of partnering, instead of imposing them training, we had a series of training that they had to go, but we also offer them every year an amount of money that they could use to choose their training, where they wanted to be trained, where they wanted to grow. And this kind of almost, I would say, partnering with your own personal and own people is absolutely central. To create the trust, to create the relationship, to be also influenced by your own people. It doesn't work always, by the way, sometimes [it is] difficult, but it's a very central one in terms of mindset if you want to think about moving together and improving together. 

00:40:21 JE 

So, we've talked about partnering with other agencies, partnering across different levels, of course partnering with the local population of the place that the Red Cross is acting in. Another question, of course, is the partnering of governments. And there's a lot of talk about a crisis of multilateralism, for example, that makes that more challenging or might make that more challenging as we see power political divides, for example, harden between the United States, China, the European Union, Russia. There are lots of dynamics that might make it harder to pursue international cooperation. And so, I'm curious to hear from your perspective, how does the ICRC deal with these kinds of tangents when thinking of a crisis response, when implementing a crisis response. How has that changed over the last 20 or so years? 

00:41:08 YD 

Yeah, it has changed and for different reasons. One is because suddenly you have states that start to be involved in war and when they involve in war, the tendency over time always is somewhat to play with, or at least to maximize what they consider the chance to win. And what I've seen over the last 20 years is important states, including P5 states, so really permanent members of the Security Council, the ones that are supposed to uphold international humanitarian law, international norm, playing with international public law, right? 

And it's true that over the last, let's say, ten years, the polarization has made suddenly basic consensus on international norms much more difficult. And that is difficult when you are, as an organization like the ICRC, willing to create consensus around very important issue that needs to be regulated, right? Cyber war, for example, is a super important dynamic, and you need to have an agreement from the collective of states about what is, for a missile of war, an objective that is military, what is an objective that is civil. Sounds basic, but it's super complicated. And you need to have an agreement, because this is what international law is about. It's about common understanding, common regulation, I would say almost common grammar that allows you to navigate. So that has made our work when it comes to international human and law for a law much more difficult, much more complicated, to bring state[s] to agree on critical issue, to agree to act together and not to be taken by their competition, that has been very, very difficult. 

I think the other issue that has been difficult is I would say we are living in a time where, and this is not just related to international law, it is related to also the ability to somewhat challenge state[s], we're living in a time where it seems to me sovereignty has become the new keyword in international affair. So, it means that somewhat not just us, but the security concept or other international body. I saw that at WHO, you mentioned WTO, where normally you have really rules that needs to regulate the trade. And suddenly there is no agreement anymore because important states are saying, no, our own interest first, you know, our sovereignty first. And when they start that, what I see is a level of trust between states being extremely undamaged, being, if you want, shaken, being sometimes destroyed. And that is a very difficult time. 

So yes, I think what we see right now in terms of polarization and tensions you mentioned between China and the US, for example, we could think about, you know, regional organization and also government, whatever, creates a lot of difficulties. Yeah, absolutely. And look at what is happening to Niger right now, and how, if I may, a rather small state that is not very powerful, is managed and looked at with a lot of carefulness by the entire international sector and the international community because they don't know who would play the sovereignty element, how it works anymore. Where I would say 20 years ago, if you would have a situation like that, where military would take power in a situation that is global, I think it would have been dealt much more quickly. 

00:44:36 JE 

Another backdrop that's been talked a lot about, lots of people talk about the pluralization of global governance. Many more actors are sort of becoming visible as being relevant mattering to international responses, and I'm curious to hear how that has played out at the ICRC? Has that changed? Has the perception of the ICRC vis-a-vis global governance issues changed? 

00:44:57 YD 

Yes, [it] just made things much more complicated. And on one hand, positively, because it's great to see actors of a different level, you know, coming in and joining and willing to participate. And I would say both at the international level, you mentioned the multilateral dimension, so essentially to observe a country that we never heard of or were very shy, suddenly be much more vocal, much more specific and pushing it. 

But it's also interesting to observe other actors, like the cities, for example. I do believe that the cities have a bigger role to play, or I would say even [the] university. Some of them are still a bit shy, but university we see over the next coming 10 years, I'm deeply convinced, will suddenly play a big role, surprisingly, in places that we don't think. I think, for example, the university might have a role to play in what I could say in a time where we lack the ability to regulate issue that are too complex and to do that timely, right? I am deeply convinced that we can't wait 10 years. That's normally what happens when you want to regulate an issue within state or between state. You can't work 10 years. You can't. You have to work much more closely and much more quickly. 

You could imagine that [the] university could pad [?] together and make some proposal and offer some temporary regulation around issue like AI, you know, that says these are the principle that needs to be followed. Maybe things will change next year, but right now it is what happened. I'll give you just an example. So, what I see is more actor[s] coming in and contributing. So that is difficult, but it's also much more positive, because it creates the ability to, yeah, try to respond specifically. 

Now, what we are lacking is a global governance. And at least for the years to come, I don't see any positive move into global governance. So, what I see is a much more diverse set of governance coming up with a diverse set of principle. So, we will deal more and more around issue with a set of governance. And that will make it sometimes very relevant. But the global governance that we were hoping, I would say 10 years ago, is far away, far away, far away, far away. So, it means for an actor like the International Committee of the Red Cross that is working globally and wants to engage, makes life more complex, no questions. 

So that's one, that's the international. But at the national level, it's the same. Today, good luck if you want to engage with government or institutions like the European Union, like the US, or like Russia, or China, take a different example. This is not one government. You have to talk with the parliament or with the party. You have to understand the security forces. You have to understand the difference between the State Department, the new ICID. You have to understand the difference between the White House and the people within the White House, how they play around that. It's the same in … it's the same in Russia. It's quite a very different country. 

Today, you have a very complicated set of actors. And we're living in a time where power and organization are slightly more complex and more diffused than it was today. Even if it's on the map, it looks very controlled and very much more complicated than we think. I mean, we all know, for example, that when you want right now to sit down with Russia and discuss the peace with Ukraine, It's not just about Mr. Putin. It's much more complicated than that. 

00:48:10 JE 

So, faced with all that complexity, all these different actors who matter, all these different demands, would you say that the Red Cross, the ICRC, has a bigger role to play in the future? Or does it need to give away some of its tasks to other organizations, to other actors? Or where do you see that going? 

00:48:30 YD 

I don't know if it would call [sic] a bigger role or not. I think the question is about what will be relevant tomorrow. And I think what is great with the Red Cross in general and the ICRC in particular is that the relevance of this organization has evolved. And I think the question is, how are you allowing possibility to your relevance to evolve? The human in service will change for sure. I wouldn't be surprised that tomorrow an organization like the ICRC would provide service around data to the people that are in crisis. So they will be the guardian of the personal data of people that are in crisis. And maybe in crisis, not just war, it might be migrants or other people that are really at risk. And there is one place, kind of a Google, if you want, humanitarian, that would really protect that. So it could be that kind of service that nobody has thought about, suddenly comes in, you know. I think there will be a lot of ethical questions, in my sense, if I look at the world of tomorrow. So, [we] also need the Red Cross, [it] could also be a very relevant actor and maybe less into concretely providing aid to people. They will still do that, [but] maybe less so because maybe the local actors will be stronger. 

So what I mean is a lot of flexibility in the way you operate, though, with one thing that would make the Red Cross, I think, still relevant is a set of principles that are what we call the humanitarian principle and that are really related to humanity, related to impartiality, related to neutrality, independence, you know, a series of principles that guide you, whatever the service, whatever your endeavor is, and that should remain. So yes, I think the ICRC will remain and the Red Cross will remain an important factor as long as they have the ability to adapt and to understand that the relevance they are providing might shift. 

00:50:18 JE 

Okay, so we're coming to the end of our conversation. I've got one final question for you. It's a big question, so it might be hard to answer, but it's I think an important one. So, how would you say the Red Cross can learn from past shocks, past experiences with crises and emergency to improve its preparedness for the future? What are the limits to learning from the past? How can the Red Cross learn from the past for the future? 

00:50:42 YD 

I think it's an important question. I think it's, I recognize it sounds basic, that in a lot of contexts where you operate, the people that operate with you have memory, the people affected, they've been there sometimes for decades. The people that you deal with, the non-state arm group, the government, some people have been there for decades. So, first, there is an element of respect, where you need to have memory, just also, it's a minimum of respect. You don't come into a country or a situation without trying to understand what you did before, what your colleague did before, what was happening.  So that's an important element for me, a must that is very valid to the present time. So past allows you to be present. 

That's one. B, I think you need to understand why your relevance is shifting and what makes your relevance in this specific context or at this specific moment stronger than another moment. And you need to be aware of that. And I think that is a place where you can bring in the organization a form of reflections and try to understand what made you relevant at that moment and why this relevance has been lost or has been shifted. So, I think there is an element of relevance that makes it important. 

And last but not least, of course, it's the questions of learning how to do it. You know, how do you negotiate? How do you engage? Something that are [sic] coming from the practice that are, some of them are very strategic and are very tactical. I've learned, for example, from colleagues, when I was a young delegate, they told me, “Yves, never ever wear sunglasses, and especially don't wear sunglasses at the checkpoint, never.” Because if you have sunglasses, people need … to see your eyes, you know, it will create a minimum of trust. It sounds so basic, you know, as an example. But this can also be very useful, and that needs to be engaged in the organization and the … so you can see the learning are [sic] different. 

I think the main element, if you want to learn from the past, you need to make it very relevant to the present. Otherwise, organizations don't spend the time to learn. 

00:52:38 JE 

Fascinating. So, there are many different layers to how the organization learns from the past, but also it's all about the people. It's first-hand experiences, and that's what we need to learn from. – It's been a fascinating conversation. We've talked about social media, about data, about your experiences with relief operations in Yemen and Afghanistan. It's been really fascinating. I've certainly learned a lot from it. I hope you enjoyed it too. 

00:53:01 YD 

I did. 

00:53:02 JE 

Thank you, Yves. 

00:53:03 YD 

Thanks to you.

Conversation with Renata Dwan. Recorded 14 February 2024, online.

00:00:00 JE 

So, today I have the privilege of speaking to Dr. Renata Dwan, who is a peace and conflict expert with now two decades of experience working for UN peacekeeping operations around the world. Most recently, Renata has been the chief of UN peacekeeping policy and best practices, and she also was the director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research from 2018 to 2020. Renata is a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, where she has served as deputy director until 2022. She is, in other words, a leading peacekeeping and development expert with extensive experience from Afghanistan to Mali, about which we're going to talk in a minute. So, hello and welcome to Global Shocks, Renata, it's an honor to have you. 

00:00:45 RD 

It's great to be with you, Jan, and hello to you. 

00:00:50 JE 

So just to begin, could you please state your name for the record and very briefly tell us what you do. 

00:00:57 RD 

My name is Renata Dwan. I spent 15 years at the United Nations, mainly in the area of peacekeeping, peacebuilding, crisis response. My last three years were spent as head of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, so looking perhaps more at the arms control side of the peace and security equation. You mentioned I was in Chatham House and I am still connected with Chatham House and have been working on development assistance approaches to what I'm calling politically estranged states. But I also continue to do some consulting from India with the United Nations, most recently to the Office for the Special Envoy on Technology, where I'm working on ideas around international technology governance. 

00:01:44 JE 

So, you've been working on peacekeeping, on how to think about how peacekeeping might need to change, adapting to changes in the world and in world politics. And now you just mentioned that you're recently working on technology, and this is all obviously somehow connected to the broader issue of how bigger changes in the world mean that international organizations need to adapt. They need to somehow track these changes and figure out ways of responding to them. So maybe just very briefly, in your own words, why do you think thinking about these kinds of global shifts and changes, global shocks, why that matters for the organizations that you're familiar with and that you've been working for. 

00:02:24 RD 

I mean, first I would say that what I felt working in peacekeeping, that was both a reflection of a consensus by a significant number of states and organizations around a problem and possibly how to respond to that. So therefore, if that instrument of international order, if that instrument of states is going to be effective both in maintaining legitimacy, in reflecting where consensus around ideas are, and in being able to adapt to crises as understood by those that essentially drives the tool, then it needs to be assessing and constantly able to navigate change. 

So, there's a legitimacy dimension, there's a representation dimension, and then there's an effective delivery dimension. And so, I think that's why peacekeeping, and I would argue all crisis management instruments, need to have that adaptability. Now, of course, and we'll come on to it, whether you adapt in a long and slow and gradual way, whether you adapt to shocks and to sudden changes, they're obviously different drivers. 

00:03:36 JE 

So, you've just mentioned crisis management and the need to sort of adapt to different kinds of crises as they emerge, and the question, of course, of whether we're talking about more protracted, complex issues or crises that sort of erupt very, very suddenly and challenge an institution. Let's talk a bit about peacekeeping because, of course, that's your specialism. So, there are currently 12 peacekeeping missions around the world, if I'm not mistaken, the biggest of which being MINUSCA in the Central African Republic, UNMISS in South Sudan, MINUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and MINUSMA in Mali. You have yourself worked as Chief of Development Coherence for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and as a team leader for the UN's Integrated Operational Teams for Asia and for Mali. 

And during your time working in these posts, thinking about peacekeeping missions around the world, what would you say was the most challenging shock and or more protracted conflict that you had to deal with, that you and your co-workers had to manage? And what were its practical consequences for the mission and for the organization? 

00:04:40 RD 

Well, if we talk about shocks, why are they important for an institution like international peacekeeping in general and then UN peacekeeping in particular? I think it's the unpredictability and the suddenness, but the potential high impact that they have that makes them a subject, let's say, of attention. You can't sort of close your eyes to their occurrence. I also think they present particular challenges for international organizations because of the slow and generally reactive nature in which international organizations tend to respond. 

And again, peacekeeping is a particular form of that. If you look at peacekeeping, the way its budgets, its plans, its mandates are given, they tend to build a lot on precedent. They tend to build a lot on gauging where the Security Council, where troops and police-contributing countries, where financial contributors and where whole states are, what are they willing to accept, what are they willing to support, what's the consensus. So, they tend to be fairly, I would say, progressive and sort of precedent-building instruments that are not massively agile. So global shocks present particular problems for them. 

At the same time, I suppose if you were to use international relations theory, there are also institutions where have a certain display, a certain amount of stickiness. Ways of doing things are well ingrained, budgets are planned in advance, they move relatively slowly. That debate is happening right now, for example, with the request by the Malian authorities, the de facto authorities for the peacekeeping operation to leave the country, there has been agreement to leave, but that's simply, you can't move, you know, over 10,000 troops, people, logistics fast. So that's an example of that stickiness. 

So, I think shocks are really important for international crisis managers and peacekeeping because they present particular problems for the United Nations. I mean, I think what's interesting for me, and when I think back on my time in peacekeeping, if I think about what were the big shocks, they might differ, the shocks that were considered real shocks internally for the organization, and by that I mean secretariat and staff and peacekeeping, then what might be the global shock? 

So let me give you an example. Let's talk about global shocks. The financial crisis of 2008, for example, that was a shock for the world, its suddenness, its contagion, its relative speed. Its effects on UN peacekeeping were not immediate, however. Why? Because those budgets were planned in advance. The Peacekeeping Support Account works in a two-year cycle, and those systems were in place, those mandates were authorized. So that lag of pressure on financing, pressure on funds, actually started to only be felt, I think, from 2010 on. 

And in fact, even you could argue that financial crisis can lead to heightened demand for UN peacekeeping. Troop-contributing countries make money from sending the troops 30% of peacekeeping. Budget goes on salaries to contributing countries for their forces and their equipment. So, you had both a sort of potentially incentive. I'm not saying that incentive alone, but it's a financial income for certain countries. Similarly, countries concerned about crises and the implications of instability and turbulence may have perhaps had attitudes or been willing to consider the deployment of peacekeeping forces. And I'm thinking in particular about that period and the significant activism in places like Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, or West Africa, peacekeeping at that time. 

So, you didn't see an immediate crisis to peacekeeping. And arguably the financial crisis for peacekeeping happened after about 2012, as departments of foreign affairs in the world sort of received from their finance ministries less budget, as the pressures on budgetary spending grew, and the, let's say, financial crisis that the U.N. faced and U.N. peacekeeping was most marked with the arrival of the Trump administration in 2017 and the refusal of the Trump administration to pay its quota or its quoted due of peacekeeping. 

The Arab Spring, I would argue, was more of a shock. Again, less to perhaps the UN peacekeeping instrument in the immediate term, perhaps more to the UN development instruments. Issues around how close were they to whole state authorities, what was the appropriate role of the UN in the face of public protests for change in regimes that were partially or non-democracies, how to respond to those demands from the street. And I think that was more a political and a development and a human rights crisis for the organization than a specific peacekeeping. 

However, the long-term lag effect of the Arab Spring became very much felt with the peace operation in Libya, a special political mission, and then particularly the destabilizing impact that it had on the Sahel with the opening of free flow of weapons, the significant increase of weapons, of munitions, of smuggling of all sorts through and across the Sahel, and the implications that it had for Mali in particular. So that's an example of a long time, a long lag. And 9/11 I would say was a similar in reshaping peacekeeping operations towards much more counter-terrorist groups, towards much more tackling threats of extremist movements and, of course, led to the reformulation of the formulation of mandates that were explicitly in support of states and supporting states, including with the capacity to use force under Chapter VII to defeat military threats by armed groups. 

But if I just, in conclusion, say that some of the more bigger threats that I felt sort of shook the system to its core were not those, as much you might call, macro shocks, but shocks of perhaps a more micro nature. So, I would say the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a political crisis for the UN that really drove significant wedges in the UN, created tension between the UN leadership and the U.S. and then, of course, led to the deployment of a UN political mission and the 2003 canal bombing. That was quite a shock for the UN in terms of understanding itself to be a target, forcing it to rethink issues around its impartiality, its perception of its impartiality, its role, mission protection, et cetera. 

A similar crisis was the 2010 Haiti earthquake that not only led to a huge humanitarian crisis, but also led to the collapse of the UN headquarters and the death of peacekeepers, including the mission leadership of that crisis and how to respond to the calls to lead a humanitarian response while you yourself are a victim of that incident. And then third, I would say the Rwanda and the Srebrenica genocides. The impact that that had on UN doctrine and thinking, particularly around peace operations reform that led to the Brahimi Report of 2010 and comprehensive rethinking of the role and purpose of UN peacekeeping, and then particularly, of course, ultimately the R2P, the responsibility to protect doctrine and placing protection of civilians at the heart of operations. 

So, I'd be interested in making sure that we distinguish between what I would call shocks that are perceived as shocks within the system, and then perhaps more macro-global shocks that impact, but over a much longer lead time. 

00:12:51 JE 

Right, so essentially we're making a drawing a distinction between shocks to the operational structures of the UN itself and its deployments, its missions, and how that changes its own thinking, reflections on how to improve those operations. And then on the other hand, shocks that are sort of generally globally happening and then with a time lag affecting the UN's capabilities and capacities to actually engage. And so you've mentioned the Arab Spring, 9/11, as moments where there was a global shock happening, the financial crisis is another, that had an effect on the operations of the United Nations, needing to rethink perhaps change its engagements to the extent that operations were newly constrained in different ways. 

You mentioned budgetary constraints as a result of the financial crisis. Can you maybe think of an example of a sort of concrete moment in your experience, how that actually changed constraints or sort of leeway in operational considerations? 

00:13:48 RD 

Yeah. So, let's take the financial crisis first of 2008. To some extent, it appeared initially to respond and to confirm the approach that UN peacekeeping, the doctrinal approach UN peacekeeping had been taking about the importance of tackling root causes about issues around preventing conflicts before they happen, about economic deprivation being a long-term cause of instability that could lead to major armed conflict. So, to some extent, I think the UN peacekeeping, and it was right around that time in 2008 that the first attempt to publicly communicate the UN peacekeeping doctrine, the so-called Capstone Project, came out. So, there was almost a sense of, see, we've been telling you these things, that issues around deprivation, issues around significant human need have destabilizing effects, including the threat of conflict. And the UN must respond to that, and also the Security Council member states must respond. 

So, to some extent, it was seen as a “we were right” at the moment. As the fallout of the budgets started to impact UN peacekeeping, you started to get much greater scrutiny from about 2012-13 on the part of member states and the part of General Assembly financial and budgetary bodies as to how large peacekeeping operations should be, what should be a component of them. And that had interesting implications around debates around civil affairs activities, issues around how large should a human rights component be, functions that might be considered protection of civilians type functions. Those functions in mandates and in mission plans became much harder to defend. And while you tended, I can recall, for example, defending a budget for the mission in Mali at one point and having a huge expenditure item around infrastructure and projects for accommodation for large troops and significant outsourcing of huge contracts for the construction of camps. That sailed through, I think it was something in the region of over 9 million, without even a look, a second look. 

But calling for the idea of a driver and one protection of civilians affairs officer with particular focus on child protection became a source of huge contention and almost held up the budget from refusing. So it wasn't even in the scope, but it was the idea of “what can we trim down?” And then, of course, that entered into the whole debate that you saw, that increasing tension between states about concepts of sovereignty versus human rights versus to how invasive, let's say, or intrusive should UN peacekeeping be. So, I think that was an example. 

Another example, I would say, that became particularly notable after the arrival of the Trump administration and its decision to not pay its 28 percent stake. That led to a shortfall, obviously, but it also led the Security Council to start to demand a significant review of every peacekeeping operation. So rather than just renew mandates as a sort matter of course, as an annual, the council started to demand significant reviews. And I can remember going to Lebanon in 2017 to review the UN peacekeeping operation there as part of a multidimensional team. And I was trying to understand what were the sources that we were looking at, because there was no particular election hadn't happened. There hadn't been a – we were not sort of at a point of inflection when you review a mission plan and its priorities. The particular source of irritation on the part of the member state concerned, in this case U.S., had been the idea somehow that they'd come to see from seeing literature of the UN mission, just being distributed magazines, that peacekeepers were just spending money on these so-called quick impact projects. 

Quick impact projects were small portions of money that were given to troops, contingents, so that they could spend some money in terms of building relationships with the communities. And then, this particular instance, it was pictures of Italian forces making pizzas part of a, engagement with the local community. And this was considered indicative of the wastage and the crisis that UN peacekeeping had. So, I felt that one of the implications of that, practically, were that we all became entirely shrinking down our perspective on micro-details and micro-budgets and micro-activities at a time when a much broader challenge was beginning to happen, which is to what extent are UN peacekeeping operations having effective change? To what extent are they delivering on their mandates? What are these, some broader trends that are happening around them in their regions, in a region like Lebanon, with Syria, with the inflow of refugees, or in the case of Mali, with a much broader regional crisis? It became much harder to address those questions. 

And I recall that in 2016 to about 2018, the debate almost centered entirely on sexual exploitations and abuse issues, so issues around the conduct of peacekeepers and issues around the costs of the wastage of UN peacekeeping. And while I don't dispute that those issues aren't important, I felt that we missed an important opportunity to assess, to measure, and to begin a conversation of what was working and what was not. And I think we saw that crisis play out in the last few years in the Sahel particularly, but also in the Congo. 

00:19:40 JE 

Right. So, you've given us a lot of insight on how different kinds of shocks with some kind of time lag affected the capabilities of UN peacekeeping forces, but also just simply very practical kinds of constraints. Would you say that, I mean, thinking back to the moments you just were telling us about, do you think that there were moments where some of these shocks also presented opportunities for the UN peacekeeping forces precisely to innovate its operations? 

00:20:08 RD 

Yeah, undoubtedly. Let's take the situation of the Arab Spring. So, I deployed to Syria in 2012 as part of a very short-lived temporary military ceasefire observation mission from about May to August 2012. I think what I find very interesting about that was it revealed to me a couple of things. First, there was analysis on the ground by UN actors, and in particular by UN development actors and humanitarian actors, about the potential for crisis in that country. And that was coming from about 2010, '11. You saw, for example, UNDP's Human Development Report, WFP warning that the harvest had not been good for a series of years, warnings of food crisis, warnings of the lack of economic opportunities for young people throughout Maghreb, but I'm talking specifically about Syria, and also a trend to watch the significant speed of urbanization in that country and the tensions that was producing between urban and rural, together with the Assad government's economic policies that saw a move away from the subsidies that his father had provided to rural communities in terms of bread, sugar, certain raw basic materials and basic goods. 

So, I found that very interesting because that was a real opportunity, we felt, to try to shape the narrative from the debate in the Security Council. So I recall that a lot of our cables and reporting, where we had our mandate to report every two weeks to the Security Council, it was a very contentious operation, where we were trying to draw attention to societal pressures, to longer-term issues, to tensions in and around us specifically, and in particular, governance, social and economic challenges. At the time, however, there was a strong narrative that we were not going to, you know, that this was about internationalized civil tensions. You had Russia and U.S. opposing views. You had the Western tensions around with the Assad regime ever since the assassination of Hariri in Lebanon. And so, as a consequence of sort of not much interest in assessing these. 

But one factor that I do think the development that the Arab Spring drove for the UN was really a consideration of, do we have across the system analysis, but we're not bringing it to play collectively together? And it drove quite a bit of thinking about how to get better integration of analysis. And that was led under the centralized in the Executive Office of the Secretary General to start to have much more shared analysis and more thinking so that political responses are informed by these longer-term trends that other parts of the House, and in particular development and humanitarian actors, were spotting. So, it did lead to beginning to think about much more system-wide analysis. It also revealed, and I don't think it's answered this problem, that the way that peace operations are designed and crisis response are designed is not sufficient for the locations in the territory. 

So, we observe the territorial boundaries of the countries we're operating in. There's a strong emphasis on national mandate, whole state authority. But some of the problems we were grappling with went over borders and were much more regional in application or even global in application. So, there was a sense that how can we start to have, understand a crisis, a conflict or a crisis, a humanitarian crisis, or usually both, in a broader context, in understanding the regional dynamics, having much more exchange between UN country teams and different adjacent countries, much more perhaps regional pooling of information. 

That has remained very sensitive, and it's very sensitive for peacekeeping, in particular because countries surrounding UN peacekeeping don't want foreign troops on their territory, are concerned about issues about intelligence, and so that has been very slow to be taken up in peacekeeping, but it did lead inside the system, much more thinking about how do we understand the different parts of the house, how do we pool information, and then how do we think regionally. And then I would say, for example, Mali and the inflow of weapons, the inflow, the smuggling, the drugs across the border from across the Sahel and into Mali and then down in Niger and Burkina Faso, led to a lot of thinking about: to what extent were UN peacekeeping operations blind, blind in their information, lack of intelligence capacity, lack of information gathering, lack of ability to have any sense of what's happening to them? And therefore, how do you undertake your responsibilities, both to keep troops safe, but more even as important, protect civilians, that is part of your mandate, if you don't have any anticipatory capacities?

That led to quite a bit of thinking on experimenting with the development of the first UN peacekeeping intelligence policy. And I worked on that policy, which was trying to build a case that UN peacekeepers had to have the ability to gather information, to even just understand immediate threats. It led to the use of, in some contexts, such as Congo drones, used by the UN, of drones to gather aerial information. And it led to the deployment of specialized assets in the case of Mali from NATO intelligence capacity in the mission and integrated it within MINUSMA. So, I think it had to be navigated primarily through the issue of force protection. The most convincing argument we could [think of] to yield change was really making the case with troop and police contributing states that it's your people that are being killed, it's your forces, less the protection of civilians argument. 

But it had important consequences for leading to a much more notion [sic] of what is this much more complex environments we're working in, where you cannot assume boundaries are the conflict ends and how do we think about navigating ourselves to operate in such environments? 

00:26:29 JE 

Very interesting. So, there's a specific initiative to kind of innovate peacekeeping practices. And you mentioned intelligence gathering is one of the things that you pushed for in particular. I'm curious, since very often when there's reporting on peacekeeping in the news and there's public debates about abuses or performance or how are they doing, is it worth staying in this particular conflict or not, people tend to be quick to draw historical analogies with other peacekeeping missions that may have failed or comparing them to further back moments where some kind of international intervention was sort of not working out well or particular things were working out well, we should learn from them. 

Addressing these difficult, protracted questions that you just mentioned and intelligence gathering being sort of one kind of answer in the UN system within these conversations, are historical analogies drawn as well, or is that a background thing? 

00:27:18 RD 

Well, yes, we're drawing obviously on our experience from the past, but not necessarily explicitly. I think it's short-term history, but lack of long-term history. So, I would say that, and that's a phenomenon all over the world. You play your last game, so they fight the last battle. But there was a terrible tendency, and there still is a struggle, I think, to cookie cut, to design missions, and particularly in the period where there were a significant number of missions. You recall like that whole growth area from about 2005, 7, right up until 2014, where you had the deployment of large, big, multi-dimensional missions with a certain set of units. They all would have this amount, more or less, these types of military capacities, more or less these types of police capacities, more or less these types of civilian capacities. And so, I think that tendency to reproduce in a rather short-termism has not been helpful in all contexts. 

And I will give you an example. The MINUSMA mission in Mali, right, in 2013-14. It took over from the ECOWAS mission, from the West African Regional Organization mission. That itself was a historical analogy to Liberia, back to the days of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The idea, the regional organization goes in first because they're fast, and then this more bigger, more capacitated operation follows. But the operations that followed first, it was just simply in many cases a rehatting. You know, you took off your ECOWAS beret and you put on your blue beret. 

But a failure to really think about what a much more hostile and much, much more austere mission that was, and much more austere in terms of the scale, the size of the country, the lack of water, the lack of infrastructure, just even just thinking about how troops would work, operate, and engage, did not benefit from historical analogies and modeling on other contexts, perhaps like South Sudan, perhaps like MONUSCO. 

On the whole, I've tended to think that some of the historical analogies are not helpful. And so let's take, for example, Libya in 2011-12. There was, I think, by the proponents of protection of civilians, some false conclusions or analogies made with the Kosovo scenario. So we were going to avoid a potential significant threat to protection of civilians by supporting a NATO-led intervention. And that was itself begged questions to the extent, the scale of the threat, certainly at a rhetorical level and in some cases actions Gaddafi did unleash forces at Libyan protesters. But it did build this sort of idea that you could get in fast. You could have a NATO-led, primarily an aerial mission, and it would be quick. 

So that's, I think, an example of a historical analogy that might be a bit skewed. And then this idea that the lessons of Rwanda and Srebrenica meant that you had to drive a response quickly when civilians were under imminent threat of danger. I think the problem with that is that it drove this idea of never-ending peace operations, because there was always, or there's quite often, a set of civilians under threat and under imminent threat of violence. And distressing as that is, there's a sort of an infinite perpetuity of UN crisis intervention that there simply isn't the political will, nor even the operational material capacity to respond to at all times. 

And in the case, then, of Libya, I was also struck with the historical analogy, one of the analogies, the historical lessons that were drawn, was that Libyans remember the UN positively from its experiences of decolonization in the immediate period after World War II. Therefore, they will be favorably disposed to the United Nations because there's a sort of a historical mindset appreciation to the UN. And while I don't know enough about Libya to say if that's indeed true or not, I think one always needs to be very careful as an outside actor about how the extent to which any domestic population feels good about any set of actors, regardless of their statements, wills, or dispositions, and I think that's when historical analogies are drawn or badly drawn, and then I ... I think maybe sometimes then there's a tendency in the UN to be too short of memory. 

So, you look to the last experience. So, in Libya, it was like, we need to move away from these large, heavy, multi-dimensional peacekeeping forces. They're intrusive, they upset the population, and they're difficult to sustain. So, the argument was we're going to go for a light, quick political mission, much more engaging and working with Libyan actors. But there was a case to be made that a significant large-scale presence of military forces could have prevented possibly the scale of arms that moved out of Libya, both the finding of caches, large caches of arms, and their transportation to various parts of Africa. And there was an argument to be made that if there had been a deployment very quickly like in a sort of East Timor context, perhaps under UN leadership, it would have had to have been under UN blue helmets. 

But could that have done a better job to sort of navigate the profusion of weapons that were freely passing? Perhaps not. But I think that's an example that I would make of a tendency to look at the immediate past, but perhaps not a tendency to look at a longer past. And when we think about the Congo and the failures of the mission in the 1960s, I often think about when people say, oh, this new phase of stabilization missions, you think, yes, but the historic analogy goes right back to the 1960s. 

So, historical analogies, on the whole, tend not to be drawn too much. They tend to be quite short-term. And I'm not sure they're always effective because they're very externally focused and based on how we understood the issue as opposed to a deep reading and analysis of the country or the conflict in question. 

00:33:31 JE 

So, it sounds like what you're saying is there are two kinds of ways in which analogies play a role in this context. On the one hand, we've got within the United Nations system conversations where analogies are being drawn in the sense of short-term comparisons, and you're saying many of them are too short-term and don't really go back far enough in order to actually draw more complex lessons maybe. 

On the other hand, we've got public conversations where historical analogies are sort of used every now and then and sometimes very spontaneously and maybe not with too much detail. And there you're saying that some of those historical analogies tend to sort of break down particular past conflicts to single lessons or maybe just one or two lessons and then plugged into a recommendation for this is how UN peacekeeping should be run if we want to avoid another Rwanda or Srebrenica, and that can be reductive as well in a different way. 

00:34:23 RD 

I think that's true. I mean, often they're a confirmation of bias. 

00:34:26 JE 

Right, yeah. 

00:34:27 RD 

But in fairness, I think you also have to recognize the nature of the decision-making around a UN peacekeeping operation is quite constrained. So, you have a Security Council deciding to take the matter up an agenda, usually instructing the Secretary General to come back with options. That's often quite time-limited, that phase of fact-finding, let's say, that can take place. And then you have the attempt to try to get a mandate agreed. 

And as you know, well, as a scholar of IR, that's as much a reflection of understanding where the powers on the council are in terms of what understanding they have of the crisis in question, what are they prepared to accept, what do they care less about. And so, there's a real pressure, including and in particular in the council, to use the standard language from Chapter VII, to use the standard language for protection of civilians, because that's just easier to negotiate. You can appeal to precedent, as opposed to [inaudible] nuance. That led in [sic] the 2015 report, the High-Level Independent Panel for Peace Operations for reform of peace operations, tried to talk about a two-phase, or tried to propose a two-phase planning phase that recognized that because of a crisis, the Security Council needs to act relatively quickly, and a mission may have to deploy. But could the mission build some time, could it deploy with a relatively rudimentary mandate, and then come back after a period of time on the ground, two, three months, with more comprehensive reports and having studied the situation, having spoken with lots of interlocutors on the ground, this is where we think we need to put the bulk of our effort resources. 

A similar debate is underway at the moment on development assistance in crisis, whether you can sort of do a two-phase approach. So you acknowledge the emergency, but you recognize that any big, long, significant planning assumptions that you might make could be flawed and need to be tested. And could you do therefore a quick and dirty followed by a more comprehensive review? 

00:36:23 JE 

Let's go back to Mali for just a second. Since we're talking about lessons being drawn, what's the bottom line of a particular operation, of a particular mission? How do we learn from that in order to deploy missions more effectively in the future? Of course, in the case of Mali, what's on the horizon is withdrawal despite ongoing tensions. We know that in 2013-14, the UN launched its MINUSMA mission. Since then, however, more Malians have joined insurgent groups. Fatalities have increased. Over 300 MINUSMA personnel have been killed. And I think only UNIFIL in Lebanon has been more fatal to peacekeepers. And the mandate has run out. The UK and Sweden have already pulled out early. France suspended its own counter-terrorism operations. 

So, it looks like another case of withdrawal despite ongoing tensions. And perhaps there are signs of change or signs of the UN learning from this. But I'm wondering what your perspective on that is. Are lessons already being drawn? How does this work? Is there an ongoing conversation trying to sort of already evaluate Mali? Are there signs that … that the UN is trying to reform based on that kind of experience? 

00:37:29 RD 

Well, I can't say speak to what are the current debates in UN peace scheme because [of] not being there. But let me say just a couple of things. I think Mali was a chronicle of a death foretold for many in the UN. It was one of the most contentious missions to set up. It was highly divisive inside the UN system. And the debates were, at the time, exactly around the issues that have continued to plague the operation and plague the situation, which is, is there a peace to keep? Are the peacekeeping operations there for a purpose of facilitating, enabling, and supporting an agreement between warring parties? Or are we there to assist a legitimately elected state, defeat militarily threat? 

There were many who felt that even if the latter was the case, that the Malian state faced an existential threat, and you must remember, of course, in 2012, it really was a crisis situation in Timbuktu with significant human impact. The sense was that the instrument to apply was not a peacekeeping operation, but rather a special political mission, a political effort to try to explore what the scope for some sort of politically negotiated solution was possible. And of course, you had a long, long-standing tension between the Tuareg communities and populations in the North. You had an ethnic tension. You had groups of people feeling that the central state had failed them and wanting alternatives to a Bamako-led regime and system of governance. 

That debate was really bitter inside the UN. And some of it was inter-bureaucratic concerns, was which department leads political missions and which department leads peacekeeping. But I think it really stemmed from a fundamental concern that UN peacekeepers were being deployed in a context and to an environment for which the instrument was not designed. As a consequence of that tension, it never amassed, I would say, the full support of perhaps the full all hands joining together of the mission. 

I think there were some humanitarian entities that had some concerns about how close they wanted to be to the UN peacekeepers. The UN peacekeeping operation was a vehicle for human rights presence and office and engagement, but that human rights tension often came into conflict with the military and police sort of perception of themselves trying to help a state under threat from various armed groups, independence-seeking and/or with more criminal agendas. And the blurring of those agendas was very difficult. So, I would say that Mali was an example of a place where there was a lot of “I told you so, I told you so,” all the time. 

And we found it extremely difficult, I say that as leading a headquarters team, an integrated team, military, police, civilian, just to really sort of get that sense of buy-in and support across the house at various points, including amongst the member states, as well as different departments. It was also formidably challenging in terms of a terrain. And it does raise something that people have written about, which is can peacekeeping deploy to large countries? And it's something that even not just UN peacekeepers, but large US or country-led coalitions have had to consider as well. 

So, you had just even the austerity of the environment and the scale of distance really a challenge. So, I would say the lessons are being learned, but the nature of UN peacekeeping is it's quite good at micro lessons as it goes along. So, there's a lot of lesson learning of particular instances – how did this use of intelligence, how does this, … – a lot of work done to try to do force protection, to provide training to troops, to help them to do demining. There's a lot of sort of lessons of these that can be applied in many peacekeeping perhaps, but perhaps the bigger question, which is: should peacekeeping operations be deployed in support of a whole state with an effort to militarily defeat its enemies? Is that an appropriate use of the UN peacekeeping instrument? Can it do that effectively? And if not, what is the role for UN peacekeeping in conflicts such as that in Mali? I think is the macro questions that are harder to engage. 

There's a little bit of a tendency in the organization sometimes to sort of take comfort or solace from the fact, well, this is about the lack of political will amongst the member states, and specifically the P5, and were they to be united, as we have all these cases of success, let's say Liberia, when united, when engaged. But I think that's a slight bit facile and superficial an explanation right now, because arguably, up until the coup in Mali, there was relative consensus on the part of the Security Council. And as states who are quite protective of state sovereignty and protective of territory and found common cause in counterterrorism for many, many years after 9/11, it represented a relative area of agreement where the tension was what was the expectations of the mission vis-a-vis holding the state accountable for its behavior. 

So, the tensions that happened on the Security Council and the tensions that happened on the ground were very much centered around human rights allegations of abuses by Malian forces, by issues around governance challenge. I remember how difficult it was for launching governance discussions in the Security Council. This, after two decades of discussions of root causes, governance being so critical to a conflict, that came much more belatedly onto the agenda on Mali. 

00:43:32 JE 

Right. So, talking about effectiveness and how to evaluate how effective a peace operation is, obviously gets us to this question of – if we want to know how effective the solution is, we also need to make sure that we understand the problem as well as possible. And you've already mentioned intelligence is one way of doing that, getting as close to what's really going on the ground as possible in order to tailor responses to that. And we've talked about your experience and how UN peace operations deal with emergencies on the ground, how that's changed over time. 

I'd be keen to zoom out a little bit and hear from your side what you think about how the perception of crises works in the context of UN peace operations. Is there a stage where there is an opportunity to make sure we're really fully understanding what the root problem is, we can really tailor our response to that? Or is there a cookie cutter response of something as a crisis: here are a couple of standard responses that we're going to pursue and then see whether they were effective?

00:44:27 RD 

I think I worked for in 2018 in the preparation of the first UN-World Bank joint study on conflict prevention. It was called Pathways to Peace. The Bank, being an institution full of PhDs and economists, brought a rigor that was very helpful and not as common, let's say, in the UN, to the analysis of: is the problem an information one? Is it an information and analysis gap? Is that what we have? And I think they confirmed something that I've always been struck by, which is, we tend to have a lot of information, and we tend to have good analysis, and especially these efforts that I think have progressed significantly in the UN to try to bring together the various pictures from the political, the humanitarian development actors, aided by significant failures, for example, in Sri Lanka that led to much more of a thinking about how do you identify risks early, how do you get early warning. 

But it's come up against two problems. One is a political problem, and one is perhaps more of a kind of structural problem. The political problem is that member states remain enormously cautious and reticent around early warning. And that's as much about feeling that it could be misused against them, but it sort of ties the hands of actors in the secretariat to think about conflict threats, both in longer term as well as in medium term. And so that lack of political willingness, not just in the Security Council, but also amongst regional partners, and then also even amongst national actors, has made it very difficult for the U.N., even if there was a concerted effort, to really tackle analysis issues, and specifically how to get early warning up the chain, understood, assessed, analyzed, and out. So that's the political concern, and that's not new, and that will only get worse, I think, as a consequence of what's happening, you know, in terms of Security Council tensions and paralysis more broadly. 

The structural challenge, and this really came through in the World Bank UN study, which is one can be very good at listing all the factors that could lead to instability, but it's very hard to identify any specific trigger. You had all of the factors that you acknowledged in the Arab Spring, but the immolation by one man in protest of a fruit seller in Tunisia was not anticipated. I find that there is the structural challenge of you list all the sort of challenge, you have a fairly good insight, but it's still very hard to predict crises and particularly hard to predict response. And that, I think, remains a structural problem that we haven't really come to terms with. And the difficulty about that is you're then always reacting to the trigger point when it happens. And depending where the trigger point happens, that leads to a different set of political discussions with member states, a different set of negotiations and bargaining in terms of how you respond and what is required. And I think that remains a significant problem. 

00:47:38 JE 

If we think about better prediction and the need for really understanding a crisis across its different dimensions, we've already talked a little bit about how crisis management can be very reduced to a particular domain, a particular issue – or it can be very comprehensive. And there's, of course, a scale depending on what exactly the conflict at hand is about and so on. There are calls for a more comprehensive approach to crisis management across different sectors. And of course, it's a question of whether we've really advanced in that direction or whether that's an ongoing debate. But my question is, how have UN peacekeeping operations in practice depended on coordinating with other actors, other organizations? And might that be sort of one way of thinking about better understanding crises? 

00:48:24 RD 

I’d just caution us, Jan, from thinking that the challenges that peacekeeping faces is simply an information problem. I mean, the assumption is that if we had a true understanding of what's really driving a conflict in country X or Y or region Z, we could then design the tools to come back with that. And I don't think that's the case. And I don't think that's the case for lots of reasons, including what are the dominant ideas at any one time around which there's consensus by major powers. That, I think, is the crisis that we should talk about a little bit. 

But you are seeing a proliferation of crisis management actors. And that has been taking place effectively since the end of the Cold War. And if you think about the EU and the early days in the Balkans, and then, of course, the decision to take on crisis management and military and civilian perspectives. You have the African Union in 2005, you have obviously ECOWAS, you have many sub-regional organizations, and then of course you have private mediation entities happening.

In some respects, the plurality is good because it potentially gives you a more range of options, right? It gives actors on the ground, it gives host authorities, or it gives warning parties options to engage with, with a range of actors, and that is potentially very good. The problem is understanding and coordinating the plurality of initiatives. And I think, for example, if you see today in the case of Sudan, or if you look at Ukraine, or even if you think about Libya, where you have a plurality of mediation initiatives, you have different people coming in and out of town, all of them declaring that they're bringing with them a peace proposal. 

And that inability to work together, that multiplicity, that can allow warring parties to trade, to bargain, to negotiate a little bit, play them off each other. It can also result in a dispersal of effort and resources. And it certainly leads warring parties to feel that the pressure imposed by external actors on them bringing their conflict to an end, and thinking here about Libya. The jury is out, but so far I'm thinking that if you look at the case of mediation, if you think that take the Horn of Africa, if you take Libya, and to some extent if you take Ukraine even, the plurality of mediating offers, initiatives, and actors has not helped any of those conflicts in the resolution. If anything, it's just led to reinforcement of the protracting sides. 

And if you think about Syria, you're effectively no longer talking about civil conflicts, you're talking about internationalized civil conflicts that to all extent and purpose services look like interstate war with via proxies. And I think that's a factor that has been done. The second dimension is even when you have agreement, and you've had various instances of this in UNMISS in the South Sudan, in West Africa where you have a hierarchy and where a UN special envoy works quite closely with a regional organization, the envoy. There was an attempt for that in the Balkans too. You saw that in Syria when you had the UN and the League of Arab States working together. 

That coordination is challenging, sometimes because the same party, the same government state will take different positions in each organization. So, in Libya, again, we saw even the African Union taking a different stand than the League of Arab States, of which many of the state party's members were the same. So, I think it can lead to quite difficult coordination and a huge amount of effort gets spent on coordination. And if I think about my time in Afghanistan, I think a huge part of that fault was we spent so much time negotiating with all the international actors on the ground there that there was very little time spent talking and thinking and engaging with Afghans and some of the forces and actors. So, I think there is that. 

Then there's an issue, I think, of the lessons of regional organizations. So, we have a multiplicity of partners on the ground and getting involved in crisis management. But I do think there's been a sobering experience in the last 10 years for regional organizations in crisis management, where some of the assumptions and I worked in the EU for the planning of its first EU mission in Bosnia. And there, there was a lot of confidence that we're going to do better than the UN because we're European and we know this country and we're organized and we have resources and training, et cetera. 

Well, the EU found itself facing many of the same issues in Bosnia and other questions, questions about whole state engagement, questions about impartiality, questions about how to affect change, questions about how to build trust between parties. And I think the AU has grappled also in Somalia. You've seen some of those tensions, ECOWAS. And if you look at the mini-lateral initiative in the Sahel, the G5, have really struggled to equip themselves financing. 

So, I think there's been a sobering moment of truth for the idea that it's not an either-or. And we're seeing the debate move less around division of labor, here's where regional organizations are better placed, here's where the UN [is]. So, some broader, I think, questioning of, are we using the right tools? Are the crisis management solutions that we're proposing the right ones and the effective ones for these sorts of protracted complex conflicts based on the liberal institutional model that was that peacekeeping dominated and that it in turn has shaped doctrines of regional organizations? 

So, I see that this plurality of organizations in crisis management today, both a reflection of competing ideas, but also a reflection of that there's a wider missing answer, right? That there's no one actor. And so you're seeing now more mini-lateral initiatives, which may be based on more interest-based, more limited, and a return to more minimal concept of containing a conflict, containing the worst of its regional spillover, the worst of its humanitarian impacts, rather than thinking about a comprehensive vision for resolution and long-term stabilization and peacebuilding that perhaps we had in the period after the Cold War. 

00:54:38 JE 

We're nearing the end of our time, so I want to just zoom out a little bit further. And you've mentioned geopolitical tangents already, power politics playing obviously a role in terms of decisions about what missions are actually going to be carried out, which missions aren't, what is possible. And of course, what we're seeing right now is a whole lot of geopolitical tangents, especially among the great powers sitting on the Security Council. And all of this making matters more difficult, as it seems, for most international organizations. 

And we've had at the General Assembly in September 2023, Secretary General Guterres warning that the world is becoming “unhinged” while global governance is no longer “fit for purpose”. How are UN peacekeeping operations practically affected by these kinds of great power shifts? Would you say that's a sort of an uncertain constraint that UN peacekeeping has to live with? Or can peacekeeping operations change in order to adapt to that more easily? Is that a possibility? 

00:55:36 RD 

What I would say is, first, that the tensions you see in the Security Council since 2022 and the full-scale invasion by Russia of Ukraine, those tensions were obvious since 2011 in Libya and the reaction of Russia and China and other states to what they saw as protection of civilians mission becoming a regime change operation. And that has played out in Syria. It's played out in all the other missions. It's played out in issues about pushback on human rights. So, I think peacekeeping has been grappling with this reality for 10 years. And it is not new for peacekeeping. Peacekeeping doesn't find itself in a global crisis since, I think, 2020 and COVID and the turbulence of that area. I think peacekeepers have been grappling with this eroding consensus since at least 2011. 

Now, what does that mean and how has peacekeeping responded to that? I think you've seen, therefore, you've seen no new peacekeeping operations since 2014, no new peacekeeping operations. The operations that you see that are being launched are political missions. And in the case of Haiti just these past recent days, you've seen the deployment of a Kenyan-led police force in support of the government of the state of Haiti to navigate the challenge, the violent challenge of gangs, of armed gangs. You've seen the Security Council recognize that – Kenya demanded that, even if it wasn't fully necessary. But you are not even working through the UN, nor are you working through a significant coalition force. 

So, we're going to be in this period of retrenchment for quite some time. We have MINUSMA closing, calls for MONUSCO to close down. So, things aren't looking great, and I think we will have this period of retrenchment. You've seen peacekeeping try to respond to that political tension by focusing a lot on what I talked about before, the performance issues, equipment issues, the management issues, the navigation of abuse and accountability strengthening. So, I see that trend continuing for quite some time. And I don't see it only about the P5 and the consensus between Russia, the United States, China, and others. I really see that as also that bigger debate about sovereignty versus a more intrusive and inclusive sense of what type of model of states and human rights and order that we have, that pushback is happening as much from states in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere as it is on the council. 

So, you've seen, for example, Ethiopia and the Tigray conflict, just seeing how difficult it was to even bring that on to the Security Council, despite the fact that 700,000 people died in that conflict in 18 months. So, I think peacekeeping is going to try to do what it did during the Cold War, which is to lay low, have a narrower agenda, be relatively effective at seeking what it is. Where I think it might also wish to look is looking at much more modular type activities. Can a UN peacekeeping, can the UN secretary provide specific areas of assistance in conflict scenarios, whether it might be specific bespoke security sector reform support, whether it might be specific election management support at request or agreement of parties, that it might need to look at a more agile ability to come in rather than the large multi-dimensional mission or the single military ceasefire observation. There's got to be some of the models between those two. Can it demonstrate that, I think, will be a big question. 

And then the other aspect is perhaps that's actually going to drive more emphasis on partnership and working with regional actors to build that legitimacy in that sense that that global governance framework still has relevance and value and added benefit for regional actors to do things, maybe bring capacities to support strengthening of their own initiatives and structures that without which they couldn't manage. 

00:59:47 JE 

How can peacekeeping operations learn from past experiences, past shocks, past crises, to improve preparedness for the future? 

00:59:56 RD 

I would encourage thinking about waves and trends. I think it would be good to have a reflection on the impact of the shock of 9/11 on international crisis management, because it inexorably moved the debate on international crisis management away from what had been a focus on inter-ethnic tensions, or hopeful on civil conflicts, on emerging protection of civilians, to the idea of threats from armed groups, threats from extremism, and an attempt to try to look at stabilization and a model. 

We're in a post-counterterrorist moment in international crisis management, but we haven't yet figured out what moment we're in. And I think that would be quite interesting, so that the assumption isn't, well, this is what the peacekeeping model is, but maybe a reflection on what we were doing, why we intervened, how we intervened, and where we intervened, rethink that a bit or unpack that from that counter-terrorism lens, I think could be helpful. 

The other area is that it's not just a crisis for UN peacekeeping, Jan. There is a broader crisis for crisis management. I refer to it with regional organizations having had also their own sort of difficult experiences learning with crisis management response. But the shock, too, of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of Afghanistan in August 2021 is also a shock that needs some reflection on. Because what I think it showed us is that even the most powerful states, even the most resourced interventions, even the most consensus-based, at least in the initial years, of Afghanistan, as opposed to Iraq, failed to sow the seeds of some form of what you might call stable democratic accountable order. 

And I think that would lead to more significant rethinking of the liberal institutional project. What are the states we're trying to build? Are we trying to build states? What's the requisite of state functionality and legitimacy that we're trying to support as outside actors, I think is one that we really need to look at. And then the final point I would say is, I think collectively we need to have a response to crisis management where the drivers are not necessarily a political agenda. And here I'm thinking, how do most people die today outside of significant large wars like Ethiopia recently, Ukraine today, most of people die in countries like Mexico and in Venezuela, if you look at violent deaths, I'm talking about violent deaths now, and they're in non-wars scenarios, but scenarios that look and feel a lot like war in terms of violence and in terms of threats to civilians. We have very little tools to even think about that, very little tools to even think about addressing it. 

So it gets back to the question of how do we understand, and even in Mali or Central African Republic, how do we understand when the assumptions we've been making about peacemaking and peacebuilding have centered around political agendas and power sharing, where that may not even be the agenda, where the agenda might be a difference about economics, about greed. We've had the greed and grievance debate for many years. It would behoove us, I think, to think a little bit about some of the instruments that we might need to think about responding to why conflicts are quite as protracted as they are today. 

01:03:24 JE 

Well, lots to reflect on. I've certainly learned a great deal in our conversation. Thank you so much. You've been very generous with your time, and it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. 

01:03:34 RD 

Thank you, Jan. 

Conversation with Maurice Obstfeld. Recorded 27 February 2024, online.

00:00:00 JE 

Hello and welcome to Global Shocks. Maurice Obstfeld, could you just briefly introduce yourself in your own words? 

00:00:06 MO 

I'm currently a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. I have formerly been a, for many years, a professor of economics at the University of California in Berkeley. And prior to retiring from Berkeley, I served on the Council of Economic Advisors in the US Obama administration, and as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. 

00:00:33 JE 

Right, so in your own words, from your point of view as an economist, why does thinking about global shocks matter? 

00:00:40 MO 

Well, all economies are to a greater or less extent attached to the rest of the world through trade linkages, but also other linkages, communications linkages, movements of people, communications, diseases, the climate. So, to pretend that any economy can be removed from shocks or disturbances that occur abroad is somewhat delusional. And so, particularly in the economic realm, these interactions between domestic economies and foreign economies are key conduits for the transmission of shocks and for the mechanisms that intermediate how domestic policies affect the domestic economy, even those are affected by global linkages. So, it seems to me that the global perspective is one that is absolutely essential for understanding a range of phenomena, but especially economic policies and the evolution of the economy. 

00:01:43 JE 

So, in your own words, what's it like to work at the International Monetary Fund? What does the IMF do exactly? 

00:01:50 MO 

The IMF was established in the 1940s with the purpose of avoiding some of the worst economic policies that countries carried out during the Great Depression, often to their mutual detriment, with political ramifications that arguably helped pave the way to the Second World War. Initially, I would say that the goals of the fund were modest relative to what it does today, although at the time they were incredibly far-reaching, but basically to govern the exchange rate relationships among economies, to promote the liberalization of international payments connected with international trade, and to provide a source of credit for economies that might find themselves in difficulty in meeting their commitments to manage exchange rates in the way that the fund system required, or that might need credit for other reasons to simply avoid a huge economic downturn. 

This exchange rate system that was built into the original IMF articles of agreement, which was a system of exchange rates fixed to the United States dollar, but occasionally adjustable, went by the board a little over 50 years ago in the early 1970s. And since then, the fund has evolved to still exercise surveillance over exchange rate arrangements, but to allow countries to pursue the exchange rate systems that they feel are most compatible with their abilities to use domestic policies to preserve domestic prosperity. The fund has also expanded in the realms of providing capacity development for countries and moreover, overseeing issues connected with financial stability. 

In the period just after World War II, the financial interconnections among countries were minimal, basically very little private finance, some official finance, tightly regulated financial markets around the world. Since the 70s, we've moved to a landscape with less regulated financial markets, which have exploded in breadth and scope, and have raised serious concerns about financial stability, as we saw in the 2008-2009 crisis. So, the fund now undertakes considerable activity evaluating the health of countries' financial systems and worrying about the interconnections among those financial systems, and that those might lead to outcomes that are unfortunate in the sense that the 2008-2009 crisis was also unfortunate. 

So, a large expansion in the realm of the economic transactions that the fund is concerned with, but also expansion in terms of concerns on other public goods that are relevant to macroeconomic outcomes, such as climate and global public health. 

00:04:36 JE 

So, we've just talked a little bit about global shocks in general. And then you gave the example of the financial crisis, of course, of 2008, 2009. And now my question to you is, during your time working at the IMF, what stood out to you as the most notable shock that the organization had to deal with and that you were confronted with in particular? And how did you or your colleagues or the IMF as an organization deal with that shock? What was the sort of initial response? What was the go-to response by the International Monetary Fund? 

00:05:09 MO 

When I came in, the world economy was still digesting the aftereffects of some events in August 2015 that really set the global economy back. For several years, China had been suffering from a sharply declining stock market and from capital outflows. It actually used up about 1/4 of its $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves trying to prevent those capital outflows from bringing about a sharp depreciation of its currency, which it feared would have negative ramifications. 

And in August of 2015, China carried out a fairly puzzling and non-transparent and unexpected shift in its exchange rate regime, which involved the devaluation, a small devaluation of the yuan, but also in a very, very sort of murky guidance about what to expect going forward. And this did set off something of a panic in financial markets. And the concern was that if China were to simply let its exchange rate go, this would have ripple impacts across the Asian region, which could be destabilizing. 

So, in point of fact, the markets remained fairly volatile for roughly nine months after this, with a lot of concerns about what direction China was taking, what would be the impact on Chinese growth, which of course is a major component of global growth and particularly important in the dynamic Asian region. So, this was a problem that, it wasn't up to the fund to manage, it was mainly up to the Chinese authorities to manage, but one where we, consulted with them and gave advice and where I think the worst outcomes were avoided. 

Fast-forward to June of 2016, another shock we were concerned about was the Brexit referendum. We in the fund, I think like everyone else, observing the ongoing events in the UK, I did not think it's likely that the referendum on Brexit would go in the negative direction that it did. We way underestimated the power of social media and the power of online targeting using granular data about voters to modify electoral outcomes. I think we also underestimated the depth of negative healing toward the EU and the British ruling establishment generally in regions that had been, regions of the UK that had been de-industrialized, where staple industries such as mining have disappeared over the years, which were severely depressed, where formerly solid labor voting blocks were in transition in many ways politically. 

So, at the fund, we sort of gamed out what would be the economic consequences of Brexit, although that was very speculative because you didn't know what type of relationship the UK would negotiate with the EU post-Brexit. That took years, something else we could anticipate. But we also worried about the impact on financial markets. Given what we had just seen in relationship to China, would the financial markets become more volatile? And could that have a similarly suppressing effect on the world economy as the Chinese events seem to have had for nine months? 

Now, as it happens, in June of 2016, the world economy was just starting to recover from the turbulence of the previous nine months. In fact, a number of indicators were turning up just at the time of the Brexit vote, which is unfortunate because it turned out not to have the sort of systemic financial market consequences that we feared. That being said, it did set off considerable uncertainty regarding the UK economy, regarding its ultimate relationship with the EU, and that played out over a stretch of years. I think it's fair to say that Brexit did not do any favors for the UK economy, but the extent to which you can directly blame Brexit remains contested. Certainly, it's hard to discern the positive effects that were advertised by the proponents of Brexit in the campaign leading up to the referendum vote.

The next major shock, I think, was the Trump election in 2016, for which the Brexit vote had, in some sense, been a bellwether in terms of unveiling the scope for social media to play a big role in elections, the scope for voters whose political leanings you think you understand, rapidly shift position in the face of their own frustration cultural and economic. And the challenge of Trump was to really upend the U.S. economy's sense of global leadership, to withdraw from key international bodies like the WHO, like the Paris Agreement, to turn toward protection to undertake a trade war with China, but also protectionist measures against allies, not just against China. 

So, this, I think, was another shock to the world economy. The [inaudible] effects were offset by other factors. For example, the big US tax cut in 2018 was a positive, at least in terms of macro stimulus. By the time COVID emerged, I think we were seeing the negative effects, Trump's trade war on global activity. But of course, by that time, I had left the fund. I left in December of 2018. 

00:10:27 JE 

Right. I'm curious to hear a bit more about the inner workings of the International Monetary Fund. So, let's picture a shock hitting the global economy. What exactly happens within the IMF? How does the fund respond? How does it decide whether this is a threat to international or global stability? Which aspect of it is a threat, which aspect might be an opportunity? What's going on exactly at those moments? 

00:10:51 MO 

Well, the institution is a complex one with some functional departments. So, the department I headed, research, is a functional department. So is fiscal affairs. So is money and capital markets, which oversees the financial stability work. So is strategy policy review, which basically is the repository of fund doctrine and policy, as it were, and oversees all of the country work for consistency with fund philosophy, fund practices, fund understanding of macroeconomics and financial economics. 

But having much of the country work, there are also the regional departments which encompass the various country teams. So the European Department, the African Department, the Asian Department, Middle East, Central Asia. And each of these departments is a collection of country teams which engage intensively with the authorities of the countries they are in charge of. And this engagement is ongoing. 

It's not just about crises, it's about regular review of policy and economic outlook and regular missions to the country to discuss the policy direction and make recommendations, which recommendations are, of course, non-binding unless a country is negotiating a fund program, in which case the conditions of the fund program, the policy conditionality does become binding as a condition for obtaining resources from the fund. 

You know, when a shock hits, generally, some countries may be more affected than others. I was not really present for a truly, truly global shock, such as the financial crisis of 2008, 2009, like the Lehman shock. But more often the shock is centered on a particular country, but it may have spillover effects abroad. And then the focus is twofold. First on the country where the shock originates, and secondly on its neighbors who may feel repercussions. There's not much we can do about the neighbors except to heighten scrutiny and engagement with the authorities. In the country where the shock originates, there would be intensified discussions and intensified scrutiny. 

So, in the case of China, I would say the authorities were quite open to discussions with the Fund and to the Fund's recommendations. They, of course, did what they wanted. The Fund's recommendations were not binding. But I think the fund's advice was quite consistent with the approach the authorities took. And whether the fund deserves credit or not is open to debate. But I think at the end of the day, that particular crisis was well managed. 

With respect to Brexit, I would say the back and forth with the UK over the years following the referendum vote, while agreements, well, attempts were made to negotiate a withdrawal agreement, with the EU was more contentious. The IMF would do its forecasts of different arrangements and how they would affect the UK and Europe. To the extent these were negative for the UK, the UK authorities would generally reject them. You know, I think the chaotic nature of the UK process spoke for itself, really. And the fund's view is that the UK should try to preserve as much of the structure of European supply chains that had been established over the previous decades as possible and to be as little disruptive as possible. But that's not the way the politics went. 

At the same time, the private sector sort of did what it could to protect itself from the ongoing uncertainty. But the period was, clearly negative to the ... in terms of, very depressed investment, which continues, and rather tepid growth. There's not much we could do about it at the fund except to, sort of preach to the unconverted and, just sort of take the opprobrium in the British political space and in segments of the British press. 

00:15:02 JE 

Right. So, let's stay with Brexit for another moment. If I picture economists working at the IMF trying to figure out a policy, a response to something like Brexit, do historical precedents play a role in IMF deliberations? Or is it rather a kind of background matter that isn't really talked about all that much? 

00:15:20 MO 

You know, fortunately, there are relatively few examples of such a self-inflicted wound in history. I mean, we do have great arrangements breaking up, but it's usually in the context of a wider geopolitical conflict, kind of makes it impossible to tease out the, specific effects of what one country is doing. So, this was a, this was in some, I wouldn't say it's unique, but there aren't a lot of precedents. So, you know, the main analytical tools would be more econometric, just trying to say, well, suppose we increase trade costs between the EU and the continental EU and the UK, you know, what effect do we think that would have on GDP? Or suppose we increase uncertainty, what effect would that have? 

So, it's all rather, you know, you have to make assumptions. So, it's all debatable, but, you know, a large number of studies that we did that were done by private sector, academic economists in the UK all pretty much pointed to the same conclusion. And you can argue about the precise numbers, but they were negative and they were not negligible. 

00:16:30 JE 

So, if we just think a little bit more about global shocks and what they mean for an organization like the International Monetary Fund, I mean, there's lots of talk at the moment about “polycrisis,” referring to the fact that multiple crises happen at the same time and they intersect and overlap and mutually compound each other. So, does that term mean anything to you, and does the IMF actually treat crises case by case as individual occurrences or rather as connected parts of longer-term historical patterns of turbulence? 

00:17:00 MO 

It depends on the country and it depends really on the shock. I mean, when, again, the China episode I described to you, it was clear that the problems were originating inside China, but there were potential spillovers to other countries that we needed to be aware of in our policy advice. You know, when a small country runs into debt problems, that will possibly affect its immediate neighbors if it has close trading relationships with them, but it's typically a country-by-country exercise. 

That being said, there are situations in which a lot of small countries run into trouble because they are responding to some common macroeconomic development. So, we have a number of countries now with debt problems or debt distress. Some of them, many of them have fund programs or renegotiating their liabilities to foreign creditors. They're not enough at the moment in serious trouble to pose a global systemic problem, but we have seen such problems in the past. For example, the Asian crisis of 1998 had a major regional impact.

Going back further, the debt crisis of developing countries in the early 1980s, which was largely a Latin American crisis, but not exclusively a Latin American crisis. It reflected the very high interest rates in the United States and the global slowdown. That was a sort of a crisis within a country group that was widespread and that had much more systemic effects. And these systemic effects can be rather subtle. In the case of the debt crisis of the 1980s, that followed a period in which large banks in rich countries, particularly in the US, had lent a lot of money to Latin America. 

And with so many Latin American countries unable to pay their debts, it raised the prospects that the banks that had lent to them could get into trouble, which would have severe financial stability implications in the US and in other rich countries, with ties to the US, which is all rich countries. And this became a major crisis for the fund, together with the Federal Reserve, to manage over a period of nearly a decade, throughout almost the entire 1980s, this crisis was being managed in various ways. 

So, this is just to say that whether a crisis can truly be treated as an individual matter or is more systemic is a matter of degree. It depends on how deep is the crisis, how widespread is the crisis, what are the linkages financial and trade-wise between the crisis countries and other countries, which may on the surface appear to be in good health, but which linkages determine the networks through which a crisis can spread through other countries? 

Similarly with the 2008, 2009 crisis, you could have said, well, this is the US housing market. The ramifications will be contained, but the financial superstructure built on that housing market and the interconnection of that superstructure with the financial systems of countries the world over turned it into a completely global crisis. It's basically a matter of degree. And sometimes it comes as a surprise when the crisis spread. The Asian crisis was viewed as a localized crisis in Thailand in 1997 when it broke out, and then it just exploded. There can be contagion as financial market participants look for similarities and weaknesses in countries that are not immediately affected. But then when they act on those received weaknesses, a crisis can spread. 

00:20:25 JE 

Right. So, you're explaining in very interesting detail how economic changes affect political dynamics and vice versa. How there's a kind of interconnection between political and economic change. So, what role does the IMF play in those dynamics, especially since the IMF often asks governments to implement pretty tough and drastic changes, right? Say, to decrease public spending, that's politically costly for individual governments and they might lose popularity as a result. But lots of people also see that as a kind of undemocratic intrusion by an unelected elite of economists sitting at this international organization. 

That kind of pushback can really lead to a loss of authority or even membership for institutions such as the IMF in the long run. So, how has the IMF dealt with this challenge in particular in the past? And what would you say is your perspective on that, [from] your experience? 

00:21:16 MO 

I mean, the link between domestic politics and policy is always a treacherous one for the fund. I think that the sort of textbook example of the hazards would be the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, where, as I said, a crisis in Thailand spread across the region to Indonesia, to Malaysia, to Korea. And the IMF came in with programs which, you know, to some extent went beyond its typical remit. And one of the reasons for that, I think it was a learning experience, was that, you know, if you looked at countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, before the crisis. The fund would have said that their macroeconomic fundamentals are good. They had sound public finances, low public debts, not big current account deficits, not big fiscal deficits. And yet, when markets turned against them, this turned up weaknesses in their banking system of a sort that the fund hadn't really been used to focusing on at that point. And the fund reacted with policies that were viewed in these countries as quite intrusive. 

Following these crises, the countries built up large war chests of international reserves precisely so they would not have to go back to the fund again, so they would not have to surrender their policy autonomy to the fund in the event of a crisis. And so that hopefully with those levels of international reserves, a crisis would not even occur. It wasn't really until, so the Asian crisis was in 1998. In 2018, 20 years later, the fund held its annual meetings in Bali, Indonesia. And the fact that the fund had been able to negotiate to actually come to Indonesia was the end result of a lot of fence mending between the fund and these East Asian economies, which were very skeptical of the fund, and where finally, after 20 years, a reconciliation did occur. So, it can be a very broad relationship. 

Another example would be the Euro crisis. This was a very complex situation in that the IMF was engaged together with the European Central Bank and the Commission in trying to address the crisis to the extent that the crisis was fueled by high public debt levels in some countries. The fund thought that a response focusing on fiscal austerity would be appropriate. The problem with fiscal austerity is it also reduces economic output and may actually make the fiscal situation worse. And arguably, in some cases, the austerity was excessive. So here too, in some countries, the result was a lot of resentment against the fund. Think about Greece as an example. 

I think the fund learned as a result of this that fiscal austerity has to be coupled with policy packages that protect the most vulnerable. For example, you go to an emerging market and you say, you have to balance the budget in part by removing your extensive food subsidies, okay? Suddenly people can't get enough to eat. You can't, you know, you have to be much more targeted in how you go about things to prevent distress among people who are really going to be hit hardest by even small fiscal cuts. So, the fund has just gotten much more sensitive about these issues in terms of how it designs stabilization programs. 

But nonetheless, politics still intrudes. You can't realistically always be blind to the likely political consequences of policies because they may undermine good policies much more than would be the case if you shade your policies a bit in a way that avoids the worst political outcomes. And that's just a matter of judgment. That's a matter of judgment. 

An example is Argentina, Argentina 2018, the fund probably was more indulgent to the government than should have been, given that the consequence of the government losing the election would have been the election of a Peronist regime, whose economic policies would have been far worse. At the end of the day, it didn't work. The Peronist came in. Their policies were as bad as expected. And now Argentina is again in a – it's been sort of yo-yoing between market-oriented and Peronist policies. So, it's in a market-oriented phase with Milei, and the fund will have to make some tough decisions about support for Argentina under this new regime. And frankly, it's hard to avoid the political implications of what your program conditions are. This is just reality. 

But that in turn raises a different matter for the fund, which is that, you know, countries look around at the programs other countries are getting and call for even-handedness. You know, even-handedness is in the eye of the beholder. So, you know, how can you sort of adhere to an even-handed approach when each country raises its own political challenges. So it's a tough problem. I don't think it's a problem that will go away, but it's a problem that the fund is just going to have to navigate going forward. 

00:26:31 JE 

Lots of commentators have stressed geopolitical divides hardening in the world today and mutually compounding crises. These make it really hard for international organizations today to navigate a world of instability, of crisis. My final question to you is, how can the International Monetary Fund learn from its own past as an organization, from past shocks as well, in order to be better prepared for a turbulent future and to improve its resilience in the face of future shocks? 

00:27:04 MO 

I think there is a process of self-examination within the fund. I mean, a great example is the work that was done on fiscal austerity under my predecessor, Olivier Blanchard, just sort of evaluating the kind of multiplier effects of fiscal contraction in European economies. And this was very controversial work within the fund. There was a lot of debate within the fund, but at the end of the day, the research indicated that the fund had way underestimated the contractionary effects of austerity within the context of the European crisis. And that is pretty much now accepted and informs the caution with which the IMF views fiscal austerity. 

I think there was a huge process of learning as a result of the global financial crisis in '08, '09, just the risks of financial stability, and that's helped propel the very important financial assessment work that the fund does across countries. Aside from this, the fund also has had for some time an independent evaluation office, which is an internal, a freestanding office that regularly assesses fund programs and fund policies and is often quite critical of fund decisions. And management is never happy when the IEO comes out with a critical report and there's some process of negotiation over that. 

But it really does reflect, I think, a very healthy mechanism for self-reflection, honest self-reflection that the fund management takes very seriously. There were a number of reports on the Euro crisis. There have been a number of reports on the fund's views on capital account liberalization, which have changed dramatically over the years. There's ongoing work, I'm not sure if it's been completed yet, on Argentina in the 2018, 2019 events. So that's one strength that the fund has as an organization that actually not many organizations have, and where the fund, I think, deserves a lot of credit. 

00:29:05 JE 

Right. Well, on that positive note, Maurice Obstfeld, thank you so much for your time, for joining me today on Global Shocks, and for sharing your fascinating insights as a former economist of the International Monetary Fund. 

00:29:19 MO 

Absolutely. 

00:29:20 JE 

Thank you, Maurice. 

00:29:21 MO 

Great talking to you. Thank you. 

Transcript 4: World Health Organisation

Conversation with Ilona Kickbusch. Recorded 12 March 2024, online.

 

00:00:00 JE 

I'm delighted to welcome Professor Ilona Kickbusch, who's a global public health expert with several decades of experience working at the World Health Organization. Professor Kickbusch was responsible for the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion in 1986. She took the lead in the first comparative study by the WHO on women's health in Europe. And she has worked academically on global health programs at Yale University, the University of Saint Gallen, and today at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Since 2018, Professor Kickbusch has also served on the joint World Bank-WHO Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. 

In short, a leading global public health policymaker with extensive experience both in the policy world and academically. So, hello and welcome to Global Shocks, Ilona, it's an honor to have you. 

00:00:53 IK 

Well, I'm very pleased and look forward to the conversation.

00:00:56 JE 

So, could you, first off, just please state your name for the record and very briefly tell us what you do? 

00:01:03 IK 

My name is Ilona Kickbusch. I'm linked to several academic institutions right now. You already mentioned the Graduate Institute in Geneva. I also work at the University of Geneva and I'm linked to the Charité in Berlin. I work on several projects. My most recent project is related to the digital transformation for health. And I, of course, as you also indicated, work in a number of ways with the World Health Organization, serving on various boards and councils, but also working on a number of specific projects. One of them, for example, on trust in global health.

00:01:44 JE 

Wonderful. Thank you. So, in your own words, why would you say, from your perspective, does thinking about global shocks matter to us? Why is it important for us to think about global shocks? 

00:01:56 IK 

To think about global shocks is important, first of all, because they are global. And a shock in one place of the world, as we have seen, can in this day and age go global very quickly. And therefore, practically every part of the world needs to be prepared, needs to work on resilience, and needs to think how to respond. And of course, in our health world, that has been particularly the case with the infectious disease outbreaks and most recently, obviously, with the COVID-19 pandemic. But through that, this whole notion of preparedness that we are also looking at in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board has become very much more in focus. 

And it's something that, of course, is intersectoral. You can't just have, you know, the health world prepared for this. It has impact on so many parts of society, as we've seen. So, this notion of global shocks, I think, is something that everyone needs to think about. And it's not just a shock, you know, it comes and goes. A lot of these shocks stay around for quite some time. 

00:03:09 JE 

Right. So, you just mentioned a couple of things about the COVID pandemic, about preparedness. And I want to delve a little bit more into your experience working in the sector and of course, dealing with many other public health crises and emergencies and developments in the past. We live, of course, in turbulent times right now. The longer-term effects of COVID-19 are still being felt around the globe, joined now and perhaps compounded by other crises, the war in Ukraine, inflation, a food crisis, all of them kind of interacting in the way that you just described. 

And during your time working for the World Health Organization, what would you say in, I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, of course, what was the most challenging shock that you and your colleagues were facing or dealing with? And what were its practical consequences for the mission of the World Health Organization as such? 

00:04:00 IK 

The biggest shock and a shock one was duly unprepared for was HIV/AIDS, starting in the early 1980s and still with us 100%. And it's actually interesting to see how little one talks about HIV/AIDS when one talks about COVID-19, because one could have learned some lessons from HIV/AIDS and applied them around COVID-19. So, the WHO, of course, was not really prepared for such a new pandemic. And similar to COVID-19 for a long time, one didn't know what was actually happening. One first, you know, like with COVID-19, had to discover the virus. One had no response to it, basically no medical response, no medical countermeasures. 

And there's a big difference here. We still obviously don't have a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, which we did get with COVID-19, see the Nobel Prize also. But I think this really led to a revolution within the World Health Organization itself. How do we respond to such a new challenge, particularly when it became clear that this was a challenge also for the developing countries? Because, I mean, this was before you were born, but initially people thought this was a strange disease of gay people who one didn't like to talk about anyhow. But at one point it became clear that this was much larger, this was much bigger and truly a global pandemic. 

So, [the] WHO had to respond. It had no such program. It did establish such a program then. There was a lot of divisiveness within WHO, the assessments of the relevance of HIV/AIDS. Finally, you know, a lot of donors were mobilized. A big new WHO AIDS program was created, but it started to run sort of parallel to the WHO itself and led to a number of problems. And when it became clear that WHO and the way it was set up could particularly not deal with the financial issues and the implementation issues around HIV/AIDS, we saw this totally new phase of global health emerging with the new global organizations that were created. 

So, the first step was creating UNAIDS because it was clear this was not just a health issue, This was a social issue. This was a discrimination issue. This was a development issue. And so that was the start of six UN organizations working together on a pandemic. Some of those things were then mirrored later on in HIV/AIDS. And of course, a real breakthrough of the role of civil society in global health. That was the time that the HIV/AIDS movement started, again, first in the developed world, then picked up in the developing countries. 

The conflict that we have today around pandemic response, medical response, vaccine inequity, the whole issue of patents, came up in the very same way. Who would have access to the medicines? The discrimination of the Global South was there just as we have it today. So then it was clear, you know, we needed a lot of money in this system. And that's when the Global Fund for AIDS, then tuberculosis and malaria was created. 

So we enter this new phase of global health with many new organizations being created, public-private partnerships emerging, the role of the civil society becoming really, really central, and that individual countries remember, of course, other political things happened, like the Iraq War. And it was then that President Bush created a big global AIDS program called PEPFAR, which made an enormous difference, saved many, many lives, but is presently and was one of the bipartisan programs in the United States that was, continued for decades and is now in the polarized political situation, threatened to continue, which basically means the death of many, many people in the developing world. 

What comes with these shocks is they are a medical issue, a problem that also needs medical solutions, but they're linked to equity, to big social issues, and finally, of course, always to politics. 

00:09:05 JE 

I'm curious to hear from your own experience what it means for an organization. And this is a very general question, but I think related to what you just said. How does an organization such as the WHO practically respond to something like the HIV/AIDS public health threats emerging? What is involved practically? You've been working there for a long time, and you worked at the WHO at that particular time. What was that like? What did that look like? 

00:09:31 IK 

It has various dimensions because the organization is, of course, the authority, the global authority, technical authority on health. It means obviously being able to say, what is this disease? You know, what is it? 

00:09:47 JE 

Right. 

00:09:48 IK 

How can one respond to it? It means setting standards for how one responds to the disease, approving medicines that are used in the context of the disease, even defining the disease itself, if it's a new disease. So, there's a whole lot of that technical work of the WHO, which is related to science, to innovation, to working with scientists all around the world in WHO collaborating centers, et cetera, et cetera. It then means, you know, giving suggestions to member states how they should respond to the disease. 

And here already you get more than a medical response. Because with HIV/AIDS, what became very clear is that one dimension of the WHO constitution that health is a human right, suddenly moved to the forefront and said, people have a right. People have a right to treatment. People should not be discriminated because they have this disease. And, you know, there were countries where people were locked up. There were, you know, dreadful occurrences around this disease, and both in developed and developing world. 

So also here, something we experienced with COVID, was usually one has this idea, everyone likes health, everyone wants everyone to be healthy, and health brings people together. But with COVID and with HIV AIDS, we experienced that health pulled people apart. People felt, it's these gay people, it's their fault, they should have different sexual practices. Then there was this big fear that it was not just a “gay disease”. And that, of course, became the reality in low and middle income countries. Then it became clear how much it became a women's disease. Because men brought the disease back home, then these women were discriminated against, and so the whole issue of health and human rights, also through the NGOs was brought forward with enormous force. 

And so also WHO had to be much more prominent and make very clear statements, even though this was not popular with some member states, about, you know, how you handle this disease in a social manner. And then, of course, when the whole issue of HIV/AIDS and drug use started to come together, that became even more difficult. And WHO played an incredibly important role and had to reorganize itself accordingly to find, you know, a humane, a human rights-based approach, both to the issue of how you handle people who use drugs, particularly in this case, of course, inject drugs, and HIV/AIDS and the link between that, which also had additional problems because there is a UN agency in relation to drugs in Vienna, which was much more conservative on these issues than the WHO was. 

So, it was straight away also a need to ramp up the medical and research response, ramp up the advisory to member states, but also ramp up the human rights rights dimension and the policy and program recommendations that kept this in mind. What does the health service need to do? What about health insurance? All these issues came to the fore and WHO needed to prepare itself for it. What was a problem is, of course, that WHO is not a development organization, it's a technical organization. And one of the things that was needed was loads of money to be able to make those available in low and middle income countries. And that's, of course, when the Global Fund was created. 

And initially over the next 10, 20 years, a sort of competitive environment started to emerge in global health. People saying, you know, these new types of organizations that are not member state driven, but have the private sector on their boards, have civil society on their boards, et cetera, “they are much more forward-looking. They are the future of global health, and WHO is not that important.” And that was a very tough time for WHO, particularly also when the financial crisis hit and when the budgets for WHO were reduced, while the billions still went up for a fund like the Global Fund or AIDS tuberculosis and malaria. So tremendous consequences for WHO, but that's where we learned. 

And you'll remember that in 2014 to 16, there was the next crisis, which didn't get as serious. You know, before that we had SARS, you remember the SARS outbreak, which was contained rather quickly. But then we had Ebola. And again, there was a great fear of, you know, how global would this go? And WHO was severely criticized for its response to Ebola, saying this was much too late, et cetera, et cetera. 

So, I was on the group that was tasked to evaluate the WHO response. And this is where my involvement in the AIDS response became so important, because we were able to learn from that mistake, that WHO built up a program, then wasn't able to run it. And a new organization had to be created. And actually early on after Ebola also, and during COVID, you might remember, some people said, create a new organization that deals with outbreaks, et cetera. 

But we sort of said, no, WHO needs to be reorganized. It needs to have a new big department which is there for pandemic preparedness and response. So, a new emergency program was created with an executive director general fully integrated into the organization. And because of that follow through from Ebola, WHO was much better prepared to respond to COVID. So, there was learning in the end. 

Whereas, you know, I would still say the COVID response neglected many of the social learnings of the AIDS pandemic, how much we need to look at behavior, how much we need to work and empower people, all those kinds of things, which were reinforced, of course, because now compared to the AIDS pandemic, we had social media, we had misinformation, we had political polarization. But definitely, WHO learned through this period AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and then COVID. 

00:17:10 JE 

Fascinating, the comparison and the sort of lessons from the HIV AIDS situation to the Ebola situation and then how that carries over into kind of an institutional memory as it were. Because the next question was going to be whether these kinds of threats, these public health threats, can also in some sense be opportunities for the organization to readjust, to learn and to gradually accumulate experience that will make it better prepared for the next public health threat. 

So, in a sense, it sounds like what you're saying is, yes, crisis is one serious aspect that needs to be tackled. At the same time, though, the organization needs to learn. Is that a correct characterization of what you just said? 

00:17:49 IK 

Absolutely. And, you know, the willingness to learn, of course, would be a very, very important component. In WHO, that, of course, brings with it a complexity, let's say, compared with the private sector, that this is a multilateral organization. It's basically run by its member states, 193 of them. So, whenever you want to reform the organization also, you would need the full approval and a consensus among the member states, who at the same time, of course, and rightly so, expect leadership from the director general of the organization, expect that the organization, as you know, WHO has a headquarters and six regional offices, that all parts of the organization then work together, particularly in a period of crisis. 

So, on the one hand, what we can see is that the AIDS was a real shock for the organization because there was a strong feeling, also if you read all the analyses from that time, that WHO was losing credibility, WHO was losing an importance, and definitely WHO was losing money, because of these other organizations that were created. And as I already mentioned, some people said, we don't really need that type of organization anymore. Let's create these new things. 

But then, particularly after Ebola, there was a strong self-reflection and there was then a consensus between, let me say, the director general, the secretariat, as we call it, and the member states who had initiated the review that I referred to, be ready to change. That's when this new executive emergency program was established. Also in the early 2000s, following the SARS outbreak, WHO was able to reform the sanitary regulations, which became the international health regulations. So that was another historical point. 

And now following COVID, one has seen they too need to be reformed again, the international health regulations. And then also countries said, look, we need to make use of the possibility that the WHO constitution gives us to actually have a legal framework for action when a pandemic strikes. And so, two things that happened following the COVID-19 was to say we must reform the international health regulations and there are working groups and all kinds of things going on. And we should be negotiating a pandemic treaty. And that would be only the second treaty that WHO negotiates. The first was the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. 

And it's very, very tough negotiations because of the issues I mentioned, particularly because of the North-South divide, because as vaccines were not available in many parts of the world, intellectual property issues stood in the way. And it indicates the increasing need to involve other agencies, in this case, the World Trade Organization, et cetera. So those are two big things where the organization is trying to learn. 

Another area where the organization is learning is to ramp up the whole area of science and innovation. Because of course, nobody expected we would have a vaccine so quickly. And in a way, the world wasn't ready to have a vaccine so quickly. You know, the organizations actually, these organizations that had competed, you know, Global Fund, GAVI, WHO, et cetera, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was another big push in the early 2000s of a new actor with loads of money coming in. So they started to work together. They created COVAX, they created other initiatives, the Act A Accelerator. 

New organizational mechanisms were created, but they were created overnight and wanted to build up, let's be ready for a vaccine, two years, three years, four years down the road. We never got one in AIDS. And suddenly the vaccine was there, and these organizations weren't ready for it. And then, of course, there was the political pressure in the developed world to vaccinate everyone, all the other issues that flowed from that. So, the treaty is trying to resolve some of that. WTO negotiations are trying to do that. 

So, this being involved, being ready, being able to assess where are we in terms of science and innovation in these areas, are we working together with the best scientists in the world? Of course, some science is always unexpected, that's clear. But still, there was a time when WHO ramped down its research program. We couldn't imagine this today. And the whole issue of science and technology, you know, again, a new way of working with the private sector emerged in this context, both in terms of the vaccines, but particularly in terms of misinformation. 

So, this was the beginning of WHO being in contact with the big tech companies, Googles of this world, to ensure that health information by the WHO would always be on top of a search query if somebody said, what is COVID-19? You know, you would get the official WHO information first. So, a lot of new things have emerged out of that where the organization is shifting and changing and trying to sort of really be hopefully ready should anything like this happen again. 

00:24:14 JE 

Right. I was very intrigued when you mentioned a couple of times that there are these knee-jerk responses in a sense of creating new institutions or new actors, adding to the landscape of global health responses. But that might not actually be the most effective way to be better prepared for the future. And that instead, the really important thing is, to evaluate carefully and to really try and learn from past experiences through things such as new international health regulations, really fine tuning the main organization that we already have, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or invent many other new organizations that potentially even sort of make it harder to coordinate. Is that basically what you were saying? 

00:24:58 IK 

Yes, at least that's my position. You know, there are people who would take different positions here. And there's been a lot of talk around that. You know, is WHO politically influential enough? Is it strong enough? What does it mean if an organization that is in principle run by health ministers, is that an organization that's strong enough? Definitely it's an organization that isn't rich enough. 

And so also following the long-standing negotiations about increasing the regular budget of WHO, DSS contributions was taken up again and a positive decision was taken to at least increase CSS contributions by 50%, which is nowhere enough. But something is on the trajectory that people, despite criticisms that also came up, you know, was it clear enough soon enough about airborne transmission, you know, all those kinds of issues that are more on the scientific front. How quickly can an organization give the scientific recommendations, you know, how sure does one have to be, how quickly does one have to react? So, all those things do remain. 

But yes, again, in this case, there were the suggestions, you know, let's create something new. There was also the suggestion to have a so-called Global Threats Council, which would meet at the United Nations, because supposedly, if you had a threat council of heads of state, they would act more quickly and with more determination. My view was if we had a problem during COVID-19, it was with heads of state and people not taking the political and financial decisions they should have taken. So, you know, all this is obviously driven by the wish to do better next time. But I agree with you, a lot of this was knee jerk.

And it's also related to another issue. On the one hand, WHO, together with many global health advocates, has been successful in saying, first of all, you know, health is a political choice. And because it's a political choice, it should be part of many other negotiations and many other bodies. And it was seen as a tremendous progress to have health on the agenda of the G7, to have health on the agenda of the G20, and to have health regularly discussed in New York at the UN General Assembly, to have high level meetings, et cetera, et cetera, also have some bodies and councils in the UN. I served on one of them, you know, to have that in that non-health sphere, let me put it that way. 

But one of the things that has emerged, and you can particularly see that at the G7 and the G20, is that, of course, everyone that organizes a meeting like that, and in the G7, G20, you have a different organizing country every year, wants to have a tangible outcome. And what's more tangible than creating something new? If you say, our outcome is we will support the World Health Organization more, everyone said, my God, how boring. If you say we will create a pandemic fund, then everyone says, wow, they're really ready to go and do something. And then big promises are made. 

We do have a pandemic fund now, as you know, but it has nowhere the amount of money that was actually assessed that people said we would need to help countries. And at the same time, so you have a pandemic fund with 10 billion at this stage, and you have WHO that has a budget of, the Geneva General Hospital. So it is, it's very, very imbalanced. But the tendency remains that it is more attractive in our world, in our political world, to be able to say, look, we created something new. And at the same time, of course, saying, we need to reform WHO. There is an imbalance here and it's definitely a political issue about, you know, how you position yourself in the international agreement. 

00:29:27 JE 

Right, that's very interesting. So, there's a kind of dynamic of quick responses, trying to do something that's visible to everyone's eye. And then on the other hand, we've got the question of, well, if we want to do something in the longer term, it might be much more worth our time to think about how we can work with the existing institutions that we already have and how they can perhaps be better prepared. 

So, let's zoom out a little bit because I think this kind of connects to the broader question of are we dealing with an isolated, separable crisis? Are we just dealing with COVID? Are we just dealing with HIV/AIDS? Or are we dealing with something that's connected to many other issues around it? And then the question becomes, are we thinking about crisis as a sort of thing that happens at one particular moment and then we need to respond? Or are we thinking of a sort of broader context of turbulence, a turbulent world with many different issues intersecting, interacting. And if we're talking about the letter, does the WHO need to somehow take that into account? Has it taken that into account? What are your thoughts on that? 

00:30:32 IK 

Well, it goes in both directions, of course, that, you know, other crises, other things happening, what we in our language sometimes call the determinants of health impact on even the emergence of a disease and the whole discussion about the ecological crises, the expansion of the human habitat into the natural habitat, the jump of viruses from animals to people and all of that, that's definitely interconnected and has been sort of on the agenda or at least in the perspective of the people working on infectious disease. 

On the other hand, then, so, other developments, crises, impact on health and have health consequences, obviously. We know that from the big poverty crises, we know that from war, you know, if you look at Ukraine now and everything else. And then you have cholera and, you know, all kinds of other health impacts, mental health impacts in particular. And then, of course, a disease then has enormous other impacts on society. And particularly a pandemic, as we saw, has impact on the economic development of the world. 

If we look at the sustainable development goals, we see that the eradication of poverty has not moved forward. Actually, poverty has increased in a number of parts of the world because of COVID. So, you have the economic impact, you have social impacts, polarization of society is one such social slash political impact. You have interfaces with geopolitics, who raises borders where, who's allowed to travel where. So, it is something where various crises and various impacts and influences constantly interact. 

And we can see particularly now with the climate crises being so much on the forefront of everyone's mind, not necessarily everyone's action, these things on the one hand interface. But we also see that they compete, because what we see in health right now is that, in some parts of the world, if you also watch in some countries, you'd think, COVID is dead and gone, and let's not talk about any of the consequences. And the discussion on climate is taking over, or in other parts of the world, the discussion on migration is taking over. One way they're all connected, but on the other hand, because money is getting less and less, development budgets are being cut, et cetera, et cetera, because people need to respond to the crises within their own countries. 

So, we see that it's getting more difficult. It's definitely getting more difficult to maintain the focus on some of these health issues, like also the treaty negotiations. And it's also more difficult to get money. Now at this stage, not necessarily for the response, unless it really flares up again, but in terms of prevention and preparedness. And there were calculations, we'd need at least 100 billion to have the basics of preparedness, laboratories, public health institutes, research, also in the Global South. And the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board on which I sit says that we are not much better prepared than we were for the COVID-19 pandemic. 

00:34:26 JE 

It sounds like, I mean, we're faced with this complexity of intersecting crises, all happening at the same time, mutually compounding each other. And it gets hard to really know where to focus our attention. And as you just interestingly mentioned, these crises also compete for our attention and for the attention of organizations. Another thing is, of course, if everything is so complex, we really need to understand the problems that we're facing very, very well. 

And so, there's a 2021 report on the COVID-19 response by the 13-member Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which argues that information flows under the existing international health regulations had proven too slow during the pandemic. In your own experience, is more and faster information another key to better preparedness? 

00:35:14 IK 

Most definitely, but you know, the starting point of it is transparency. If you look at the international health regulations, countries which, you know, are subject to these regulations should be transparent and should inform WHO the minute they see something that's out of the ordinary. And the long and short of it is because disease has such geopolitical consequences in terms of trade, movement of people, the way you are looked at in the world, et cetera, whether you're a failure or not, leads countries not to report. 

You know, despite the fact that the IHR applies to all countries, not all countries report or report quickly. That has, in a way, always been the case, but has been absolutely extreme in relation to COVID-19. And the countries that have reported quickly, take South Africa, for example, with a variant, then get punished. And no, we will cut travel, we will cut economic relationships. And in a globalized world, that, of course, has tremendous consequences, which is also why, because then in this case, also the global flow of medical countermeasures comes in. 

This is why now, as one of the follow-throughs, the whole issue of local production has become so critical. You know, within our region, within our country, what can we produce ourselves, but at the same time, how can we be guaranteed that we get the constituent components for whatever medicine or vaccine we are trying to develop. And as we know, many of those components are all in one big country. So, it then becomes economic and geopolitical again very quickly, which is why the panel said we need to find measures that ensure the transparency, ensure the rapid reporting.

So, there's been a lot of discussion around, can we sanction countries? What kind of pressure can one exert? Can WHO exert pressure? Actually not. But could the pressure then, for example, come through the World Trade Organization? Or could it come through the financial institutions? That is to say, you know, if you don't report this time, I'll be very simplistic, you won't get a loan next time. So it's quite clear that the pressure in all probability needs to be both economic and political, but that it cannot be exerted by the World Health Organization, what the World Health Organization needs to do. And of course, this is what it then gets criticized for. 

It's got to try and cajole countries, its own member states who actually decide about the organization to jolly well share their data. So, this is why at the time the Director General, Dr. Tedros, traveled to China, spoke with President Xi himself, you know, to say, look, you know, you can't stay outside of this. You've got to be transparent. In SARS, China was transparent, not at first, but then the international pressure did work. The health ministry was reorganized. The Chinese Center for Disease Control was created. So that had an impact. But now with China being this big world power that does not want to be seen as being weak and does not want to be seen of being at fault in any way, it becomes much more difficult. 

And so, an organization like WHO is sort of balancing its way, trying to convince countries to report, to share data, to share experiences, and to actually create and ensure this public good. In the geopolitical tensions we have right now, that is particularly difficult for political reasons and for economic reasons, because science and technology are, you know, the big areas of competition now, including, of course, then the whole issue of digital, et cetera, et cetera.

So, it is a world also for the WHO, for whom, you know, politics is not new, it had to work during the Cold War and all of that. But this extreme polarization of the world, but not into blocks, but with players who keep moving around. And today I will associate myself with you, take the Ukraine war, you know, where do the African countries stand? Or you get these alliances of countries, both in the global north and the global south, around reducing sexual and reproductive health and rights. So, it's a much more politically mixed bag, which makes the work of the World Health Organization more difficult, but also much, much more important. It just shows how much one needs a multilateral organization, even if people fight like hell, but they at least come together to fight. And one needs to try and take things forward. 

00:40:45 JE 

Now, the WHO was, of course, in the spotlight throughout the pandemic. We've already talked about that. And it's received its share of criticism regarding its effectiveness in the face of precisely those geopolitical tensions that you were just talking about. And this question emerged really of, are countries collaborating here at all? Are they putting enough of their efforts into making global public health work? And a 2022 report by The Lancet called the global response, and I quote, a “massive global failure”. And it spoke of a failure in particular of international solidarity. Can the WHO do more to foster international solidarity? And should we expect it to? 

00:41:21 IK 

Well, that's actually WHO's bread and butter to try and establish that global solidarity. Of course, you know, if you have 193 countries who don't talk to each other, then you have a big job to do. And, you know, one of the attempts to create that global solidarity are international agreements, treaties, accords, et cetera, et cetera, and are, well, regulations, rules, norms that everyone subscribes to. 

So that's in a way as much as WHO can do because, and that's of course also criticism, people say WHO has no teeth. Some want WHO to call out individual countries. We had a director general at WHO at one stage who did that, but she could not serve more than one term. So that was Gro Harlem Brundtland, who, you know, with the SARS outbreak, not only called out China, but called out Canada, for example. So, a lot of it is what we tend to call global health diplomacy. And it's not always visible. So that's another tricky part of the work of the organization and the role of the Director General. 

I know, you know, somebody like Richard Wharton at The Lancet would like to see the Director General call out individual countries or even individual leaders. The minute you start doing that, you could probably close down your organization, because that's not the role. And it's, of course, for anyone who's an advocate who wants to move things forward, it's, you know, you say, why aren't they doing this? People do get upset, but it's not the role of multilateral organizations to do that, which is why we have so many stakeholders, which is why also WHO then establishes certain committees and then you get, you know, the committee chaired by Helen Clark and Ellen Sirleaf, being able to say things with great force that a director general could not say in that way. It's very, very difficult. 

I mean, you see it in the Human Rights Council, you know, calling out countries. You do have the reports, and there is a suggestion that one would call out countries in the pandemic sphere with similar reports as the Human Rights Council does. But still, it's a very, very delicate balancing act. It's related, you know, also to the larger role of an organization and the specifics at a special point in time. And usually it's only, you know, a decade or two later where you where you can really assess what might have been the right approach. And I mean, we have the same discussion right now. Should Russia be called out? Also within the health organizations, because clearly the country is targeting health facilities, et cetera, in Ukraine, and WHO is keeping very clear track of that. But it's not WHO who could sanction them as the secretariat. 

What would be possible, but nobody has taken that action, is to do something similar as was done with South Africa, where South Africa was then, you know, excluded from the organization and its voting rights until apartheid was over. But that was also a decision that was prepared at the UN General Assembly and then made its way into the specialized agencies. So calling out is very difficult. At the same time, it also needs the kind of challenges that come, from civil society, from the Lancet, et cetera. 

And it's also the role, quite honestly, of countries. I mean, there are governing bodies of the WHO. And countries can call each other out in those bodies. Often, they choose to do this in very flowery ways. But that's actually where it happens. And it's happening now in the treaty negotiations. There is very big conflict between certain countries and parts of the world. 

00:45:49 JE 

In your view, considering the ongoing negotiations for a renewed international health treaty, what would you say is the best way for the WHO to learn from past experiences with shocks and crises in order to actually improve its preparedness for the future? 

00:46:05 IK 

I think we've discussed some of those things, obviously, and WHO has an opportunity now in formulating its new work program, the so-called 14th General Program of Work, to set the new priorities. Obviously, together with the member states, the secretariat makes the proposals. Definitely, as far as the organization itself goes, the ongoing strengthening of this preparedness dimension of the work, we can see that the science division of WHO is being ramped up considerably. 

This understanding of the role of technology and digital is something, and standards in this area are something that the WHO needs to support member states, but also use and be prepared for. Also, good data are expected from WHO. There's a big challenge of, on the one hand, having to do its analyses because of the way it's set up based on data you receive from member states that are not totally reliable all the time. So, WHO also tries to create new mechanisms to actually collect data. 

And one of those examples is a hub that the WHO has created in Berlin on pandemic and epidemic intelligence. Also not only looking at health data, but relating the health data to data from other sectors. One of the toughest things always for the organization as a whole is actually to set priorities, not because it wouldn't have ideas, you know, what are the five things we would like to concentrate on if I speak about the secretariat. But then, you know, straight away member states come in and say, well, we also look, need to look at sepsis, we need to look at tuberculosis, we need to do more on non-communicable diseases, you know, you name it. 

And then, you know, there's the whole push to say, well, this organization in its constitution has a commitment to wellbeing. So, it shouldn't only be dealing with diseases, it should, you know, be developing new approaches to promoting health. And a lot of that is the determinants of health, looking at quite different issues than, concentrating on viruses. What I find so interesting is actually how many times the organization has reinvented itself, how often it has been more innovative than some people give it credit for, how it is trying to do that again. And I think the discussions around this 14th general program of work will bring that to the fore. But also the new areas that are being discussed in the treaty.

Really the whole issue of the production of medicines and where that is and the equity there was not so much an issue of the World Health Organization. And now, you know, smack, it's right in the middle of supply chains and everything. The cooperation with the other organizations is really critical, the other health organizations, and it's gotten better, particularly through COVID. And one is working on ways to maintain that even in non-pandemic times. And then, of course, I think three years down the road, there will be elections for a new director general. And that's usually also a time where new issues are also put on the table. 

So those kind of processes, you know, continuously also brings new thinking and new issues into the discussion of the organization. And obviously, every organization needs to reform all of the time. And it also has to look out to survive because we see that in very difficult geopolitical times, the organization tends to become more technical. And then, you know, it sort of moves forward as things become a bit clearer, it moves forward into more political arenas again. But it can't be a geopolitical player. 

But it has to draw attention to the fact where health is subject to geopolitics and where health is, as the organization says, a political choice. And that's the message to the member states. You know, we, the secretariat, can do this much. Sometimes we'll fail. Sometimes we're not good enough. Sometimes we actually told you we should do X and you didn't approve it. 

00:51:01 JE 

Right. 

00:51:01 IK 

It needs that constant back and forth. And as you said, definitely as simplistic as it sounds, it does need a bit more money. 

00:51:10 JE 

Right. Well, on that note, all that's left for me to say is thank you for your time and for generously sharing your insight and experience. It's been really great to have you here at Global Shocks. Thank you. 

00:51:20 IK 

Well, thank you. It's been fun. Thank you for your questions.

Conversation with Mari Kiviniemi. Recorded 26 March 2024, online.

 

00:00:00 JE 

Could you please, just to begin our interview, state your name for the record and then briefly summarize what you do, and maybe tell us in your own words why thinking about global shocks matters from your point of view? 

00:00:11 MK 

Yes, I'm Mari Kiviniemi from Finland. And for the last five years, I have been working as the managing director of the Finnish Commerce Federation, which is a nationwide commerce sector lobbying organization. And it also negotiates the commerce sector's collective labour agreements and undertakes research. And I'm also the chair of the Vaasa University Board and a member of the board of Metsä Board, which is a leading European producer of premium fresh fiber paper boards. And before this position, I worked a bit more than four years as the Deputy Secretary General of the OECD. I held the position from 2014 to 2019, and I oversaw the directorates of public governance, trade and agriculture, and local and regional governments and SMEs. And before that, I hold various positions in the Finnish government, including Minister of Public Administration and Local Government, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, and Minister for European Affairs. And I was Prime Minister of Finland from 2010 to 2011. And I was elected to the Finnish Parliament for the first time in 1995, and I served my country there until 2014. And I have a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Helsinki. I'm married and I have two children. 

And when it comes to the question of yours, why thinking about global shocks matters, yes, I think the answer is obvious. Of course, they matter. And nowadays, it's a bit difficult to kind of find any shocks which are not global because the world is very interconnected. When it comes to economies, societies and systems worldwide, the globalization has increased the interconnectedness so heavily. So, shocks very seldom stay in one country, and they can have very cascading effects impacting other regions and nations. So whatever shock we are talking about, economic crisis, pandemics, natural disasters, or geopolitical events, or shocks related to climate change. And shocks are very multi-dimensional and complex, and they can have environmental, economic, social and political consequences. And for example, when you think about the most recent ones, they are kind of excellent examples of multi-dimensional global shocks like COVID-19 and also the Russian total war against Ukraine. 

And when it comes to the reasons why I think global shocks matter, another one is that every government have to [sic] be prepared. Anticipating and preparing for global shocks is crucial. Governments have really the responsibility to manage complex crises and shocks. So, risk management is needed, not only from governments, but also other organizations and companies, and then analyzing and strategizing for the potential shocks that help institutions and governments and businesses also then develop resilient and adaptive systems. And it's utmost important in order to manage risks to work together. You have to coordinate with the private and voluntary sectors, but also international collaboration is needed. 

And there, international organizations play a crucial role. And I have seen as Minister and as Prime Minister how a country prepares and manages and governs shocks and been involved in crisis management. I would say that managing risk, that is everyday work for everyone. 

00:04:22 JE 

Right. So, you've got a very special perspective since you've worked as a Prime Minister and you've also worked very closely at the heart of a very important international organization, the OECD. So, you just told us that global shocks matter since they're multi-dimensional. They affect so many different parts of social and political and economic life. And on the other hand, the responses to global shocks need to be multi-dimensional in equal measure, in a sense. 

So, let's zoom in on the OECD as an organization that deals with shocks in some way or another. In your own words, could you just tell us a little bit about what does the OECD do exactly and what might be its role in a world that faces global shocks?

 

00:05:08 MK 

Yes, first of all, I would like to tell something about what the OECD really is, because I'm a bit irritated about the definition, which I hear very often, that the OECD is a group of rich countries, and it's so much more. So, of course, economy and wealth plays a role, but in order to become a member of the OECD, you have to fulfill certain criteria. You have to be a stable and developed economy. You have to support open markets, free trade and investment, liberalization. And you should have democratic political system, respect for human rights, rule of law, and good governance principles. And that includes, of course, having transparent and accountable institutions and independent judiciary. 

And then It's important also that members implement market-oriented economic policies and that they promote competition, innovation, entrepreneurship and efficient allocation of resources. And they are expected also to align their policies and practices with OECD standards in various areas. And in order to implement and enforce OECD standards and recommendations effectively, you should have legal and administrative capacity to do that. So that is really what the OECD is via its membership. 

And the OECD is a think tank. It's a high-level policy designer. It creates evidence-based analysis and research in order to help governments to make better policies for better lives. And it gives recommendations in most relevant policy areas. I would say that it covers everything except defense policy. And so, it helps countries to tackle the social, economic and environmental challenges, including risks and global shocks. And really the aim of the OECD is to help the member countries. 

And it's not only a think tank, it's also a “do tank,” because I think that the peer review reviewing process and the way the OECD kind of produces its advice is partly also very hands-on recommendations. So, all that those policy recommendations which are then produced by the OECD should be also implementable and, in that sense, really in a rather concrete manner to help governments to tackle the challenges of today and future. 

And then OECD is a global standards setter and supporter of the international cooperation. It has more than 400 legal instruments which have been adopted by the organization. And some of them are binding international law, but mostly they are softer instruments like recommendations. So also, in the area of risk governance, OECD does a lot by helping the member countries. 

00:08:16 JE

What would you say, given your particular background – you studied economics, you worked as a prime minister, and then you entered this organization – from your point of view, what was the most challenging global shock that you had to face, that you and your colleagues had to face? And what would you say were its consequences for the work of the organization, of the OECD? 

00:08:36 MK 

So, definitely it was the financial crisis. Maybe a bit funny to say so because the financial crisis happened in 2008 and 2009, [but] the effects and consequences of it were still felt and they were there during my years at the OECD. The aftermath of the crisis really had a lasting impact on various aspects of the global economic landscape and via that to the work of the OECD. And what the OECD wanted to do was to support governments in tackling the problems they faced after the financial crisis. 

As we remember, [inaudible] growth, high levels of public and private debt, persistently low interest rates, which was a totally new world for most of the countries. Also questions like how to balance stimulus measures with long-term fiscal sustainability, how to manage the Euro crisis. And also, I think that the crisis prompted a re-evaluation of economic models and assumptions. There were discussions like on secular stagnation, the role of globalization, the impact of technology and labor markets, inclusive growth and so on. 

So, policymakers and economists, they address the underlying causes of the crisis and also the consequences too. That discussion at the OECD produced a lot of material, research and surveys, evaluation and reviews. So, I would say that the financial crisis affected in a profound way the work and agenda of the organization. To a certain extent, you could even say that it set the agenda. And it's very obvious when you think about that, what the OECD does and what is it does in its name too, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

And also, to give some concrete examples, what happened and what was created during those years, all of the countries almost in the global sphere, not all, but most of them were struggling with balancing their budgets. There was low growth, challenges in the financial sector, so it was necessary for them to find more funding for the budget. Right. So, efforts to curb tax deviation gained momentum. And many remember the G20 leaders meeting in 2009, which stated that the era of banking secrecy is over. 

So, the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes was established, and now the forum has more than 170 members, and it has achieved massive progress in implementing the international tax transparency and exchange of information standards. And also, part of that work was so-called PETS project, which started at year 2013. It was an OECD G20 project to set up an international framework to combat tax avoidance by multinational enterprises. So, the financial crisis really elevated the cooperation of key economic powers in meetings of the G20 countries. And for those meetings, the G20 meetings, the OECD prepared reports together with WTO and UNCTAD and similar collaborations we're also undertaking with other organizations. 

But then I want to mention also another, a bit more limited crisis, and it was the migrant and refugee crisis in 2015, 2016, when the number of migrants and refugees seeking asylum surge in Europe and created a humanitarian crisis. And it raised questions about immigration and integration, also sparked political debates on a global scale. And the OECD had worked in this policy area for decades. So, the organization's help was asked when it comes to special integration policies, how to manage such a big flow of migrants and refugees. 

And the OECD, during those years and after that, undertook country reviews and also made recommendations, which is kind of a normal procedure and what it had done earlier to several countries, but also fast-track reviews were produced. But we also have to remember that the OECD is not a rapid response force. When it comes to its reviews and in-depth analysis, it always takes some time to produce those. But the good thing is that there is already a lot a lot of work done on which you can base your support to governments. And also, when you think about the recommendations and then the actual implementation work, which will be then done by the governments to which that advice is given, that takes also time. 

00:13:25 JE 

If I may just take you up on that last point on the OECD not being a rapid response force, I think that's very interesting. If we take your insider perspective into the inner workings of the organization, what does it actually look like for the OECD to respond to a global shock like the financial crisis, like the refugee crisis? Is it a process of monitoring, observing, and then slowly digesting and analyzing what the situation actually is, what the priorities need to be for the organization? What are the steps that are being followed? And I mean, if you could just give us a bit of a concrete example of how the organization faces the global shock at hand, what happens within the organization once a shock hits, as it were? 

00:14:05 MK 

Yes, of course, much depends on that. So, to a certain extent, yes, the OECD can be a rapid response force because maybe there are already recommendations set which can be used by the government which have been hit by the crisis. But then if you really need kind of in-depth analysis of the situation, then you need some time. But that is also based on the work earlier done. And it depended on that, was it so that it was a government who asked for the support, what kind of work we were able to offer? 

Sometimes there were requests to kind of produce a report very quickly, and that was possible then when, as was always almost the case, because the government knew that we had done something in this area. So, they relied on that by knowing that we have some previous work recommendations concerning the current situation. 

00:15:08 JE 

Right. So, [here] at the Oxford Martin Programme on Changing Global Orders, we're interested in historical lessons and the past. And I'm curious to hear from your point of view in this process that you just described of how the OECD analyzes and contextualizes particular challenges that occur. Do historical analogies play any role? Does it matter to the OECD to put a particular governance problem into longer term perspective? Or is that more of a background aspect to its work? 

00:15:35 MK 

Yes, of course, because in many policy areas, OECD has decades of experience in conducting surveys, research and analysis on various crises. So, it's clear that you have learned from past and you can use those lessons. So, I think that historical analogies really help recognize similarities in the underlying causes and responses and consequences of past and present situation and helps identifying lessons learned from past experiences. 

But of course, it's essential to approach historical analogies with caution because each historical context is unique and direct comparisons may not always be appropriate. It really depends on the crisis which we are handling. 

00:16:24 JE 

If you think back to the financial crisis and the migrant crisis, was there a discussion of, “have we seen this before? Does this bear any resemblances to past crises that the OECD faces?” Did that kind of conversation happen? 

00:16:37 MK 

Yes, definitely. In both crises, our experts or economists were thinking about the past crisis to, is [sic] there any analogies? Have we seen this earlier? And especially when it comes to migration crisis, that was more like a crisis where you can really benefit from earlier experiences because they are a bit more like them, or they have more similarities than the financial crisis had with earlier crises. 

00:17:06 JE 

There is, of course, a lot of debate as to what actually a crisis is, what counts as a crisis, when something becomes a crisis, when it becomes a sort of emergency that an organization like the OECD needs to respond to, and why something is a crisis and to whom. So, I'm curious to hear how the OECD actually goes about determining what counts as a sort of urgent enough crisis to respond to. How does that matter to the OECD's work? 

00:17:30 MK 

Yeah, I think that the first question which was asked at the OECD was, is this a crisis where our expertise is needed? Can we offer something to the governments or regional governments of the countries which had been hit by the crisis? And is this something where we have knowledge and high-level expertise? And the answer was obvious. It definitely was the OECD's piece of cake. And I think that it's the interaction between Secretary General's office and the whole Secretariat, as well as the Council with its permanent representatives, they all played a role defining the answer and also the committees. 

And of course, then the member countries, they had a say when kind of analyzing that, is this something where we could contribute and by which way? And sometimes really it was so that the particular government asked for help, that they wanted us to produce a survey and wanted us to give some advice. And sometimes we also as an organization where we knew that we have a something to offer, we offered to governments that we could maybe undertake a review on this policy area in order to help you. But then when kind of the answer was yes, definitely this is something where we should be active, then we had a look if there is work already done and what kind of new material is then needed. Let's take it as an example, the migrant crisis. Yeah. 

00:18:59 JE 

Was the perception one of, this is potentially a threat to the stability in our member states, this is a problem that we need to solve, or was it also kind of seen as an opportunity for the OECD to learn to find new ways of responding to complex problems such as a migrant crisis, a refugee crisis? Was the perception one of a threat or of an opportunity, or was it a bit of both? 

00:19:22 MK 

A bit of both. So, when it comes to those shocks, the migration flow, many of the member countries of the OECD were seen to be in a certain danger in a way that how to handle the situation. So, it really was so that the OECD wanted to offer its support in order to stabilize the situation. But also, there were also opportunities for the organization to develop its work to a new level. 

00:19:53 JE 

So, right at the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned how global shocks connect different policy domains and spread across different areas of social, economic, political life. And of course, in recent months, over the past year maybe, “polycrisis” has been the kind of big buzzword that policymakers and public commentators have been talking about, trying to capture how every crisis is always connected to other crises actually and other issue areas. 

And of course, I can imagine from your point of view as an economist, that is a very clear aspect to you, that an economic crisis is going to have social consequences, is going to have political consequences. Does this term “polycrisis” make sense from your OECD point of view? 

00:20:36 MK 

Yes, definitely it does. The interconnectedness of global challenges is really so, high that you have to find multi-dimensional solutions also. 

00:20:49 JE 

And during your time working at the OECD, you mentioned that the OECD at some points needed to coordinate its policies and its actions with other organizations, like you mentioned UNCTAD and the WTO. Is this part of dealing with a world in which crises intersect with other crises? Is that what's required for the OECD, to coordinate its action with other organizations working on adjacent areas? 

00:21:11 MK 

Yes, I think it's essential to coordinate and cooperate, but I would use the word cooperation more than coordination, because I think that every organization when it comes to international ones, they have their own rather well-defined roles among the international organizations, so each of them knows what to do and where they limits, where they can go. 

But of course, you can always raise the question that is the number of organizations the right one, are there too many? But in any case, international organizations, they cooperate and they also to a certain extent, the work is coordinated well. And this occurs through discussions between organizations, but primarily I would say through the political decisions made by member countries and in the organization. So, the long-term agenda of each organization is set in collaboration with the organization's secretariat and member countries. 

And this then largely determines the agenda for each of them, and where to go, in which areas to be active, in which policy areas to be active, and in which crisis the organization is going to be one of the problem solvers. Yeah, and that has set this interaction with member countries, with Secretariat, and also discussions with other organizations, then kind of defined the limits of actions. 

00:22:37 JE 

If we think about how the OECD relates to other organizations, would you say how international organizations relate to one another, is it kind of division of labor, or is it trying to secure your own mandate and to make sure that the OECD is the one organization that works on X? How does that play out in your perspective? 

00:22:54 MK 

Sometimes there is competition that organizations want to state that we are so important, we have to be active in this policy area too. So, it's a bit challenging, to try to get out of this complex system certain limits to every organization's work. But I think that so far, kind of the member countries which should be in lead than in defining where the limits are for each organization have managed rather well. But also, the international organizations are not the only players in this field. We have also NGOs in the field. So that makes the situation even a bit more complex. 

00:23:40 JE 

We live in a world where there are many geopolitical shifts happening. Who gets a seat at the table has changed dramatically. And so, the OECD in this context, I think, is quite interesting. Its roots are geopolitical in the sense that the organization was founded to administer the Marshall Plan. And at that time, the Soviet Union and its satellite states rejected that. But then over the longer run in the post-Cold War world, OECD membership has globalized in a way, right? So countries like Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile are just a few examples of new OECD members. Membership has changed a lot, and arguably that has an effect for the fundamental purpose and identity and mission of the OECD. How would you say does the OECD relate to these kinds of longer-term changes, and how have its changes in membership affected the organization's work? 

00:24:29 MK 

Yes, as you mentioned, really, geopolitical shifts really affected the work of the OECD. And you can see it in the composition of the OECD's membership. Former Eastern Bloc countries are now they're more in the line. But [during] my years at the OECD, Latvia and Lithuania became members. There are still a couple of EU countries which are not yet there, and Latin American countries, as you mentioned. And I think also what has happened and what can be seen because of these geopolitical shifts, that the OECD's work demand has been increased. 

So, there are more countries and partners who want to cooperate with us, and there are quite many in line and in the accession process already. So, the OECD has become [a] more and more global organization. And it's not only the members, but also the OECD's cooperation with key partners, with China, Brazil, South Africa, India, Indonesia. It was something new a couple of decades ago. And also, with some regional economic organizations like Southeast Asia, G20, G7. So OECD is a more wanted organization all over the world. That has also increased the OECD's importance as a global standard setter. So, this really shows how much more important the organization is. 

00:25:59 JE 

Right. So, you're saying that the OECD has become more important. There's an increased demand for the OECD as an actor in global governance and that the OECD has also played a role or started to play a role as a kind of global standard setter in a way. 

00:26:13 MK 

Exactly, yes. 

00:26:14 JE 

Would you say that given that there are geopolitical conflicts, not only on the horizon, but we've seen many over the last decades, we're seeing many at the moment – these kinds of conflicts, of course, require that somehow we build resilience, not least through international organizations – would you say that the OECD can play a role in building this kind of resilience against geopolitical conflict? 

00:26:37 MK 

Definitely. And of course, I'm also worried about the fragmentation of global order and the geopolitical tensions which have been rising. But I think that OECD can really be quite a big player trying to solve and tackle this challenge. While getting more members, it can actively seek to expand its membership, as it has done, and then the OECD should continue to foster partnerships and collaborations with key partners, with interested countries, regional organizations, and other stakeholders. So, the work it has been doing for decades already. 

When the OECD is also continuing its work in building capacities and sharing knowledge, that is also important because we need more and more evidence and we need to promote the evidence base, which clearly shows how important for the economic growth and wealth of free trade is and how bad fragmentation is. 

00:27:40 JE 

We've talked about how the OECD does its work, how it responds to global shocks, what kinds of global shocks it responds to. We've spoken about the financial crisis as an example from your perspective and the migrant crisis as another example. If we think about all of this, what would you say, going forward, is the biggest challenge for the OECD as an organization and its role in regional economic governance in the future? 

00:28:04 MK 

I think that the biggest challenge is the geopolitical fragmentation. The OECD operates in a world where geopolitical fragmentation and power political divides are increasingly pronounced, and there are tensions between major powers, and also national security and resilience are prioritized over multilateralism, international cooperation, and rules-based global order nowadays in many countries. So, there is need for functional global rules and practices still in many areas. So, in that sense, I think that there's a lot of need for the work of the OECD in the long run. 

The global opinion will understand the benefits of free trade and the global or multilateral rules-based system. So definitely, the OECD has an important place also in the future in promoting the multilateral cooperation. 

00:29:00 JE 

How would you say can the OECD learn from past shocks to improve its preparedness for the future? 

00:29:06 MK 

I think that the OECD should keep up the good work and continue its work. There's no silver bullet to change the public opinion, which to quite a big extent is against multilateralism. But when it comes to global shocks, the OECD has done actually also a lot of work in the field of risk governance policies. And the OECD has definitely learned from past experiences. 

And I think that that is kind of internalized very well in the work of the OECD's Secretariat. And I would like to mention the OECD High-Level Risk Forum, which brings together policymakers, experts and stakeholders from member countries to discuss emerging risks, also share best practices and develop strategies to enhance resilience and improve risk governance at both national at international levels. And that forum also conducts research to help policymakers understand and identify critical risks. 

And then there is also the OECD recommendations on the governance of critical risks, which was adopted 2014. And there has been also an assessment report which have been published in order to get an overview of countries' progress in implementing the recommendations. This work done by the OECD really can help the member countries to govern and the global risks. And also the strategic foresight work has to be mentioned too, which supports not only the OECD's own resilience, but also that of the member countries. 

00:30:42 JE 

That's really, really interesting and I think really connects the different dots here because we've talked about different ways for the institution to understand what's happening around it. Mari Kiviniemi, it's been a great pleasure having you today and talking to you. It's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. 

00:30:57 MK 

Thank you. 

Conversation with Kumi Naidoo. Recorded 10 April 2024, online.

00:00:00 JE 

So, just to get us started, just for the record, if you could state your name and just briefly summarize what you do. Tell us in your own words why thinking about global shocks matters to you. 

00:00:12 KN 

So, my name is Kumi Naidoo. I am currently a visiting lecturer for a year at Stanford University. I'm part of the Friedman Spogli Institute for International Relations. And I'm using my time here at Stanford to do a reflection on the question of why is activism not winning faster and bigger so that we are aligned to the climate crisis. I'm also the advisor to the Community Arts Network and a founding board member of the Ricky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artivism. The foundation was set up a year ago after the passing of a very popular rapper and hip-hop artist, who was my son.

And when I asked the question, why is activism failing or not succeeding to win on the scale that it needs to, the main reason I've landed on is that we have a serious communications deficit, that we are not able to communicate to people clearly enough, accessibly enough, and urgently enough. And there are two problems to this. One is the objective reality of the communications and media landscape, which is very much dominated and controlled by the very people who are making policy decisions and driving us closer and closer to the climate cliff. 

So, the environment for us to be able to get our messages across. Any messages that go against the status quo, any narratives that seek to promote fundamental structural and systemic change, it's hard to get that penetrated in the mainstream media. But assume for a moment that wasn't a challenge, right? Even if it wasn't a challenge, activism would still screw it up, if you take the cultural ways of how activism communicates, right? Because a lot of, if you take climate activism, a lot of our approach is narratives that are aimed at the brain and the head, and we ignore the heart and the gut, right? 

And if we look at the emerging fascists around the world, from Donald Trump to Steve Bannon to Bolsonaro and others, Orban, they are not concerned about the head. They are not interested in facts. Because for us, in the climate justice movement, we have tried to advance our struggles by using science, policies, rational arguments, proposals around specific interventions and so on. But the language that we use, the framing of it and so on, is way above the ability for most people to enter the conversation, including people who might have university education and so on. 

Because if you're not a specialist in climate, then you struggle to get in. So, one of the solutions to the problem is I looked back at my own childhood activism, during apartheid in a country where the majority of our people were consciously deprived of education. One of the most powerful statements of apartheid policy was actually about education. The founder of the apartheid ideology, Hendrik Verwoerd, said, “blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education.” They should know that “their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

And so, when I look at how did we mobilize, how did we mobilize in a context where people couldn't read and write? And actually, the answer is so simple. It was through song, through dance, through theater, through a range of cultural sort of expressions that connected with peoples. So, that is why a lot of my work right now is focused on how do we break through the communications hurdles and how do we actually draw on the power of arts and culture. 

Let me just conclude by saying that I am not suggesting that if we harness the full power of arts and culture for social change on its own will deliver us the salvation from the climate crisis and its intersecting crises. However, I would safely say right now that without harnessing the power of arts and culture, we're almost guaranteed not to have a chance to break through the communications hurdles that we have. 

00:04:36 JE 

Right, fascinating. It sounds like you are drawing so strongly on your long and distinguished career as an activist, as part of the anti-apartheid struggle. You've worked for Greenpeace, you've worked with Amnesty International. These are different, very different issue areas where those challenges of communication that you just laid out must be quite different, right? What really led you from your sort of earliest involvement in activism all the way to a big organization like Greenpeace? 

00:05:04 KN 

When Greenpeace, you know, folks had hunted me for this position, in fact, there's a funny story about it. When they called me, I had just finished a hunger strike. [Corrects himself] No, no, no – I was in the middle of the hunger strike, well, towards the end of it, to put pressure on the South African government to act on the worsening situation in Zimbabwe. And part of it was a hunger strike that Archbishop Desmond Tutu had called for. And I was the first person that anchored it for 21 days and all of that. 

And in the middle of it, I got a call from Greenpeace sort of saying, would you be interested to be a candidate? And I said to them, you know, thanks very much, deeply honored, but the timing is really bad. And my daughter, who I spoke to a few days later, sort of said, “Dad,” she had seen me on a television interview and she said, “Dad, why are you so, why are you still doing interviews and so on? Aren't you supposed to be conserving your energy?” And I said, “no, you know, I made an exception. The only two people I spoke to were these BBC people and these folks from Greenpeace who called.” And she said, “what did you tell them?” And I said, “no, I told them bad timing, you know, I can't make a decision like that.” And she said to me, “you know, dad, I won't talk to you if you don't seriously consider this when you finish your stupid hunger strike, because Greenpeace is addressing one of the most critical issues of our time.”

But when I spoke to the Greenpeace board and so on, it became clear that the reason they were keen to have somebody like me was they recognized that the organization couldn't continue as it was, which is having an international claim by calling themselves Greenpeace International, when in fact there was not an equal balancing of power between the Global South and the Global North. And it's important to recognize that when we're talking about international organizations and their role in the world, is that actually there are very few truly international organizations. We use the term “international” very loosely, and I can tell you an anecdote to bring this point to life. The Secretary General of Amnesty, while I was the head of Greenpeace, was a guy called Salil Shetty, and he brought his senior management team to meet with my senior management team at Greenpeace, you know, about six months or so after I started. 

And then he said, “you know, Kumi, I've come to realize why all the organizations we know, whether it's Greenpeace International, Amnesty International, Save the Children International, Oxfam International, and so on, is that we use the term international to mask how uninternational we actually are, right?”And so if you talk, you know, when we say Global South, Global North, what we should be saying is the overwhelming global majority and the global minority. If you look at the countries that we have often referred to as the international community, right? So the word “international” has been abused for far too long. 

And so, when I was approached, both by Greenpeace and Amnesty, it was very much part of how does the organization become as global as the challenges that it seeks to address? And how does it ensure that it looks like how the world looks like? Now, the difficulty we have is that in international organizations in the governmental space, G20, G8, UN, and so on, they don't have a fundamentally different analysis from the crises that we find ourselves in, right? Because, for example, as early as 1997, after the Asian financial crisis, the president of the World Bank, [and] Bill Clinton was [US] president then, Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, and many others said, the world needs a new international financial architecture. We would agree with that. 

But then once some band-aids were put on the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which obviously proliferated beyond to Argentina, Russia, and so on, as we saw after the 2008, 2009 global financial crisis, and as we are seeing now after COVID, right, all of these crises have shown how bad our current systems are, right, in terms of being able to take care of the majority of people in our societies, within the Global South or in the Global North. So, what we would have expected, say, after the global financial crisis in 2009, was that there would be an approach of system innovation, system transformation, system redesign. But what we got, and as we're now having with COVID, post-COVID, is all you get is system recovery, system maintenance, and system protection. 

The other important thing to note about the failure of the international system at the moment is the failure to embrace a wisdom from the feminist movement that was given to us decades ago, when we were urged to embrace the power of intersectionality, understanding that, you know, environment doesn't exist in a silo, development and poverty doesn't exist in a silo, human rights doesn't exist in a silo. But both on the civil society side, right, you know, Greenpeace and WWE, Friends of the Earth are focused on environment, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch on human rights and Oxfam and Save the Children and so on, on poverty. 

But on the governmental side, you have exactly the same thing. When we look at the global system, you could say that we have four deficits, right? And let me now talk about the governmental system at the global level. We have four deficits. We have, firstly, a democratic deficit, right? So, if you look at the World Bank and IMF, it's governed by a $1, one vote system. The president of the World Bank has to be an American, the managing director of the IMF has to be a European, and two parts of the world in population size are relatively modest, when we look at population size. So, or even you take the Security Council of the United Nations. Yes, you know, why should those five countries have the veto power? France and the UK, for example, at the time, at the rules that were being drawn, were on the right side of the victory in the Second World War, right? But you could say, well, all those countries have nuclear power and therefore they should have a veto, right? But if you use that logic, then Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea, others should be on the Security Council. So basically, you've got a Security Council that is fundamentally undemocratic, right? So, the first deficit is a democratic deficit. 

The second deficit is a coherence deficit. And the coherence deficit resonates a lot with the incoherence we see on the part of civil society, in the sense that you have your finance minister, going to the World Bank and IMF, your foreign minister going to the UN, your health minister to WHO, your culture and education minister to UNESCO and so on. And try and imagine what this means for small countries and medium-sized countries even, especially in the Global South and the resources it takes to just service the international system. And quite often at the national level, some of these ministers are shooting off in a different direction, without necessarily coordinating what are the intersections within – what are you saying at the World Bank? What am I saying at the UN? What am I, you know, what is somebody else saying at the UNESCO or WHO and so on? Obviously, some countries are better at dealing with this incoherence, but most countries, I would say, get embroiled in territoriality and political intrigue and so on and leaves us with a pretty incoherent situation. 

The third, I would say, is a compliance deficit, right? If you go and do an analysis of resolutions taken, whether at the G8, G20, UN Security Council, UN General Assembly, and so on, or from UN summits, if you take the Beijing summit in 2005, for example, and you look at what has been complied with and followed through, if you look at what the commitments that the G8, G7 made over time and what they deliver on, the compliance is very, very low. 

And so, these three deficits of democratic deficit, compliance deficit, and coherence deficit combine to give you a legitimacy deficit, right? And so today, the failure of international NGOs like Greenpeace, Amnesty, and others to be as global as the challenges that we seek to address also means that there is, because sadly, you know, I, for example, during my time at Greenpeace, did a lot to push this agenda forward of balancing the power and so on. But like people everywhere, nobody gives up power as easy as we would think they would. 

So today, all international NGOs without exception, sadly suffer from a deep reality of structural racism, right? Because if you look at, you know, like, for example, when I joined Greenpeace, you had a governance arrangement where like Luxembourg had one vote and China had one vote, all of Africa had one vote. And I don't want to pick on Luxembourg, because also you could say Belgium or other smaller countries in Europe, the Czech Republic had one vote and, you know, India I had a single vote. 

So, basically, part of the problem is not dissimilar to World Bank and IMF sort of $1, one vote system. It's money that actually drives it, right? So, I might have been the Secretary General of Amnesty International or the head of Greenpeace, but it was common knowledge that the people who really had the power were those that were from powerful countries in the Global North, which had the ability to raise significant amounts of funding. So, as happened often, if there was some transformative idea that I was trying to push, it can easily be blocked by the people who had, who controlled the offices, whether it's the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, and so on, who were the big fundraisers. They could block you and kill anything that you want to do. And they didn't, and they can blame their boards and they can, you know, they can say, oh, my board didn't want me to support that and so on. 

And so, the challenge, Mahatma Gandhi once said, be the change you want to see in the world. And sadly, all international organizations that exist on the governmental side, on the civil society side, and so on, don't reflect that deeply. 

00:16:12 JE 

It's a tough, tough verdict, but I think I would love to hear more about your experience working at Greenpeace and dealing with those deficits that you just sketched out. And I have a question about how Greenpeace is different from other international organizations. Of course, it's an international NGO. That's one major difference, of course, if we compare that to intergovernmental organizations. 

But Greenpeace also stands out as a civil society organization that is really committed to direct action, to civil disobedience, to very particular kinds of tactics and sort of means to achieve its goals. And that's, of course, included not shying away from confronting powerful multinational corporations responsible for major environmental harm. And if I'm not mistaken, in 2012, for example, you occupied a Gazprom oil platform in the Arctic, as part of a Greenpeace campaign. My question to you is, in this kind of world marked by turbulence, marked by these deficits that you sketched out, so a kind of simultaneity of crises multiplying and a fully equipped international system, in that world, do we need more civil disobedience? 

00:17:20 KN 

So firstly, one of my attractions of joining Greenpeace, I had spent ten years working internationally before that as the Secretary General of Civicus World Alliance for Citizen Participation, which was a global umbrella body for small as well as large organizations like Greenpeace and Amnesty and all. If history teaches us anything, when humanity has faced terrible injustice or a terrible challenge, those struggles only move forward when decent women and men stood up and said, “enough is enough and no more. We prepare to put our lives on the line. We prepare to go to prison if necessary. We prepare to make sacrifices necessary.” And by taking action that is peaceful, but which actually breaks unjust laws, right? 

And I would say laws that protect the fossil fuel industry, given that we know that the fossil fuel industry is dabbling in a poison called carbon dioxide emissions, which is killing the future of our children and their children. If we look at the extreme imbalance of power, let me give you a practical example. So, if as head of Greenpeace, we were engaged in a campaign around Shell, right, to encourage it not to go into the Arctic, for example, right? Now, the Arctic is actually one of the front lines of the environmental challenges that we face at the moment. The Arctic is telling us clearly we are in deep trouble, right? The incident you talk about when I occupied a gas oil rig in 2012 in the Barn Sea, very much on the top of the world, if you want. At that time, there was a clear recognition by the science. There was [sic] very few governments that were still questioning the reality of climate change. 

But what we saw is, yes, you can't blame people who work in the fossil fuel industry for being in a dirty energy industry that's driving us to destruction, because they've been told that they are providing an important national service by generating energy. But none of those workers particularly say, “oh, I only want to generate dirty energy. Please let me generate dirty energy.” They want to generate energy. So, they would be happy to do it through cleaner means that doesn't impact the children's futures. 

Now, the fossil fuel industry were ahead of the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, in terms of their own scientists told them much earlier that burning of fossil fuels is going to create the problem. What they opted to do was to bury their own scientific findings in terms of public discourse, but they changed their practice. So, for example, when rigs were being put in the sea, right, they took into account sea level rise as a result of climate change and they put the rigs higher. But in the public, they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars saying fossil fuels is absolutely fine. And so, when you look at the imbalance of power between Shell and Greenpeace, for example, Greenpeace's entire global budget of close to 400 million euros is not even one-tenth of the advertising budget of one fossil fuel company like Shell. 

And so, the power of civil disobedience, you know, which we learned from Mahatma Gandhi, from Martin Luther King, from Nelson Mandela, from Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, you know, many, many people in history around the world, is as relevant today as it's ever been because when power does not shift, you have to shift power. And so, the other purpose of why civil disobedience is important is that some of these crimes, environmental crimes, are happening far away from the visibility of the vast majority of people on the planet. Whether it's the slavery practices we have seen in the Amazon, whether it's the murders of nuns and others who are working to change things around, which we've seen in the Amazon. 

Greenpeace's work in the Amazon. Oftentimes, the federal state of Brazil had no capability to find exactly what was going on and to intervene. Like for example, once when a popular nun was murdered for her work, Greenpeace folks had to be there on the ground, bringing in the federal government into these remote places because they didn't have the direct capability on their own. Then if you take the Arctic or the Antarctic, they are so remote from where the majority of people live, it seems so far from the reality. But as I like to remind people, you know, people say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Sadly, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. Its impact is global, right? 

So therefore, civil disobedience is also about bearing witness to injustice in places where it's hidden from people. Now, nobody relishes the idea of going to prison or putting your life at risk when you, you know, occupy an oil rig where potentially Russian agents could be firing at you has happened the year after. In 2013, thirty Greenpeace activists were thrown in prison in Murmansk for doing exactly the same protests that we did. But where we are right now as humanity, it's important to understand that civil disobedience is one important and powerful tool in the toolbox of social change. 

And like any tool, if you don't use it strategically, with good timing, with sensitivity, and so on, it can actually backfire really badly. Civil disobedience is very contextual. What I mean by that is what works well in one context might not work well in another context. So let me give you an example. I hope many of your listeners will know what mooning is, but if they don't, let me just offer a definition. If twenty people want to make a sign say, stop climate change, but they have to enter a venue where they cannot carry in placards and so on, what has happened sometimes is people will paint on each of their bum cheeks one or two letters, and at a given point, they all pull their pants down and it'll say, act now to stop climate change, for example. 

Now, that might work well in London or New York or San Francisco. It might not work so well in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, or Egypt, right? So, it doesn't mean that it was bad. And it becomes more complicated in a global environmental space because nothing stays solely within one country. And that was often a challenge for Greenpeace because, for example, whenever there was [sic] atrocities committed by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people, and when those were happening, you would have a lot of Greenpeace wanting to take action and take a position, and then others would be very hesitant about it. And those that were hesitant would not even allow, or those individual countries where it was easier to do, or it was appropriate to do, to offer that solidarity to the Palestinian people, because they would say, it will still reflect in our market because when you do social media and so on, people will still say, hey, that's Greenpeace, we did that, and in our country, that'll play bad. So there's quite a challenging thing to actually manage. 

And let me give you another example. When Extinction Rebellion – who I fully support, their message is absolutely right, the urgency is right – but that doesn't mean that I support every single protest or tactic that they've used. So, in October 2020, they did some, I mean, in 2020, they did some amazing protests, which kept, during COVID, kept the climate struggle alive, more so than any other campaigning group in the world. But for example, when they choose to block tube stations, right, public transport used mainly by working class people, at a time when we have to win over working class people, we're struggling to put food on the table for the kids to eat, we are pushing people away. That might have got media coverage, might have got the issue to be talked about in the media. But on the other hand, it's alienating a critical constituency. And bear in mind, one of the problems of the environmental and climate movement that it's far too white and far too middle class. 

And the challenge for us is, how do we include those that have been excluded and those that stand to suffer the most? Because one of the realities of climate change is the people that are paying the most vicious and brutal price for climate impacts now are those that have contributed least to the problem in terms of emissions. You know, if you look at the impacts in Africa, in the small island Pacific states and so on, these are communities where the emissions are largely negligible compared to the historical emissions of countries like the United States and countries in Europe that built the economy on dirty energy. 

So yes, it's a rather long answer to say that civil disobedience is something that we need, but we need to be strategic in how we deploy it, and not be self-serving in any way in how we, because it might mean that you might get a fundraising bump if you do a certain action in certain fundraising sort of context. But if that doesn't actually broaden the constituency of people who are participating and so on, then I would argue that that's not helpful. 

00:27:33 JE 

So, you were International Executive Director of Greenpeace International from 2009 to 2015. In that time, what was the most challenging global shock that challenged the organization, that challenged Greenpeace? 

00:27:45 KN 

I think the Fukushima nuclear power plant's vulnerability after the tsunami in, I believe it was 2011. And it's at a time also when people were trying to make a big push for nuclear energy because they said it was carbon neutral, which by the way, it's not 100% carbon neutral. And there's major questions around water and resources and so on. So, I always say to young activists, if you want to be popular, try to become a sports star or a musician or something, because activism is not a popularity contest, right? You have to go against a broken status quo, a broken economic system, a broken energy system, food system, transport system, and so on, right? And if you want to succeed or you want to do good in the world, you have to have the courage to say, that the current reality is not the best that humanity can do for itself. 

And so, we were struggling right until Fukushima to get movement on countries like Germany and Italy, for example. But six months after, so we turned that crisis into an opportunity. And this is just to be very clear why I and many others don't think nuclear energy is the solution to the current situation, because to put it simply, it's too expensive, it's too dangerous, and it'll deliver too little, too late to address the climate crisis. Let me just quickly walk through those terms. 

Too expensive today – there's absolutely no question the unit cost of electricity can be generated much, much cheaper than through from solar, wind, and other renewable resources then. So, there are multiple studies that show that now. Secondly, on too dangerous. Now, too dangerous people might say, well, you know, Fukushima happened and yes, there was some impact and Chernobyl happened and there was some impact, but you know, the world didn't end and the impacts were manageable, right? But let's say the nuclear industry comes to us and say, we can guarantee you that there will never be any human hero in any nuclear facility. And we agree with them. They come and say, “We can also guarantee there will never be any technical failure”, and assuming we agree with them. And then they say, “there'll never be any extreme weather events like a tsunami that could have an impact on a nuclear facility.” And let's say we agree with them. 

The one thing that they cannot put before us, that reasonably they can expect to shift us, is on the storage of spent nuclear waste at the end of the nuclear cycle. So just for those who don't know, the spent waste at the end of the nuclear cycle, depending what exact combination of materials used in it, can take at least 200 to 1000 plus years before it's no longer toxic and dangerous, right? And so, all we're doing is we are then storing these things underground in the northern part of Germany, for example, and we're just passing the problem on to future generations. 

So, imagine today when archaeologists go and prospect and so on, they're finding temples and cities and artifacts and so on. The archaeologists of the future could stumble on this most toxic reality that has just been passed on by previous generations. And on the too little, too late, how long does it take to build a single nuclear power plant, right? [We are] talking between seven and ten years when it's done in country, like when Russia builds it in its own country, that's what we are talking about. But when Russia is building outside of Russia, it can take up to 30 years. The same would apply to almost any other country. 

So, for all of those reasons, the global shock of Fukushima, which was put the world on anxiety and not just in Asia, because you see, the Chinese have the same character for crisis and opportunity, right? That's what activism has to be about. It is about how you turn every global shock or global crisis into an opportunity. I also faced other global, which to us at Greenpeace was like a global shock, but probably not to the world as a whole, which had to do with the culture and the reality of international organizations. And I'll tell the story because it's a painful one. 

So, in 2014, the climate negotiations were taking place in Lima, Peru. And I hate going to those negotiations because it kind of always is very frustrating because you seem as if you are doing the same thing every year and each year you're just like moving the agenda like one centimeter in the right direction. 

00:32:24 JE 

Groundhog Day. 

00:32:25 KN 

Yeah, exactly. So, my colleagues in the Philippines kindly said to me, “hey, why don't you rather than go to Peru, come and be in the Philippines because another horrific typhoon is on his way and thousands of people are going to lose their lives, and there'll be millions and millions of dollars in infrastructure loss, and let's stand with the people on the ground and we can message in to Lima and the COP that was happening there.” And, you know, we didn't have cell phone reception and so on and we were kind of chasing the typhoon trying to get ahead of it so that we could get to communities and support them with temporary solar installations and so on so they could call their families, and so on, and we would interview them and tell their stories, and we'd use a satellite phone to send the stories to the negotiations in Peru. 

When we come out of it, we get a shock to discover that Greenpeace Germany had led an action on a sacred site in Peru called the Nazca Lines, which allowed a corrupt political elite in Peru the president and the people around him to then turn that into attention away from the corruption investigations and so on that were going on to say, oh, Greenpeace disrespected our culture. By the way, the Peruvian government was not doing anything substantial to protect the Nazca Lines. So, it was complete opportunism on their part. But should we have done it? We should not have done it, right? No question. 

And, in a situation like that, where indigenous peoples around the world were criticizing Greenpeace immediately, people in the world of archaeology and cultural protection of historical sites and so on were so upset with us, as well as the climate movement, because suddenly, nobody was talking about what was happening in the climate negotiation. [For] everybody, the news became saturated with who [are] the people, can we arrest the people? You know, that's how the government played the agenda. And even though I was kind of fully exhausted, when I was not able to get the leadership of the German office to go and be on the ground, to answer for it, to apologize appropriately and so on, I then went, and I've never witnessed, I never had tomatoes and eggs thrown at me in my life. 

But that, you know, what I see when there are global shocks is that people in leadership don't actually step forward and say, we've made a mistake, we made a miscalculation, and we take responsibility. Part of what I was trying to do when that for us was like, for me was emotionally, because bear in mind, right, the inequality of it. Can you imagine a bunch of Peruvian activists coming to Germany and occupying a church in Germany? The German office of Greenpeace would never agree to that, right? But the Global North can parachute into Global South places with complete immunity and arrogance. And that has to shift. 

And so, we had INTERPOL arrest warrants for some of our activists that had engaged in the process and so on. And you can't blame the individual activists. It was a failure of leadership. And even though I was not aware of the decision and I had to deal with the aftermath of it, I felt it was responsible, the right thing for us to do as Greenpeace was to go and apologize and say, this is not who we are. We don't disrespect the cultures of people and so on. 

00:35:47 JE 

Would you say that part of learning the lesson is to really think more carefully, as you said at the beginning of our conversation, about how to truly be a global organization? Is that part of the answer to these moments? 

00:35:59 KN 

Absolutely. Because if, as a global organization, you're choosing to do something. in one national space, then we should evenly say that we will do that in all national spaces. So, like with COVID and the vaccine apartheid that most of us in the Global South had to deal with, they were saying, the powerful nations of the world were saying, we need to get people vaccinated, we need to get people vaccinated. And they developed the vaccines because they have the resources on a scale that the Global South could never have done it, with the exception of India, which caught up and played a big role. 

We have to have equity in how we act in the world. And basically, the global system has very limited equity in it. The people that dominate decision making, it's, you know, you would say, okay, it's changing a bit now. And I think that the formation of BRICS and its recent expansion is an attempt to balance the power that exists. The difficulty for many of us in the Global South is that some of the leading governments in BRICS are not the shining examples of democracy or of justice or of anti-corruption and so on. 

You know, like my country, South Africa, which is a leading figure in BRICS, is one of the most corrupt countries in the world with one of the most corrupt political leaderships that you can find, right? And so, while I agree with a lot of the words coming out of their mouth about the changes we need in the international system and so on, there is this difficulty that what they're saying and why they're saying it is not necessarily what they're going to follow through on. Right. And so that's the other huge problem we have with the poor state of our politics at the national and global level, where politicians will easily say that which they know is right and what they need to say. 

But the compliance of those decisions are so lacking in the extent to which they are implemented. It's fraudulent, really. And so, for civil society organizations, you know, we cannot be on the one hand, for example, saying people who get elected to government should do their two terms or whatever the constitution says they should do and leave, right? Which is correct for us to be saying, and we say that a lot, that people, nobody's indispensable and so on. But when you go and you look at the NGO community in some parts of the world and even internationally at Greenpeace, you know, you had executive directors of offices that were there for 20 years plus, and they embraced a notion of indispensability. 

So, what I'm saying, I'm using this example to say that we have to live up to the criticisms that we are making about the injustices in the global governance system. Right. If we are making critiques about, you know, people should not stay in positions, they shouldn't develop a culture of indispensability, then we need to reflect that fully. And of course, some organizations in the broader civil society community do better at it than others. But the fact that people can do that and it doesn't get challenged as much as it should be within civil society is a problem that says that we have embraced the culture and the logics of the mainstream status quo in many ways. 

And another small example, you know, the one thing that international organizations, national governments, and international NGOs have in common is that over time, they've ended up all using the same consultants, right? No, seriously, they're using, Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte and Touché, and many of these organizations have built major global practices, right? All the major consulting firms in the world, Boston Consulting Group, Gemini, name them, they all now have significant sort of non-profit practices as they call it, or non-profit arms. So even when I was at Greenpeace, you know, that was the logic. Many of those contracts were in place, and of course, if you've designed the organization to look like corporations and you're mimicking them, then you're gonna need the same consultant to help you figure out how to make those institutions run more effectively. 

Yes, and so, it's a big question for people who believe that the current system is not simply one that requires incremental tinkering and baby steps in the right direction, but people who believe that the current system is broken to an extent, that it requires substantive structural and systemic change. If you hold that view, then you have to recognize that it's a fraud to suggest to people that “if we just improve things year and day, it's all going to be okay. Don't panic.” Right? And that's the approach we've taken to climate since 1992, since the first Rio summit, right? We have continued to just, you know, it was one step forward, two step backwards type of thing since 1992. 

The powerful thought, we can get some nice words in the final declaration and show that we are going to do something that responds to what the science was saying, we’ll be okay. And now we are at a situation where we are right at the climate cliff, right? And let's be blunt, as we, you know, people ask me the question, is it too late to address climate change? And this is a question, by the way, people were asking me ever since I was at Greenpeace from 2009. And my answer is always an optimistic one, which is to say that the window of opportunity to prevent catastrophic, runaway, irreversible climate change is small and shrinking, but the opportunity is still there. 

You know, one of the popular lines we used to say was, we can't change the science. We only can change the politics. And the political world, thankfully, is a renewable resource because hopefully we can elect people out of office and so on. But the contamination of the political class globally in accepting the status quo as given, because what you see with the most progressive or radical of political parties, when they're out of power, they can be very transformative in what they say. But when they get into powers, you know, understandably, the constraints of power is very, very limiting within certain current global rules. And those very global rules continue to perpetuate more and more global shocks, right? 

I mean, COVID itself is a result of us not addressing deforestation. And so, we then continue to generate more and more, if you want, crises or global shocks that each time we are more shocked by and each time appear to be more incompetent in addressing it as a global community. And the last thing I would say is that climate change, I've been arguing since 2009, can be an opportunity. Well, in 2009, it could have been an opportunity, right? Which is for us to recognize for far too long, we've lived in a world that's been divided between north and south, east and west, developed and developing, rich and poor. 

What climate change is saying to us, hey, folks, get it together, get it together and get it together fast, because you'll either act as a united global family and community and hopefully you can reduce the amounts of deaths that are happening. So, for the people who are dying, like the 450 people that died in my city in Durban in 2022, it's too late for them, right? From two days of like crazy rainfall that created massive infrastructure losses and took 450 lives, it's too late for those people, surely. But I still want to believe that we are still in a moment where we can actually prevent the worst losses of human life and the complete destruction of countries, and so on. Even though parts of Africa are becoming depopulated as a result of climate change as we speak, I still want to believe that it's possible for us to deal with the biggest global shock. 

00:44:13 JE 

Right. 

00:44:14 KN 

And it's interesting about whether you could even call climate change a global shock in the sense that a global shock sort of suggests that something that was unanticipated came out of nowhere and so on. The terrible thing about it is that climate change is the biggest global shock that we face, but we don't treat it as a global shock. We treat it as, oh, it's just one other issue. And therefore, it's important for us to recognize that the struggle to avert, to address climate change is not an environmental issue. Climate change is a cross-cutting issue. It's a failure of our economic system, energy system, and so on. And we have to deal with it in a more intersectional way than we've been doing in the past. 

00:44:54 JE 

If we think about the past, what we've been doing in the past, how Greenpeace is trying to achieve climate action since it's been founded, a lot of things have changed, of course. There's been lots of different individual shocks in the past that Greenpeace has been dealing with. Geopolitical tensions have just shifted a lot over the last decades. 

And at the same time, global governance itself has changed. You mentioned the role of consultancies, for example. The way global governance is being done has changed over the last decades as well. So, if we take all of that, how would you say can Greenpeace as an organization learn from its own past? And how can it sort of deal with this diversified and fractured global governance landscape that we have today? 

00:45:40 KN 

The real imperative of Greenpeace and other international NGOs is to recognize that they cannot continue to operate the way they've operated historically. They cannot continue to call themselves international when they actually, the decision making, the finance, the control, and so on is very much in the global now. That needs to change. And while everybody in those organizations have been putting a lot of effort and so on to make it happen, the level of urgency to make that change is very, very less than what it needs to be. 

So, there's a big contradiction here. We cannot say to governments and businesses, “We need to transition to an economy that's driven by clean, green, renewable energy rather than an economy that's driven by dirty fossil fuel-based energy.” Because when we say that to governments, we're not saying to them, “it's a walk in the park for you to do that.” We recognize that it has to be through a just transition, that it's complicated, that it'll take time, and all of that. So, we can't be saying, “the science says you need to change in this substantive way” on the one hand, and then on the other, we say, “oh, for us to become, to balance the power between the Global South and the Global North with international NGOs, we need about 10, 20 years to do that,” and put a different timeline of what we need to do to be fit for purpose versus what governments and business need to. 

We should be ahead of the game anyway, because we are supposed to be the ones that are driven by public service in a much more fundamental way and that we're not compromised by either profit or by power. Yes, that's the logic of it. Therefore, we should be significantly performing better in how we look and so on. The sad reality is, there are senior management teams of most international NGOs, if you were to look at them with a couple of exceptions. They are all led by very good people, let me just say, good people from the Global North. But that doesn't matter how good they are. It's sending the wrong message, that we still live in a colonial world, which still means that the voices, perspectives, expertise, capabilities of people from the Global South are not valued in the same way as people who come from significantly more privileged, better education systems, more opportunity and so on, because the pathway for somebody like, and do with Greenpeace, I'm the first and the last person from Global South to be the head of Greenpeace, which is a 60-year-old organization. That's just not good enough in my judgment. 

Right. So yeah, the ability to be as consistent with what you say and what you do is a critical success factor for the international NGO community going forward. I think that they need to be shrinking their bureaucracies, putting more resources to frontline communities who are facing whatever issues that they're facing, especially on climate, but all the intersecting crises, and start moving in that direction. 

Because the reality is that the power and impact of the international NGO community is on a decline right now because if you look at, say, the Arab Spring, for example, and you look at some of the major sort of societal mobilizations for justice and fairness and equity that has happened with its Indignados, with its Occupy movement, with its Extinction Rebellion, all of the Fridays for the Future, all of these starting points are not the international NGO community that at one stage add pole position on many of these issues. And I think it's good that power has been disrupted, but I genuinely feel that international NGOs still have an important role to play, but that role can only be played if they look and feel as global as the challenges that they seek to address. 

00:49:45 JE 

Kumi Naidoo, I want to thank you so much for your time, for generously sharing all this really, really interesting experience and sharing your thoughts on where climate action and climate cooperation might go in the future, might have to go in the future. Thanks so much, Kumi. 

00:49:59 KN 

Thank you very much. 

Conversation with Nicholas Westcott. Recorded 25 April 2024, in person at the Oxford Martin School.

 

00:00:00 JE 

Hi and welcome to Global Shocks, Nick Westcott. Could you just briefly introduce yourself, state your name for the record, and tell us a little bit about your past experience? 

00:00:08 NW 

My name is Nick Westcott. I've been a British diplomat for the last 36 years and served most recently as the EU's managing director, first for Africa, then for the Middle East and North Africa, based in Brussels, but covering those regions of the world. Before that, at the Foreign Office, I served in many places, including Brussels, Washington DC, and a couple of postings in Africa, including as the British High Commissioner to Ghana. 

00:00:34 JE 

Based on your experience working for the European Union, why would you say does thinking about global shocks matter? 

00:00:40 NW 

During that career, global shocks were constantly impinging on the everyday work, and it seemed the response was as much a part of everyday work as planning for a more ordered global future. In particular, I remember the Asian financial crisis, which blew up across the world in the late 1990s and required a very swift response. I was at the time working in the Foreign Office's economic department, working very closely with the Treasury on how G7 should respond to these crises in the Asian economies. And that was a classic economic crisis where response was needed very quickly. 

More recently, the Arab Spring, which then degenerated into wars in Libya, in Syria, to a coup, counter-coup in Egypt, were shocks that required a response in a rather different way. They were geostrategic challenges to which Europe wanted to respond collectively. Those ones that I was directly involved in myself, likewise the collapse of order in Somalia, international efforts to try and rebuild some kind of coherent political structure and a security system. The other one that particularly comes to mind is the crisis in the Sahel, which began 2012, 2013, when I was dealing with that at the European Union, but it has continued, in fact, escalated to this day, and I think is increasingly a global impact. 

00:02:23 JE 

Can we just zoom in on your past experience, having worked at the EU's External Action Service – what exactly does the External Action Service do? 

00:02:32 NW 

Let's talk a bit about the EU's response to the Arab Spring and particularly what then turned into the Syrian Civil War, because that mattered to the European Union. North Africa and the Middle East are part of Europe's Neighborhood, with a capital N. And there are a whole set of economic and political agreements that the European Union collectively has with these countries to define the economic, trading, investment relations, as well as political relations. And they have association agreements with most of the countries of North Africa. They have a bilateral agreement between the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Council, the countries in the Gulf. And Turkey was obviously a candidate member for European Union membership. 

So, there were quite complex, intricate and close relationships which required a collective response from the European Union, not just individual member states. So, when the crisis broke out, first of all in Tunisia and spreading eastwards through Libya, Egypt, up into Syria, the European Union tried to respond swiftly, largely in support of what they saw as a democratic movement, echoing what had happened 20 years before in Eastern Europe, once the Berlin Wall fell, and it was seen this was a moment of opportunity to support the democratic forces, liberalise the economies a bit and provide a more amenable neighbourhood for the European Union where there was more to share. 

However, things didn't evolve quite the way that was seen. The European Union came forward with offers to support, but rather slowly, because changing trading relationships is not so simple. There are a number of divergent interests within the European Union, whether you should for example, accepted liberalisation of olive oil imports, which would have been of huge benefit to a country like Tunisia. It was indeed offered, but a smaller quantity than perhaps the Tunisians might have liked, which would have helped boost their economy, but obviously there are olive oil producers in Southern Europe who don't want too much increased import. So it was never quite as simple as it looked. 

And member states would also come in through, in the UK, the Westminster Foundation, in Germany, the various “Stiftungs”, to provide political support to opposition parties that were trying to promote democracy, free speech, human rights in the countries that were in political turmoil to try and encourage these kind of forces. So, it was very directly involved both politically in the evolution and in trying to build a broader, more fruitful economic partnership with these countries. What we found was that the internal political dynamics were often rather different from what we had anticipated. And unlike the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe, where it's quite clear they were getting rid of autocracy, they wanted to build in greater, stronger democratic institutions and aspired to join the EU. 

Across North Africa and the Middle East, there were more complicated factors at play, which meant that there was not a single and clear direction of travel. And particularly in Libya, we saw that efforts to try and encourage democratisation were blown apart by the factional interests and the difficulty of creating any kind of political order after the demise of Colonel Gaddafi, who had held things together largely personally in his own idiosyncratic, autocratic way. But with his departure, there were no institutions that could then start building a political structure that everybody would buy into. So, the country fragmented. And that led to a great deal of chaos, continuing civil war and a division of the country that has not been resolved to this day. Despite the efforts of the European Union, the United Nations, other countries to try and broker an agreement between the different factions. 

In Egypt, again, we saw that elections were held, but it brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, whose agenda was perhaps not quite as clearly democratic and beneficial to many of the people in the country as some had expected. And the eventual coup d'etat that ousted Morsi and brought in al-Sisi had a good degree of public support, even if development since then might not have been what people wanted at that time either. But the European Union found itself unable to control, it could try and support and encourage, but the local political evolution was turned out to be more complex and more difficult to influence, despite the efforts of then High Representative Catherine Ashton to be involved and encourage the forces of democracy to build a more resilient and accountable political structure. 

But we are now where we are. Syria was the most difficult, because here what began as protests against the autocratic rule of the Assad regime turned violent, not least because of the response of the Assad regime, whose tradition, you might say, from father to son, was to repress any political opposition. And that provoked a violent response from groups who were keen to promote a more radical Islamic agenda, and groups who began to ally with al-Qaeda or in due course the Islamic State, and therefore were not the kind of democratic political forces that the European Union found easy to support, while they were happy to support a democratic opposition to Assad. They were not happy to support the armed factions that owed allegiance to terrorist organizations as they were defined. So, it became a lot more complicated. 

And the problem in Syria was the European Union was by no means alone in wanting to influence the outcome. Turkey next door promoted a more Islamist opposition, along with support from Qatar. The Iranian regime gave support to Assad, seeing him as a more or less fellow Shia, and encouraged Hezbollah to go in support of him. So, then you also on top of this [had] Assad versus the opposition and the Islamic extremists against the moderates, you then had a Shia versus Sunni conflict entering into that space as well, of course, because the Turks not only wanted to encourage Assad's downfall and a more Islamist sympathetic government into place, but they wanted one that would contain the Kurds and in particular the PKK, who they deemed a terrorist organization, but which had bases in Syria. 

And therefore, Turks saw this as an opportunity to weaken the Kurdish opposition that they faced at home. There were several different conflicts between different factions taking place in this space. The European Union threw its support behind the democratic opposition, civil society, the women's movement, and these were involved in a set of negotiations in Geneva throughout 2015, 2016, 2017, under the auspices of the United Nations. But there were negotiations that ultimately we've seen led absolutely nowhere. The Assad regime had no real interest in engaging. They wanted to retain the freedom to achieve a military solution to this. And in that from 2016 on, they had not only Iranian support, Hezbollah’s support, but explicit Russian support. And that gave them a significant military advantage that led to the situation where we are today, where they've not recovered for Assad complete control over the country, but they have over a large chunk of it. 

Apart from factions in Idlib, the Islamic jihadist movements, if you like, have been run out. ISIS was ultimately defeated in that sphere. But you end up with a situation that nobody particularly wanted, where there is no effective control, there is in practice a criminal economy. Based on the production and export of fentanyl and, various other smuggling businesses, that is not certainly not encouraging the reconstruction or the rebuilding of Syria, foreign investment is not coming in, and refugees are not returning. 

What did the EU end up doing? It did what it could do, which was to focus its attention not on political intervention or material support to any of the armed factions, but providing humanitarian support to avoid the conflict spreading to neighbouring countries, and specifically Lebanon and Jordan, which bore a heavy burden in terms of refugees. Nearly 25% of the population of Lebanon is now Syrian refugees. Similar proportion in Jordan. So huge influxes, which would destabilize those countries, were the EU not to continue providing humanitarian support to enable those refugee communities to be accommodated and fed without excessive strain. 

In the long run, this has not prevented Lebanon falling into further chaos, so the state has not completely collapsed at present. And there are other causes there in relation to Hezbollah's role and the rest. But in the short term, the EU was successful in avoiding other neighbouring countries being drawn into the civil war itself. And that, to some extent, was all the success that we could achieve. But it was a success. But that's where the EU ultimately had money. It could provide these kind of resources through UN agencies and the rest. And it did so, it ran a succession of fundraising conferences in Brussels to raise humanitarian aid to support the refugee populations. 

So it was more a safety net than an effective intervention. But nobody in Europe was interested in responding to that shock by providing kinetic support to one factor or another. It provided political support to the civil society, provided humanitarian support. That's what the EU could do. And of course, that was not decisive. It was a damage limitation exercise. But in the long run, it did stop the flood of Syrian refugees, which in 2015 had threatened to destabilize some European polities and continues, in retrospect, to feed a far-right narrative that is gaining currency. 

00:13:28 JE 

It sounds like the EU faces a two-fold challenge when confronting crises, whether in Libya, in Syria, or in Egypt. On the one hand, the EU tries to act as a united institution with a coherent diplomatic position despite being made-up of many different member states. And on the other hand, it's not necessarily obvious which actors to engage with in these countries. As you mentioned, in every conflict, there are many different factions, right? So, can you give us an example based on your role at the External Action Service where you faced that kind of challenge? 

00:13:59 NW 

Two examples. One is in relation to a country where EU member states had no divergent interests, and that was Somalia. And when Somalia effectively disintegrated, it endured about 20 years of no effective central government. Al-Shabaab took over, but were not popular, certainly not with the outside world, were forced out, but re-establishing a legitimate and accountable government took a long time. 

During that period of chaos, piracy took off like wildfire in the Gulf of Aden, and it became a very lucrative economic model for groups of people who otherwise had no effective source of income beyond fishing, and taking boats and holding them to ransom was far more lucrative than any fishing could be, so as it seemed easy to do, it caught on in a big way. The European Union collectively responded by setting up a naval force, UNAV for Atalanta, which in cooperation with the US and cooperation with the Chinese, effectively began patrolling the Gulf of Aden protecting convoys of ships as they passed through and taking in the end sufficiently robust action against the pirates that the economic viability of the model of hijacking ships evaporated and effectively the piracy problem stopped due to European Union intervention collectively putting together a naval force that was willing and able to take the necessary action. 

This was accompanied on land by the EU, helping fund an African force called AMISON under the auspices of the African Union, which was able to re-establish some effective security control against Al-Shabaab on land. And that created a security umbrella within which the European Union could then encourage the different factions to reach a political deal effectively a federated state where local constituent provinces were able to retain a good deal of autonomy while still working under a national federal government as an umbrella. And that all happened after 2011, 2013 when I was involved with this, and was a successful stabilizing effort both at sea and on land to re-establish order where effectively the country had fallen into anarchy. 

The second example though is in Libya, where different member states of the European Union had different interests and it was increasingly hard to maintain a common European position and therefore increasingly hard to have a decisive influence. And at the outset, I think there was a belief that, as in Eastern Europe, you just bring down the dictator and civil society will spontaneously rise up and establish democratic norms, which, as I said before, didn't happen. But as Libya then fragmented itself into different factions, political factions and armed groups, the French and Italians had different interests in different parts of the country and therefore were not wholly aligned and would pursue a direct policy because it was quite close to them, there were historic links with Italy, there were big economic interests in relation to France, in the oil industry, and they saw their national interests as protecting these interests rather than a single collective European position. 

Both sides wanted Europeans to come in behind their position, but as they didn't coincide, it was hard to do that. And therefore it became very difficult to get a single European voice on Libyan issues, as a result of which the EU ended up just backing up the UN, but the UN didn't have enough clout in itself to bring the competing factions together. There was a Secretary General special representative from the UN who tried to broker negotiations. There were various deals that were landed, but never implemented, because nobody had sufficient leverage. And not just European countries had divergent interests, but you also had Egypt, which had a particular interest. You had Algeria, which had a particular interest. 

So there wasn't the unity of international opinion that had supported, through the African Union, the UN and the EU, a solution in Somalia. That did not exist in Libya, nor did it exist in Syria. We are seeing the same now in Sudan, where it's very hard to bring civil war to an end because the international community does not have a single united position. So, it depends on circumstances. The EU itself has to have a clear position and interest and a united front, but it then needs to work with other international actors if it's to have effective influence. 

00:19:01 JE 

Right, so let's think about the practical day-to-day business of the External Action Service. Was your job trying to reconcile divergent national interests in order to identify a common position? Or what was the procedure for formulating an adequate policy response or a position? What did that look like, practically speaking? 

00:19:20 NW 

The EAS only came into existence in 2011, so I was one of the founding members as the managing director for Africa, so nobody was quite clear what its role was to be. Although obviously the EU had been involved through Xavier Solana and the Foreign Affairs Council and the European Council had taken positions on international issues, but the EAS was meant to bring more greater weight and coherence to that external policy. My view was always that we should do this by trying to define common strategies in relation to particular geostrategic areas and challenges, to which you could get the member states to sign up, and which would then be a basis for responding to global shocks challenges that arose. 

So, the strategy would define a direction of travel and our key interests, not necessarily what policy we should adopt in relation to everything. That's the mistake, I think that's what strategies are. And it was usually possible to get EU member states to sign up to a broad strategy. That then made the crisis response a lot easier, because you'd say, look, we've defined already, these are our broad objectives in this area, let's follow that. So, we had a strategy for the Horn of Africa. We defined a strategy for the Sahel. We tried, but did not succeed to define a strategy for the Great Lakes region. That was, again, there were some member states with particular interests that proved harder to corral together. And it did prove quite difficult in the Middle East. We agreed a strategy for Syria in the end, but it was the strategy I've described to you, the best we could do in these circumstances. 

So, in the Sahel is quite a good example where we were able to get a common approach, but this tended to reflect perhaps rather more than was desirable the position of France as, if you like, the dominant member state in that region. It had a lot of influence at that stage, quite a lot of interests in the region, but we were able to get them to a place where the EU took proactive measures to encourage the settlement of the jihadist challenges and the separatist movements in Mali in particular, and supported other countries to try and avoid the same happening there. As we can see in the long run, that strategy has not succeeded. 

There is a good question whether, was it the strategy that was wrong, was it the implementation that was wrong, or was it just that France was too visibly in the lead of all this process in seeking, if you like, a military solution to the jihadist threat rather than the more political one? Or were we on a hiding to nothing because, in effect, whatever our strategy, we couldn't actually control the internal political dynamics in these countries, or influence it enough. There was always a dilemma where you had a democratically elected government and you wanted to support it, but they weren't necessarily dealing with the political challenges that existed, and this was explicitly the case in Mali, where it was very difficult to get President Keïta, [also known by his initials as] IBK, as was to negotiate a meaningful settlement with the Azawad separatists, the Tuareg separatists in the North, so they then preferred to ally themselves with the jihadist groups who would provide arms and support, and therefore the rebellion in the long run has expanded and multiplied, rather than a political settlement being reached. 

And now we have a situation where the government in Bamako, with support from some external allies, primarily the Russians, are exacerbating the conflict rather than reducing it. They have strangely, having thrown out the French for having failed to deliver a military solution, they've brought in the Russians to deliver a more effective military solution, but it's not, it's getting worse, because the military solution will never work. It has to be a political solution. So, we are actually getting further away from a settlement. 

But you have to admit that the EU's strategy has not delivered. That doesn't mean it was the wrong strategy. It may have been the only strategy we could perform. So, the External Action Service's role was to try and look ahead and agree the broad outlines of what a common position should be in terms of the direction of travel. But then member states would you hope act within that and, when necessary, collectively within that.

00:23:42 JE 

And so how does the EU's external action service build resilience and preparedness? Is it about trying to predict or anticipate future scenarios or is it more about past lessons and longer term trajectories within each region that you're looking at? 

00:23:56 NW 

Yeah, for example, on the Sahel, we've spent quite a lot of time and effort designing a strategy for the Sahel. Firstly, you define what are the underlying factors that are driving political and economic development of that region. And the answer was it's being increasingly impacted by climate change, demographic growth continues to accelerate, and therefore you have governments that face huge challenges of diminishing resources and growing population. 

Therefore, the EU's response to this would be helping the legitimate governments accelerate economic development by building trading relations that work, finding alternative means of development than just relying on agriculture, which is under pressure, improving education so that you have a workforce with a wider range of options. The one element of that might have helped but was not likely to fly in the European Union was supporting outward migration, because that is, on the contrary, what the EU wanted to avoid. 

But that increased the emphasis then, which we now see through the Global Gateway Programme, of increasing investment in the Sahel. But it has not delivered fast enough results that it's been able to change changed the political dynamics that are increasingly trending towards authoritarian solutions to the challenges, rather than democratically supported or accountable solutions to the challenges that those countries. We all accept that they're facing challenges. We know that the EU should be doing what it can to encourage productive solutions, but we have not been able to make those productive solutions sufficiently available to enough people that they have predominated. And therefore we see an increasing trend towards authoritarian government across the Sahel. 

So, that's what a strategy was. So, it would identify what the challenges are, what we thought was going to be a desirable outcome, and therefore the actions that we need to take to try and support the trends going in the right direction. So, it was definitely forward-looking. That was the idea. They were sort of five-year strategies, what have we got to do in the next five years to try and avoid these challenges? There was a risk management, avoid these challenges derailing the process and supporting positive evolution. 

00:26:13 JE 

Were those strategies drawn up in response to a particular crisis in real time as it erupted, or did you try to take a longer-term view to be prepared for future crises? 

00:26:24 NW 

There had been thinking about a strategy before the crisis erupted in Mali in 2012. But it hadn't been finalized at that stage, and the crisis in Mali accelerated the need to agree the strategy. And therefore, once we knew that this crisis, we're going to have to deploy resources. We were looking at, for example, could we set up a peacekeeping mission of the kind that had worked in Somalia? Could we do that for Mali? And the answer was no, because the local governments and ECOWAS could not mobilize the troops necessary to deliver a peacekeeping force that we could support. 

And therefore, ultimately, it was the UN that came in and set up MINUSMA as a peacekeeping mission. But in the long run, that didn't work either for a range of reasons. And the French remained president first through Operation Serval and Operation Barkan. And as we see, that hasn't ended particularly well either. They killed a lot of jihadists, but they didn't resolve the political problem, so that now we have greater difficulty. So, those are the strategies sometimes accelerated in the Horn of Africa, again, because of the challenges we had faced in Somalia, but successfully dealt with. 

00:27:37 JE 

Right. So of course, there's debate as to what counts as a crisis, when a crisis merits an EU response, and what kind of response it ought to pursue. I can imagine that complicates the External Action Service’s work. Working for it, was that actually a recurring debate in your view? 

00:27:55 NW 

The debate did happen, but it tends to be very, as you say, what is a crisis, there are many different ones. While I was involved, we had the Ebola crisis, and that was quite clearly a crisis. It was one for which member states were very ill-prepared. The degree of medical cooperation amongst member states was very weak. And we at the External Action Service, together with ECHO, which is the humanitarian office, who were providing medical support to the countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak, set up a coordination mechanism with other EU services. You know, health services are basically a decentralized responsibility within the EU. So, national health ministries were all taking different decisions and the rest, which made no sense, where you had free movement within. So there had to be then some coordination on this medical crisis. And the EU was the body that could do that by bringing together the relevant people, the member states. 

It took quite a lot of time. But the experience of doing that in Ebola certainly helped the response to the COVID crisis. And it was after my time. But again, you could, while many people said the EU's response was rather slow and clunky, nevertheless, there was a coordinated response. And that was helpful in the circumstances and did enable the epidemic to be contained. In geopolitical terms, global shocks would include something like the spread of jihadism following the fall of Libya and the reinforcement of the Islamic State in West Africa, West African province, ISWAP, and Ansara, various other jihadist groups across the Sahel, whose objective was explicitly to overturn the states and establish a caliphate in that particular region. 

That was seen as a global shock to which we needed a European response, because instability in the Sahel would have immediate knock-on effects for Europe, at least through the movement of people across the Atlantic. So again, there was a recognition that we needed to respond collectively to this because we were collectively at risk, as we saw in 2015 with the migration crisis. So, that kind of, you know, Syria was also part of that. A lot of the refugees coming over in 2015 were Syrian refugees, not Sahelian ones, and therefore we had to find ways of collective response, which included cutting a deal with Turkey so that route across the eastern Mediterranean was stopped, but also trying to do deals with the North African countries that would limit the flow of people. 

So, certainly in domestic political terms for European countries, instability in the neighbourhood is a collective shock that we had to try and deal with because of the migration consequences and therefore the political consequences within the EU. That was acknowledged. I don't know if you remember, towards the end of 2015, the European Council was meeting, which normally meets twice a year, was meeting more or less every month to review what are we going to do about the migration crisis, because it mattered to every single national government in the EU. And eventually they reached a deal which, both with the North African countries and with Turkey, that overcame the immediate crisis. 

So yes, the EU can respond, and at top level, where a global shock is seen to have direct impact. And we saw that again in the response to the Ukraine invasion, the second Ukraine invasion. Russia undertook a huge and very swift solidarity amongst the European response, which was self-interested, but the fact that the EU, the External Action Service existed, enabled it to be well coordinated. So yes, from that point of view, the External Action Service has proved that it can serve a purpose, even though it may not be successful in every case, that goes for every country's foreign policy. 

00:32:12 JE 

Speaking of cooperation, say with the UN agencies, but also regional organizations such as ECOWAS or the African Union. In a world where crises multiply, overlap and touch upon divergent issue areas, arguably cooperation with other organizations is particularly crucial. Is that part of the agenda for the EU's External Action Service as well? 

00:32:35 NW 

Yes, it's an explicit objective to try and work together with other regional and international multilateral organizations to resolve these issues. That, if you like, is one of the cornerstones of the post-war settlements that you actually put in place multilateral institutions that can deal with crises. So, on the Libyan crisis, for example, the then High Representative Federica Mogherini explicitly tried to set up a quartet of the European Union, the United Nations, the Arab League, and the African Union, who you would think would be the four international organizations that were relevant and should be enabled to corral the relevant forces to reach a settlement. 

It didn't work. It didn't work because Egypt wanted to pursue its policy, Algeria wanted to pursue its policy, France and Germany, France and Italy had their particular interests, and neither the Arab League nor the African Union had much by way of leverage on the actors. Oh, and Turkey also became firstly involved, given its historic relationship with Tripoli. So, it didn't work because the EU did have coordination and money, but no military engagement. The UN could play the role that the UN did, but that depended on its member states backing it. 

But neither the Arab League nor the African Union could actually impose any discipline on its members to take a particular approach on this one, and therefore trying to get a multilateral system in place that would deal with it did not work in Libya. But the EU and the African Union have pursued a fairly consistent policy of trying to work together, particularly in resolving crises. But again, the African Union has proven itself not particularly effective in tackling the crises in Ethiopia, in Sudan, or now across the Sahel. And ECOWAS itself, as we've seen, has been deeply divided over response to the Sahel crisis and announcement by the three juntas that they're going to withdraw from the organisation. 

So, not all other regional organisations have the kind of coherence and ability to act collectively that the EU does. We try to build them up, we try to cooperate with them, but it doesn't always work. But while in the EAS, I would consistently maintain very close liaison with UN and the UN actors, the Arab League and African Union, where they were involved, but also with the US. So, I'd have a monthly video conference call with the Assistant Secretary for Africa and the US. It didn't work quite as well on the Middle East, but on African policy. So, there was a big effort to coordinate. 

And also, within the the EU, there's a difference. On Africa, not that many member states have deep interests. [The] UK was still a full member at the time I was there. So the UK, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain had some interests. Germany had quite a broad interest. But once you got those on board, the others were quite happy for the external action service. On the Middle East, almost every member state has its own particular interests and its own historic alliances, and it was much harder to coordinate a position there because there was greater divergence on the Middle East and North Africa. 

00:36:14 JE 

So, you say that you had a regular conference call with the United States. Did you have a regular line of communication with Geneva as well? Would you be going around member states' representatives to gauge their positions, or how did that work? 

00:36:27 NW 

There are monthly foreign affairs councils, and they look at the most important issues. But in both jobs, responsible for Africa and then Middle East and North Africa, I would chair a monthly meeting of the directors from all member states concerned. These were the opportunity then to talk about the whole range of issues and that's where we negotiated the various strategies that we were putting in place, which we would then get blessed by ministers up above. The Foreign Affairs Council itself would look at Africa maybe once or twice a year, but it looked at the Middle East every single month. 

So, there was then constant engagement at the ministerial level on Middle Eastern issues and much the same with Eastern European issues. That had to go along with coordinating within the EU institutions because the External Action Service was only one. We had to work with the European Parliament, with the European Commission, with the European Council to try and make sure all the institutions were pointing in the same direction. And then we were dealing with our external partners. But there, most would accept that I was speaking with a collective voice. They would, the Americans would still talk to the Brits and the French and the Germans, of course, bilaterally, and what their opinion [inaudible]. 

But for them, it was useful to talk to me, particularly on Africa, because the EU was seen as having clout and influence and, in many cases, a single position. But again, on the Middle East, it was once also more fragmented, and individual member states would have their own relationship with Saudi Arabia. I had no influence on the relationship with Saudi Arabia as the managing director for the Middle East. 

00:38:02 JE 

So, in your position, when did geopolitical divides come to the fore and affect your work most often and most strongly? 

00:38:08 NW 

Syria is quite a good example. So, the EU would try to play a convening role along with the UN through the humanitarian channel, but bringing together political actors who could then also try and agree a more coordinated political response to the crisis. So, the Brussels conference, there was a London conference, I think, 2015, and then Brussels conferences in 2016, 17, 18, 19, all of which there was a purpose which was to raise money, but we tried to get all the political actors together. 

There was simultaneously a more explicit political coordination, the ISSC, which was actually co-chaired by John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, and Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. And that tried to knock political heads together. And the EU participated in that, but didn't lead it and couldn't really lead it. So, we were there sort of representing all the member states, but the Brits and the French and the Germans were also around the table, but so were the Saudis and the Turks and everybody else. And that's really where the political discussions took place. But even that ran into the sand. And eventually it was the Astana Forum, which was a separate group. 

The Russians pulled together of Russia, Iran and Turkey, who were basically the three groups who had armed involvement on the ground. And they then negotiated what an outcome might be. And they invited the UN to come and observe, but they didn't invite the EU. I think the US were allowed in to observe as well. And the Astana Forum, because it involved those who were materially involved on the ground, actually became the point at which decisions were taken. So yes, we did a lot of coordination with outside actors. We tried to bring them in. And our convening power worked quite well in some areas, like humanitarian assistance, but it didn't really exist adequately on the political side in relation to Syria. 

00:40:13 JE 

Coordination with other actors sounds like multi-dimensional chess. Maybe that's especially true of a still very young institution like the External Action Service of the European Union. Things get even more complicated, I guess, given the rise over the last few decades of more and more different international actors, affecting how diplomacy is being done and how it can be done. Have you felt the effects of that at the External Action Service? 

00:40:37 NW 

I think it was quite clear throughout my, or seven years there, and particularly towards the end of it, that the former multilateral structures that were used for resolving conflicts were becoming less and less effective. And you could see that to some extent explicitly in the Middle East. And almost simultaneously, but it marked a crossover point. You had the Iran nuclear negotiations, which were, if you like, a last hurrah of the multilateral system working effectively. You had the P5 all negotiating together with one country, Iran, to try and get them to agree to limit their nuclear ambitions. You had it endorsed by the United Nations. Immediately the deal was signed. You had the IAEA closely involved as an international institution with the relevant role and authorities to do that. And it was a negotiation that succeeded. And it was a multilateral negotiation, and it worked the way we imagined the world was going to work after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

But more or less simultaneously with that, you had the Syrian crisis, where the multilateral institutions proved effectively unable to resolve it, and national interests of all the neighbours took precedence over any UN, EU, or collective P5 intervention. The EU and the US tried to make the international multilateral institutions work in resolving the crisis. Kofi Annan was sent in, first of all, then Baradei, and then, you know, so the UN sent in envoys, but it didn't work. 

Why? Because not enough of the surrounding states, all UN members, had interest in the collective solution. They were pursuing their individual interests and ultimately the U.S. and Russia ended up on different sides. So, at the same time that we saw the Iran nuclear negotiations of the last hurrah and success of the ... what we had envisaged as the multilaterally run world where conflicts could be resolved, you had a conflict then that blew up, which showed the inability of those multilateral structures to deliver a solution. There just was not enough clout within them, and you then saw a fragmentation and a perpetuation of the conflict. It's still a frozen conflict, it's not been resolved. 

And we're seeing the same in Sudan now, and I fear we will see the same elsewhere with other [inaudible], where we do see the same in the Sahel. Russia is very happily encouraging authoritarian governments to ineffectively combat jihadism and try and sort of threaten the unity of West African states in dealing collectively with the problem. So, yes, there has been a very significant deterioration in the ability of the multilateral system to operate effectively in the way once envisaged. So we have a very different diplomatic environment. And the EU is still coming to terms with this in relation to Ukraine and the challenges there. 

And again, with President Trump's abandonment of the Iran nuclear negotiations, that in some ways is even more symbolic than people realise. It wasn't just the end of that, but it was a repudiation of a way of doing business internationally. And should we get a Trump II administration, we will see that multiplied, which will then create a very different, I suspect, much more unstable world, which, if we're unlucky, it'll be a case of [inaudible] dealing with Russia, which is an imminent threat on its border. At the same time, it needs to present an approach. 

00:44:26 JE 

Going forward, what's the biggest challenge for EU foreign policy in the future? 

00:44:31 NW 

Climate change negotiations, but to keep the COP process going, that will only work if we are able to reduce conflict in the world. While conflict is going on, nobody will care about climate change. This is the immediate against the inevitable but longer term. So, it needs to keep a focus on climate change because that will drastically change the way the world works, how people are able to survive, live and be safe. But in the short term, they've got to deal with Russia. And that means also what the relations with the US and with the other neighbours are going to be. So, there'll be plenty of challenges for the new commission when it's appointed. 

00:45:11 JE 

Right, so my last question to you: how can the EU External Action Service learn from all these past shocks in a sustainable way, so that the EU can avoid improvisation when a crisis hits and ensure continuity in its responses?

00:45:24 NW 

The challenge has been the European Union doesn't have complete control over all the resources of its member states. As a man with a hammer sees every problem with the nail to be hammered in, so the EU has economic power and it therefore uses economic power in whatever shocks arise. So, it gives humanitarian support, it applies economic sanctions. Those are the instruments that it has, those are the instruments it uses. It doesn't have the full panoply of power, if you like, that a superpower would deploy, including military means and more political means. It could develop more political means and exert more political influence, but that would need the member states to accept that they will allow a single European spokesperson to use that kind of leverage. 

And ultimately, political power needs to be underpinned by military, and that connection is not yet really there. So, the EU will continue to respond to global shocks with the instruments that it has at its disposal, which is sort of, as I say, economic, financial, to some extent coordination. And these are shocks like health pandemics as well as others. And with each crisis, to some extent, the EU learns. And you're quite right, the EU was certainly able to act internationally in responding to crises before the EAS existed. 

But the EAS should provide a more effective way of pulling together the economic and the political response. That was its purpose in being created within the European Union and amongst the member states. But it has to carry credibility. Member states will ignore it unless they accept that the EAS has authority and has competence in dealing with this. And building that up was an integral part of what we were trying to do when the EAS was formed. And I think as the challenges get bigger, the EU always evolves in response to crises. 

And now we are facing harsher external threats. And I think given the changing balance of both military and economic power in the world, the EU either has to step up and coordinate more effectively, use its external action service more efficiently, or it will begin to disintegrate. 

00:47:42 JE 

Well, on that note, Nick Westcott, thank you ever so much for joining us today at Global Shocks. It's been a great pleasure talking to you and hearing from all your fascinating experiences at the EU's External Action Service. Thank you. 

00:47:54 NW 

Not at all.