 We had the great advantage of being the first commission. South Africa hadn't had a planning commission after 1994, although we'd done a, you could argue, a long-term plan in South Africa's 1994 Reconstruction and Development Program. So this was a bit of a new exercise. This was an exercise that says after 20 years of democracy, or it was 16 years of democracy, we find that we are not managing to develop the kind of coordination and integration of approaches that has the impact that we want. And that is both at different levels of government, between different sectors of government, but very importantly, we weren't achieving the linkages we needed with the private sector, and we weren't succeeding in convincing community-based sectors, organized labor being the obvious one, that what we were trying to do as government was in everybody's interest. So we weren't pulling together. Now the notion of the planning commission was that it was an independent advisory body. It drew members from people like myself who'd been in government, but also from the business sector, from the community sector, from the academic sector. And the intention was to have a much more open framework within which we could discuss, not bound by political party policy, considerations, or individual sector considerations. And obviously if you're trying to do that work as an independent advisory body, we were all part-time as commissioners. There was a very small full-time secretariat. You do need external support, information, research. And I think one of the great offerings of UNU wider was that it comes with substantial technical capacity I think that the work at UNU wider does is well-respected and is solid and it's not lobbying. We want evidence-based policy and too often what we get is policy-based evidence. And I think because UNU wider doesn't have a particular interest or ideological axe to grind, I think it has been very, very helpful in addressing some of the quite contested areas and as we've been talking about here in South Africa, issues about energy and the environment are typical of the kind of challenges that we face. UNU wider can also take and must take, given its nature as a global institution, must take a wider approach. And since we need to be able to work with the region and the region in generally is correctly quite nervous about working with South Africa because we're the big brothers and we kind of get our way sometimes just by its force of numbers and money. It's useful to have a neutral interlocutor who can help and I think UNU wider has helped in that as well. My background is in water but I use water as a vehicle to go into all sorts of different areas. So I've worked in water and health and I've worked in water and regional integration and everywhere in between water and agriculture. The particular interest that I've had has been around the development of the region's power potential to serve the interests of the region looking for the configurations that would help address the needs of the countries of the region in an equitable way and in an optimal way. And I think this tied in very well with what UNU wider was trying to do, looking at the energy economy and linking this obviously to climate change and the pressure, the policy pressures that climate change is bringing. So we have had quite acute arguments inside the planning commission about the future energy path for South Africa, what the energy mix should be and I think we've been able to introduce a regional dimension to that which has been helpful both to present a wider set of options for us but also to give effect to what is always a good intention but often doesn't materialize which is to promote greater effective equitable regional integration because like some of the people on the UNU wider team I spent quite a lot of time in Mozambique in the 80s. I kind of come with a regionalist bias and so one of my other sort of efforts in the planning commission has been to promote a more effective work on regional integration and I think this work on energy has really helped to make the point in a very practical way. Let's first characterize the problem and we've been talking here in South Africa about some of the evidence. My favorite bit is finding that the US government in its 2014 budget legislator to instruct its representatives at the World Bank and all other development financed institutions to block funding for hydropower. That piece of legislation was introduced by Senator Leahy from Vermont. Vermont takes 40% of its from hydropower. It's actually just agreed to extend that for another 20 years and to take more hydropower from Canada as it happens. Total hypocrisy but a very damaging hypocrisy because it's blocked the avenues of finance for some very important projects and I would argue has contributed to Southern Africa's power shortage. We knew what we wanted to do but the countries just couldn't get the help to do it because Western governments didn't want to help hydropower. And I think there are many other examples and I was talking this morning about how at the World Economic Forum I had the privilege of sitting in at a meeting with leading American Chinese and Japanese coal experts actually more than coal expert. They were talking about cabinet level environmental experts and even environmental leaders and they were essentially saying, well, this is the deal, this is how much coal we're gonna burn, this is how quickly we're gonna transform ourselves and by the way, we will make sure that all future coal generation in the world uses the best most efficient super critical technology which happens to come from Japan and sitting in this meeting was the chairman of the largest company that made coal-fired power and the two African ministers who were sitting there representing their country's mineral sector were just left open mouth because essentially they were being told this is where you're gonna be able to work, this is the technology you're gonna use and if you don't like it, well, tough. And I think it's important in this kind of frame that there are resources to which particularly the poorer developing countries can turn but which South Africa certainly benefits from like UNU wider which can actually make a more careful analysis of the options. For instance, is it worth taking risks and spending a lot more exports on the very latest technology? Can we use lower levels of technology? I think those kind of questions can benefit from an independent view and UNU wider provides one channel through which we can ask questions and try and get them answered.