 I think UNU is useful at the interface of evidence-based research and policy. And I think the best policy is informed by evidence, although occasionally there's a brain wave that isn't. So for the UN system, UNU has an important role to play. But both in UNU's own mind and sometimes the mind of others in the UN system, its role is fuzzy. If you look at the discussions that preceded the creation of UNU, which I did prior to my job interviews, and if you look at the early history of UNU, it was really intended to be a think tank for the UN. There was a debate about whether it should be primarily a teaching institution or primarily a research institution, and those favoring the research option came out way ahead. It doesn't mean we can't teach or shouldn't teach, but the principal focus was to be on developing ideas based in research that could be useful to the principal UN debates of the day. As soon as I was appointed rector, I started hearing from people who had ideas about UNU, good, bad, and different, and its institutes. And it's useful to remember that its first institute was wider away from UNU headquarters in Japan. So I heard from a number of people who had been involved with wider over the years or who were currently involved in wider. I heard from the Finnish Development Minister very rapidly after I was appointed very positive views of wider at the moment. Wider, like all institutions, waxes and wanes. It's very unusual for an institute to remain an even keel at the highest levels of excellence indefinitely. So my sense of wider coming in, and I think it's a sense that is shared by the other board members of wider, shared by the vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, who's very generous in giving us all this time, is that it's young, it's dynamic, it's fun, and the quality of the work is very good at the moment. What could be better? It's a very attractive mix. I think it comes down to leadership, frankly. I think wider is very well led at the moment. But I also think it's got a team of quite diverse researchers, visitors, younger people of all sorts who respond very positively to the leadership at the moment. And it's a collective work of think tank, like wider, which benefits both from an academic rigor but isn't an academic department where work is much more collective, where projects are shared. It really needs to be fueled on enthusiasm. And enthusiasm, it's a bit like love, it's sort of alchemy, it isn't science. It doesn't occur all the time, but it's occurring now at wider and it's exciting to see. There was a wonderful project a few years ago. You'll remember, Roger, that was the intellectual history of the UN that Richard Jolley and others put together. And it actually makes clear how much the UN has been influenced by ideas and research over the years, a beautifully produced book of which my favorite, or set of books, of which my favorite volume is one called UN Voices, which brings to life many of the great thinkers who at one time or another in their lives worked in UN processes. I think the UN can be receptive to ideas, but it's always a minority of people in any community who light up when they hear something new. A majority of people are quite busy, have other considerations on their minds at any given time, and just don't respond particularly well to not so much new ways of thinking and doing, but of prioritizing new ways of thinking and doing. Politicians, I think, are always looking for opportunities to promote themselves, their party, but in so doing many of the more creative ones realize that ideas are powerful. Well, I think several dangers lurk in the research world. One is endless complexity and going on complexifying until it's sort of porridge and unshapeable in any way and unusable really in any way. The other risk is the nearly religious conviction that one's ideas are right because one's evidence is right, but evidence is often wrong because the data can be wrong or the wrong questions were asked if it's survey-based or the ideas shaping a particular policy being advocated can be unhelpful as it turns out. So I think the fanatical zeal that grips certain academic communities at time is either on methodology, a belief that only one methodology is acceptable in a given discipline at a given time, or the belief that a single idea holds the key to the universe. It's true, it may be true about once a century, but it's not true much more often than that. The issue of economic factors, which clearly in some cases triggered in other cases intensified civil strife, which often led to civil wars. This was something the UN didn't know much about. And so figures like Paul Collier, who had done a great deal of data gathering, Peter Wallenstein, who had done a great deal of data gathering without being an economist, one of the groups on the west coast of the USA, all of a sudden they had something to offer, but econometric approaches weren't the total answer and couldn't be because if you aggregate a great deal of information and you essentially split the difference, you get very artificial answers. You get our answers that are true in the aggregate but may be true in no single case. So this was something that wasn't necessarily fully appreciated either by those who were attracted to data-driven approaches or those who were opposing data-driven approaches. I think it took us time to realize what the benefits were and what the limitations were of these. Happily, Paul Collier is a tremendously open guy. So far from rejecting what others might have to offer to the discussion at the World Bank where he was then working, he opened his doors wide to those of us who had different scholarly backgrounds. And he was also interested in interacting with the UN Security Council at the UN because he felt rightly he had a lot to offer. And so working together was a wonderful experience rather than sniping at each other through the pages of academic journals. And that owed a great deal, again, to the personality of the people involved. Would you rather be in a gloomy library doing very deep work which doubtless could be useful, or do you prefer collaboration moving ahead into the field of policy with all of its risks? So that was a period of tremendous fun. It was linked to other work going on at the time on sanctions, how sanctions could be refined to be less damaging in general, more targeted towards specific groups in society, sometimes specific individuals who had in their gift to change the behavior of states. So there were a number of thoughtful processes going on at the World Bank, in the UN, in other spheres at the time, and that was quite exciting. I think today development faces the challenge of adaptation, but it's a happy challenge of why. The biggest adaptation of the development community is to accept and adapt to success in the developing world. The development community, particularly in multilateral organizations to keep the donor money flowing, has tended to be catastrophist. So success is inconvenient. But actually we're facing success now, and one of the things that came out in the recent high-level panel report at the UN, which was chaired by the President of Indonesia, the President of Liberia and the Prime Minister of Britain, was the notion that now quality is beginning to matter as much as quantity that developing countries having got lots of bums on seats in schools and even universities are now worried that the quality of what is being offered to their citizens isn't what they deserve, they deserve better. So this shows how we're progressing. It's not that development challenges are over, but it's the reality that they're different from 30 years ago. And so because all of this has been occurring at a fairly accelerated rate, the challenge for the development community has been one of adaptation to the real challenges, the current challenges in the world today, rather than going on focusing on the real challenges of 30 years ago.