 Good morning. My name is Lise Grande and I am the president of the United States Institute of Peace, which was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 as a nonpartisan public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict abroad. We are delighted to have people joining us from around the globe for this timely and critical conversation with Dr. Akim Steiner, the chief of the United Nations Development Program. As the head of one of the UN's most important agencies, Dr. Steiner leads a diverse, multidisciplinary, multinational team of 5,000 development experts and professionals who are working in 170 countries. UNDP has just published its flagship 2022 Human Development Report, which includes the world's report card on human development. For the first time since the Human Development Index was introduced in 1990, the index has declined for two straight years. It's been driven down by multiple crises, including the COVID pandemic, climate change-related disasters, crashing supply chains, soaring food in energy costs, job loss, violence, polarization, and conflict. We're here this morning to reflect with Dr. Steiner on whether the international community is doing the right things to avert crises, to protect people in stabilized countries in the middle of crises, and to help communities recover when a crisis is over. We've called this discussion reimagining crisis response, because we know that the answer to all three of those questions is no. We're not doing what we need to do. UNDP is a global leader in crisis response. For decades, it has produced cutting-edge research and policy and supported governments and civil societies across the globe in implementing some of the most successful, innovative, impactful strategies for stabilizing, averting, and recovering from every conceivable kind of crisis. For those of you joining us online, we encourage you to be part of the conversation through the chat box function on the event page of the USIP website using the hashtag GlobalShocks. Akim, thank you for joining us today. Akim, UNDP has for many years analyzed and assessed what drives conflicts. And for many years, UNDP has been at the forefront in helping the international community and countries and communities respond to those crises. The approach that we've taken has been successful in many instances, but increasingly less so. Why? Is what we have been doing no longer working the way that we expect it to. Well, Lisa, thank you first of all for that very kind introduction and also for hosting us today. It is a real privilege to be here at USIP and to be also discussing these issues with you together because I think we both have been students and participants in this journey of trying to understand how to deal with crisis. And I think coming from a development background, it will not surprise you or our listeners that in many ways crisis are the product of development failures. And we do need to go back to where societies and economies in a sense fall apart, where crises arise because either political governance systems become controversial or the politics moves from the institutions of government into the streets. And we have seen that obviously in many contexts. Economic crisis can also drive society to the point where essentially legitimacy and authority of those that are elected or have put themselves in positions of power are being challenged. But what is also becoming quite clear is that the drivers of crisis are much more profound and complex in our time. I just mentioned climate change, the images from Pakistan and the extreme flooding impacts of just the last few weeks. But also throughout this year we have seen what used to be called natural disasters and catastrophes really become a function of human inaction. That's what I think climate change is also demonstrating to us. And then on top of that there is the global economic impacts. A war in Ukraine overnight translates into disruption in every food market around the world in the supply chains on fertilizer. A pandemic which is another phenomenon of what did somebody in Tonga or maybe in the mountain nations of the Andes have to do with COVID-19. And yet everything that followed affected everyone simultaneously. So I think our ability first of all to deal with multiple shocks that are increasingly disrupting the lives of citizens but of economies and really the global economy is one of the phenomena we are trying to deal with. And I would argue that we have also in the post-war period perfected our humanitarian response capacity which is when there is a disaster we are able to fly in food. We are able to provide tents when an earthquake happens or a flood event. But really many of the crises today are not natural disaster driven principally. They are very often events where conflicts, civil wars, tensions within societies amongst nations lead to these extraordinary spectacles of human suffering. And we can now talk about Afghanistan, we can talk about Libya, Syria, Iraq, Haiti. Not always is it a foreign power, it can also be conflicts within society, the collapse of government of the economic institutions. And I think herein lies one of the key issues that have led us in UNDP not to try and reinvent a crisis response but rather to evolve it in line with what we are learning. And a critical part of that lesson has been that in the worst moment of crisis it is critical that the international community in a sense remains engaged but not from a external top-down perspective of how to rebuild a society but rather by investing in the very forces that are able to create the momentum from within a country to rebuild. Whether that is Iraq after a war where you played also such a significant role with the stabilization program, allowing millions of people to return within weeks and months to the places they called home and being part of the reconstruction rather than being stuck for years in internally displaced people's camps which sadly today is another phenomenon we are observing. There are literally hundreds of refugee camps around the world where children are being born to parents who arrived there. In fact, in Kenya we have the famous instance where a girl was born a couple of years ago to a mother who herself was born in that refugee camp and this is a Kafkaist nightmare that we are also having to confront. We are not dealing with the issue of displacement of refugees in ways that resolve issues we are kind of dealing with the symptoms and I think therein lies one of the key debates we have to have. Akmi said something very interesting. When you were talking about a crisis hit and then people who have expertise in helping institutions to function pack their bags and leave and rather than those people who have expertise in helping institutions to continue to function even under stress, even when everything else around them is collapsing those are the first people on the bus out of the capital and out of the country. How has UNDP dealt with that phenomenon? I know that in some countries Akmi you've insisted that your teams remain in Afghanistan you've insisted that your teams stay even as the political culture of the country has changed very dramatically. Absolutely, it is partly the recognition that out of any crisis the way forward cannot only be the kind of emergency support we provide you can provide people with food with temporary shelter but the ability to rebuild an economy, a local infrastructure the functionality of state institutions whether it is the education system whether it is the health system, whether it is the justice system a local police station, a local court are an incredibly vital part of a society having confidence again and this is something that we are developing as an approach right now from the bottom up for instance in the Sahel where very often state institutions have been absent for years this is where political radicalization, extremism, alienation take root and therefore there is no more state institution and you can try and design a lot of things from the top down but actually where you have to begin is where people really need something to believe in the future. Now there is also an interesting phenomenon in a country such as Libya where conflict has been perennial now for years continuing particularly in the coastline, in the capital but actually in the rest of the country working with local government authorities has continued through this period because the majority of people actually live in a local context where they are still having to survive earn some form of living in the informal sector so our focus has been to try and stabilize local institutions local services so that people are able to at least survive in the places they call home but you also refer to Afghanistan and there we took a very deliberate decision the whole world knew that ultimately based on an agreement signed with the United States and as part of the international community the international community would withdraw and the Taliban in one form or another would become the new rulers of the country anticipating what that would mean a year in advance and then making a decision which we did as UNDP not to say in that moment we essentially leave the country and come back maybe in two or three years time but actually to say the assets we had on the ground the networks with civil society, the expertise but also the ability to understand how you would be able to identify the most vulnerable people realizing that tens of thousands of micro enterprises were actually women led enterprises so if you could set up a system to inject a little bit of capital in this very rough and chaotic transition period to maintain the ability of these women to run their businesses working with the women's chambers of commerce and other civil society organizations would at least allow the people of Afghanistan to protect to some extent the people's economy that would be the only basis in which they could survive essentially the implosion of the economy, the implosion of a political governance system and the implosion of the financial system remember the central bank was paralyzed, the banking system collapsed no money was circulating, being able to stay there and not only argue that the thing that can be done at that moment is to deliver food aid or medicines but rather to look at ways in which you can enable the Afghans themselves to begin to sow the seeds of a recovery even in a as yet unpredictable political context is a vital part of a different kind of development response in crisis contexts Agam for generations now UNDP has played a very important role globally by alerting the international community by alerting all of us to major trends that are developing and to offering a set of options to policymakers within the multilateral system and across countries offering options for how those can be addressed as UNDP looks at the great transformative dynamics underway that are literally changing the globe itself from that vantage point if you were alerting us to the things that we should do differently if you were advising us on how we should change the way that we respond to crisis to reimagine our crisis response what would be your top three priorities? the first one I think is to better anticipate where crisis are likely to break out I think we live in a world where information really is an enormously vital currency technology allows us to process data to be able to take indicators, trends and derive from them an understanding where is there a situation that may likely explode and whether it is driven by domestic political tensions or whether it is driven for instance by the phenomenon of excessive debt levels many developing countries right now have emerged from the pandemic already highly leveraged fiscal space is extremely constrained debt levels are reaching very dangerous levels and countries are not able to expend the sorts of resources that for instance help the poorest to survive an explosion in the price of food that is happening right now worldwide and fuels for instance our ability to then respond to these early warnings is something we have to invest a lot more attention to we already published in April of this year a report that pointed out that more than 80 developing countries are potentially facing a debt distress situation our international financial institutions but also the G20 because of the political dynamics and the geopolitics are at the moment only to some extent able to put up a response that would address this immediately injecting liquidity into the global economy it's the wise sensible thing to do we do it at national level but we struggle in the international context but the global economy is simply an extension of the national economic logic the same applies to for instance the suspension of interest payments a country that is already struggling to keep the schools open and deal with the explosion in fuel costs to keep transport systems going to get enough food into the country following Russia's invasion of the Ukraine and all the ripple effects this has had on world markets not being able to look after their citizens will create automatically not only economic distress but in many countries political stress when we see citizens giving up on their institutions and going into the streets it's almost too late because at that point you are no longer dealing with a prevention approach you are now dealing with a crisis management approach and I think we do need to have an international community that recognizes first of all the value of intervening earlier development investing in one another is a way of preventing the crisis of tomorrow from happening but sometimes it is much more immediate also we do need to do something in the immediate sense with the current global economic outlook we are drifting into a recession for many developing countries the rising interest rates and inflation and a global recession is leading perversely enough to a cut back in development finance exact opposite of what we should be doing and I think we need to have a more honest conversation in our capitals and with the public also of why investing in one another in crisis is actually a very smart way to come out of this crisis and that I think is a conversation that needs to go well beyond the think tanks and the beltway so to speak of the capitals of the world before any global crisis there are always canaries in the coal mine who say the crisis is coming we have to do something about it and we fail to and you've just alluded to that so how do we get it right next time we know a crisis is coming we have to do the great mechanisms which drive the interventions that we take and the work that we do in partnership with friendly countries and friendly nations how does that dynamic change how do those mechanisms evolve to deal with contemporary problems I think one thing is to go back to the architecture and the mandates and the design that we have built up over the last 50, 60 years is a very segmented approach for all of responding to crisis we have in the parlance of the experts a humanitarian development and a peace building kind of set of mandates I think in the United States we have recently passed the global fragility act which was precisely trying to address itself to the fact that each one of these has a raison d'etre and a role to play but not in isolation from one another not in a chronological order but as instruments that are deployed in a synchronized and coordinated fashion how do we better achieve that so in our own institutions of government we need to recognize the nature of these crisis as not being something that deals with first world saving lives later we find some way of making peace and then we start building institutions and that's why in UNDP we have often argued we need to find a way in which we can save lives and save livelihoods at the same time that is a smarter response to enabling countries to come out of crisis I think a second part has to do also with the way we finance our responses for instance the reality is there are instances where you will go into a country where there are internally displaced people's camps next to a village I've seen this with my very own eyes water is trucked in with trucks into that internally displaced people's camp to provide them with water 500 meters away is a village where if we were to use some of these funds to deepen that well and lay a small pipe across we would be able to help both this ability to understand how you connect this is critical and host communities are part of dealing with the capacity of crisis and refugees and displacement look at the Middle East for example some of the countries who have carried the greatest burden there Kingdom of Jordan but also Turkey Lebanon are countries that have received some support from the international community and therefore have been much more able to offer also these opportunities but time runs out and money runs out so how do we solve the problem of getting people back into their countries also and that's where development again becomes the key element if you cannot create an economy where people can earn a livelihood can find a job can educate their children you essentially leave them no option but to either give up or get up and leave How can the development cooperation frameworks and the architecture that's developed during the period of decolonization since World War II a large part of that framework has been seen as something which you give to a country if you like them and you take it away from a country if you don't and part of the incentive and disincentive structures that try and promote good behavior across the globe you know it's obviously as somebody who works for the United Nations the notion that we have some shared values that define our ability to work with one another clearly is a departure point that was already captured in essentially the charter of the United Nations so the United Nations is in a sense a deeply value-based institution but its ability to work with countries is not premised on everyone having the same values the question is if we want to for example in a humanitarian context save lives help people in an utterly desperate situation we have over decades developed ways in which we are able to help those people despite the fact that we are sometimes dealing with governments that in many ways contradict the very principles of good governance that is a humanitarian approach the question is in the development mode of thinking we are also very much engaged in trying to build the governance institutions I mean the governance frameworks that allow democratic societies accountable governments transparent governments to be part of the way that we can actually allow people to feel that they are in charge of their country and this is a journey that you cannot do by declaration not overnight we need to sometimes invest in countries where the transition is painful full of contradictions but the journey the direction is very clear and there are failures that people will cite there are actually many more examples just think of the process of decolonization for instance people today say oh yeah the 50s and 60s we was an era of decolonization the fact that dozens of nations became independent were accompanied in that journey through very tense political processes sometimes is often forgotten but also East Timor and many countries where we have deployed peacekeeping operations UNDP together with our department of political affairs and peacekeeping is engaged in supporting an election on average once a week in the calendar year because countries turn to the UN and say please help us to have a transparent and effective election as part of our democratic governance process so that's the everyday investments that we make in helping countries to move to a point where shocks which will always come sometimes economic, political, natural disasters do not destabilize the society and once that happens it becomes much more expensive for the international community and whether you look at the cost of somebody who is temporarily displaced in their country but then can return to their home for instance in Iraq the minute that person crosses a border the cost of looking after a person explodes the minute that person becomes a refugee in another country the cost is even higher that person never wanted to leave their home so it's a fatal kind of set of circumstances we need to invest more in prevention and that has a lot to do with how development can build institutions livelihoods and good governance and I think the way we in UNDP have tried to now frame it is with very simple four headings it's to anticipate better to prevent more effectively and earlier where things go wrong and natural disasters are not something you can always predict respond quickly and not only with the humanitarian response capacity but also the essentially allow people to rebuild their livelihoods and that's the recovery strategy element of our strategy these four are not in a sense rocket science but in the way we aligned them clearly we are struggling in many of the countries that offer support but also in the way that our institutions are able to work together on the ground we need to incentivize a different kind of international response one of the things that was very striking about the 2022 human development report is the first part of the document just as you're describing now talks about the different multiple crises that are increasing in intensity and are happening more and more often in more and more complex ways and you finish the first half of the report and you think to yourself oh my gosh there is no way that we can possibly deal with the intensity and the pace of what's happening to all of us on this earth right now there's almost a sense of paralysis and then the second part of the document just as you said lays out four approaches that we can take I found reading the report that I was panicking in the first 75 pages and not entirely sure that the next 25 pages really answered the problem why are you confident that the approach that you've just described is the best one we can come up with now first of all let us recognize that the situation that we find ourselves in the year 2022 is really quite serious and people might think well these things pass you know we have a pandemic we have a series of conflicts and more displaced people and refugees than since 1945 we have the global recession we have dozens of countries that are in economic terms literally one step away from having a real economic crisis and maybe defaulting we have tensions that already before the pandemic frankly were manifesting themselves all across the world remember the demonstrations from Hong Kong to Paris to Santiago de Chile to Washington DC I mean our societies were in many ways fracturing so it is a very serious moment and the Human Development Report of 2022 tries to first of all understand and explain where do we find ourselves in this moment in time because you in part have to unpack many of these changes and developments in order to be able to respond to them but let me also say as Mary Robinson the former president of Ireland said on the launch of the Human Development Report yes it is some very sobering reading but you know what the real message in the report is we have choices we can choose differently and in that sense the best future could still lie ahead of us because we are an extraordinarily privileged generation if you think about it we are the wealthiest ever there is more money in our global economy than we would need for any single of these problems to be resolved so are we able to incentivize our financial system to actually invest in the things that help us get out of these stress factors something that Secretary General has repeatedly called for now and that citizens in the world have been asking for for years whether it is the way we measure progress the GDP per capita or income levels as being perhaps the only indicator but the Secretary General has also said we need to look at our international financial architecture the way that we incentivize the investments we are the most technologically advanced generation in human history the possibilities of digital of artificial intelligence of quantum computing but also renewable energy and we can power our global economy in the next 30 years essentially with an inexhaustible resource if we solve a few technological things along the way so I remain an extraordinarily optimistic person but with growing levels of frustration because what I think is causing us so much grief and also frustration our societies is that our political systems our economic systems are not evolving in line with the possibilities and increasingly are causing us existential problems the levels of inequality in the midst of extreme wealth cannot be sustainable from a social cohesion point of view we need to address this and we have all the means to do so and we showed actually in the pandemic the extraordinary capacity of societies to stand up responses in terms of social safety nets, basic incomes, measures to stabilize businesses we also have to I think recognize that living with 8 billion people and perhaps soon 9 or 10 billion people on this planet requires a different kind of relationship between economics and technology and this is not about giving up things it's about doing things more intelligently smarter who even being a very traditional economist could justify that more than 30%, roughly 33% is the estimate of everything we produce every year to eat on this planet is actually never consumed it's lost between farm and market it's thrown away because of expiry dates that's over a third of the food production of the world this is not sustainable development this is the opposite and I think we need to go to the core of some of these economic incentives and regulatory frameworks that allow this to continue to happen if you're able to address that then indeed there are many pathways out of these crisis and I think that's where the human development report is essentially saying look Houston we have a problem and it's very serious and it's getting more serious but here are all the opportunities to address it and it has a lot to do with also enabling people to regain trust in their institutions trust in the future hope is actually something people are losing how many parents today think that their children's future is not likely to be better than their own this was not the case 20, 30 years ago and that's where the human development report really is trying to get back to people feeling that they have the agency the ability to make different choices Ackman a number of conversations that you've been having across the world one of the themes that has come up is that we are losing trust as you just said in institutions and yet institutions are perhaps one of the the best bets to make in collective change by investing in those institutions and having them create new mechanisms and create new strategies we can find a pathway out of the crisis that we're facing how do you solve that contradiction if institutions are proud of the problem how are they suddenly going to become part of the solution well there are two ways in which this happens revolution and evolution revolutions usually are very painful because basically citizens overturn their institutions and all the chaos that this implies is obviously not the preferable way of having change so how does evolution happen I think it is by recognizing in our institutions the importance of giving citizens the ability to shape the decisions that affect their lives we can talk a lot about democratic values and so on but it is ultimately the ability of citizens to shape and influence their futures through the forms of government they choose through the pathways development choices they make in a country like Switzerland people sometimes look with fascination at the kind of decision making at the level of a commune including the right to become a Swiss citizen but also the referendum that's one way and the Swiss have chosen that there are other ways that it can be done but I think it's not just the act of voting that is at the center of this it is actually allowing people to feel that they are part of shaping what happens next and I think our institutions have to evolve it's partly why again the Secretary General of the United Nations has called for more network multilateralism the United Nations is an extraordinary expression of aspiration and of in a sense a shared value proposition but also a shared interest proposition in a world that will always have differences will always have reasons to compete with each other or perhaps even find themselves in conflict but how do you make such an institution not pretend that we are nations united we are not we know that and I would argue the wisdom of establishing the United Nations already before the end of the Second World War when it was designed in its core principles and then after 1945 was not a naive view that we would be one big happy family it's precisely because differences are there different interests are there how do we evolve an institution born in the 20th century for the reality of the 21st century I think there are obviously many directions in which change must happen I in UNDP and with my team have certainly invested a great deal in the last few years to think about the future of development and to give you a simple analogy in the 60s 70s and 80s we talked about helping each other through development aid transfer expertise invest some funds help countries to sort of get going I would argue we live in an entirely different age today if you look at climate change the threat of pandemics of cybercrime violent extremism migration the future of work we need to find vehicles that we can use to invest in one another and development cooperation of the 21st century is really not about one country helping another and giving a hand up and then or a leg up and then you know you're on your own it's actually the platform on which we can invest in one another's energy transition in greater preparedness for the next pandemic in more resilient economies when shocks hit them including in the way that we have built up the international financial architecture and an international political architecture but what you see I think in today's world is a lack of confidence in these institutions partly because they have not evolved enough and secondly because we also apply too many double standards so we need to come back to the core of what is a shared value and what is a shared interest and how do these two coincide in the way we run these institutions I for instance do think that UNDP the United Nations Development Prom as part of the United Nations Development System in today's world is actually a vital architectural piece of the future of international cooperation others would perhaps say no development cooperation is kind of an acronym and we're going to phase it out how are we going to invest in one another because development is from a geopolitical geo-strategic geo-security perspective absolutely premised on investing in one another without that we're essentially going to fall apart Akim as a final question the United States is very proud of having been one of the leading voices and architects of multilateralism after World War II and of a driving force behind the United Nations and yet at many times in our recent history the US has questioned whether or not this institution that we helped to create is an institution that can still be meaningful now can still live up to the aspirations that we have invested in the expectations that we have of it you're here in Washington with us today we're very pleased you're with us what would you say to an American audience about the UN you know it's an interesting question I was once introduced in a podium like this by a US based journalist who essentially introduced the United Nations as something that many Americans wondered whether it should still exist and you know my answer back to him was well then you explained to me what happened between your grandfather and your grandmother and you in the way that you look at this logic of having an institution because you know it was Americans that were at the forefront remember 1941 the meetings that were happening in the US, UK, even Russia then in designing this institution and then in the post-war period the United States gave it its global headquarters here I think we have found ourselves in a period where clearly the United Nations very often became a kind of alternative battleground and if we treat an institution that is essentially meant to bring countries together despite their differences empower it also with an adequate resource space to be able to intervene in extraordinary difficult situations you know for example our world food program bringing food in you know essentially highly dangerous highly volatile situations and I wonder how many Americans know that this evening there's around 100 million people in the world who will actually be able to eat a meal because the United States together with other countries by the way invest in their world food program and in the humanitarian response that allows us to deal with those shocks how many people would realize that for you know a fraction of the money that they believe the United Nations and I can cite the United Nations Development Program here we are working in 100 countries right now to help them invest in their energy transition which is on the one hand just giving the 1 billion people who don't even have access to electricity today access to affordable and clean energy while at the same time helping the economies to transition to cleaner energy infrastructure so that we have a chance to actually have a global energy matrix that doesn't kill us on this planet and few people will believe sometimes the amount of funding that the UN actually has available I often say how does the Secretary General whose budget that he has for the Secretary of the United Nations and obviously we have different organizations but that's the political mandate the humanitarian coordination his budget is the equivalent of what the citizens of New York essentially invest in their fire department so I think also we need to go back to the citizens of the United States and be able to say to them there's actually extremely value for money that you get by first investing in an organization that has that presence around the world so wherever either crisis, political need development priorities need to be addressed you have a infrastructure, a partner and one in which you have a very significant voice and secondly for every dollar you put in other countries put in another hundred dollars and what a great equation that is for actually saying leveraging other people's resources to have the capacity to intervene at scale and yet the reality to almost any UN agency you speak to today the funding situation is extremely constrained and therefore the problems are growing in scale and complexity the resources that are available are actually shrinking in many respects and that is in two respects fatal one we are not able to address the crisis early on and secondly we are actually undermining the institutional architecture we spend over seven decades building and we risk losing it and these are two I think discussions that we need to have with members of congress but also with the public with the administration in virtually every capital of the world I can thank you for being with us today and for so thoughtfully describing the nature of crisis a practical pragmatic response to them for defending the United Nations and showing that it is a meeting point for shared interests and most importantly for all of us for shared values that we have together created over an extraordinary period of 75 years I hope you also allow me a very personal comment it was a great privilege for me early in my career to have come under the mentorship of UNDP I was very proud to have worked for the institution that you now lead I will always remember in every country I served in that when people talked about the UN and what gave them hope they always mentioned the United Nations Development Program it's a testament to the leadership of that institution and the role that has played for many years in many countries thank you for being with us and thank you to everyone who's joined us for this conversation