For more than 50 years, the Leech Lake Art League has been bringing artists of all kinds together under one roof. Reporter Cheryl Moore takes us into their inner circle for this week's In Focus. I really enjoy the camaraderie of the artists and also the critiques at the end of our luncheon. Every Thursday, artists of all backgrounds and skill levels will gather in the basement of the Legion and Walker. Together, they formed the Leech Lake Art League. The league was started back in 1963 to give members a safe and fun environment to practice, share or create something new. Right now I'm just trying to come up with something that is creative and it doesn't always work but it doesn't matter. I have fun with it, I enjoy it and everybody is very supportive of it. Here at the Leech Lake Art League, all mediums are welcome. You can do paintings, mosaics, textiles, even Gordart. I've really enjoyed seeing all the different mediums that people work with and where they get their inspiration from. There's a huge variety in the type of materials people work with. If anybody is interested in learning how to do something, anything, as far as this is the place, somebody knows something about everything so it's a helpful group. Learning is a common theme in the league. They even have a library filled with books that you can use as a reference, in addition to the advice you get from your peers. We critique at the end of our get-togethers if you want, which is very helpful because we give each other all advice on anything from the framing we're doing to our artwork or the picture itself. The league can see up to 30 members at a session. It all depends on how much the members want to participate. For those who are thinking of joining, it's really easy. Members say the best thing to do is just show up to the Legion on any Thursday between 9.30 in the morning and 2. We're always looking for new members and you should never be self-conscious about where you're at with your art ability. Everyone's welcome. Reporting in Walker with this week's In Focus, Shremor, Lakeland News. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


George was given a tour of the Rosamount. The press has gone on. Well, hello there. It's been a long time since 1981, when you were here before. It's been a very long time since you were here. Well, I said, you were here. Yes, we met right here. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. How was it, we, the mastermind? I'm going to shake the staff and the press. I'll see you in addition to our own people here. We'll have about three waves at the top of this. We have our own collaborators here. We have three waves of photographs that will succeed. Thank you very much. We are looking for the opportunity to exchange ideas during this period of time. Say thank you for your precious hospitality. But I would like to thank you for your very kind hospitality towards my daughter. I would like to share the same message. I haven't even seen her since I got to Washington. You will watch. You will have the Thursday. You will have the questions. They always do. They are not supposed to ask questions. They are supposed to film. But they are trying to replace them. Mr. President, the hearings are about over on Capitol Hill. Have you heard any evidence that any laws were violated in the grand contra up there? You know, I don't take questions of these photo opportunities, but I ask a question like that. I haven't heard a single word indicated in any of the testimony that laws were made. In that case, do you think that Colonel North, the Admiral Poindexter, rather, deserved pardons at this point just to prevent any kind of prosecution? I am going to speak out on that whole subject and the subject of this whole affair when the hearings are over. Are you at all worried about the surgery that's going to happen? Are you at all worried about the surgery that's happening? No, it seems a little over dignified to call what it's going to happen. Surgery is scraping the patch on my nose. Thank you. Thank you. That's why you do this. Thank you. And this is just where they took a look at how this happened. So you won't stay there for long? Oh no. The press is provided. I think the African, their best behavior because they're right here. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you. You're welcome. We're behind schedule this evening. That brings Yolkson right over there by that. In the other room I was thanking the president for being so very kind to my daughter on her visit to your country. She has come back very enthused about all that she saw there. Symbolizes our strong friendship and esteem of which we owe you. In the years you have nurtured political stability and economic prosperity in your country, and you've also been forced for peace in the region. The OAU and the UN and elsewhere. Incidentally, I know that I'm going to ask you if you have an agenda or something. You'd like to start a discussion, but first of all I have to confess a little curiosity as to the reason OAU is summit. Would you like to say something about that? If you do, I'll tell you, but I'll say it once and then. We have admired the way the policy that you have pursued in regard to the economy. We know that the oil price situation has caused you great problems. We will do all we can to promote for the private best in your country, but you have almost performed a miracle in that regard. And it is definitely the path to follow. This has been a long-awaited visit that has given us a chance to return the generous hospitality President Bongo personally accorded to so many representatives of this and earlier administrations. For 20 years, President Bongo has led his country in an era of stability and progress. Under his leadership, Gabon has consistently encouraged the peaceful settlement of regional disputes siding with reason, dialogue and moderation over bloodshed war and terror. Recognizing this, the Organization of African Unity asked President Bongo to help find a solution to the conflict in Chad. President Bongo has been a champion of African development and has worked tirelessly for the welfare of his people and all Africans. The United States and Gabon have cooperated closely in the effort to achieve these noble goals. We have enjoyed a positive and friendly relationship for the past two decades, a relationship that has served both our countries well. I have greatly valued President Bongo's advice and counsel concerning America's role in Africa's political and economic development. Today, President Bongo and I found ourselves in harmony about many of the key issues that confront Africa. We agreed that economic reform, which is the best hope for growth, self-sufficiency and full economic sovereignty, must proceed. The United States has encouraged reform through special aid funds and increased contributions to international financial institutions. Gabon is contributing as well by setting an example, taking positive steps toward reform on its own and in cooperation with the IMF. We admire this commitment and wish President Bongo great success. For our own part, we will soon be signing a bilateral debt rescheduling agreement with Gabon. U.S. investors have had a favorable experience in Gabon. President Bongo is working to make the investment climate even more attractive, and we are working with him to promote increased U.S. investment there. President Bongo and I also reviewed the situation in Southern Africa. We share the conviction that negotiated peaceful solutions to the disputes that afflict that region are urgently and clearly impossible. The evil of apartheid is no exception. President Bongo and I are committed to working together, along with other African leaders of goodwill, to set the region on a peaceful course. The United States will continue to stand unequivocally by the side of Africa with our counsel, our friendship and our assistance. Constructive meetings, like the one I held today with President Bongo, bolster that commitment. I was very much heartened by our discussions and pleased to have President Bongo as our guest. I am very touched by the kind words you have just said in my place, as well as by the confidence you put in my country. I would like to thank you, Mr. President, and I would like to express my condolences to the people of Gabon and to my personal name, the feelings of friendship that we show in the face of your excellence and of the American people. During this official visit, which is now beginning, which is my privilege to carry out throughout your great and beautiful country, I am also touched by your kind words towards me and touched also by the confidence you displayed toward my country. May I thank you for this, Mr. President, and tell you, in turn, on behalf of the people of Gabon and in my own name, how much esteem and friendship we feel towards you personally and towards the American people. In this world of politics, the United States has built on their nation, on the diversity of the origins of its inhabitants. They have become an example for all the countries and the price of peace, of freedom and of solidarity. That is why, as the head of the African State, I can assure you that we are very attentive to all the efforts undertaken by your country to end, not only at the part-time and regional conflicts, but also at the constant degradation of the country. For our part, we have set foot in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund and a program of austerity that imposes on us the constraints of the future to preserve the future. I am very grateful to all of you, Mr. President. The International Monetary Fund and a program of austerity that imposes on us the constraints of the future to preserve the future. The International Monetary Fund and the Paris Club and London have taken action of our determination and our will to honor our children. In you, the American people finds its perfect embodiment because beyond your great statements like qualities, it has found the leader which has given back confidence and greatness and dignity back to the American nation. No country can stand idly by and watch what is going on in the United States. And Gabon watches with keen interest the deep and rapid shifts taking place under your leadership within American society. In this political world in which we live, the United States built its own nation predicated upon the diversity of origins of your people. Thus, you have become an example for all countries which love liberty, solidarity, and peace. Therefore, speaking as the leader of an African nation, may I say that we follow very carefully all your efforts to put an end not only to apartheid and regional conflicts, but also to put an end to the steady deterioration of the economic situation of the African continent. For our part, Mr. President, we have set up with the IMF an austerity program which imposes drastic constraints upon us if we want to preserve the future. The IMF and the Paris and London clubs have been made aware of our determination and of our will to honour our commitments. By the importance that our export products and access to the global market have increased. The solidarity must indeed become the reality in the measure of our relations between states. In this spirit, the distance between our two countries, the difference between the level of development and the economic situation, must not constitute obstacles to a multiform cooperation. Gabon is a peaceful country, stable and welcoming, where security reigns. He is the guardian of people. He seeks to diversify his partners in and in these contexts. We know that there is room for your country. The United States can indeed bring us their knowledge, their technology, their knowledge and their capital in order to contribute to our development. Mr. President, the United States and Gabon have been maintaining harmonious relations for several years. Some American companies have already established Gabon. But I wish for the future that our relations benefit from a new impulsion, especially after the signing of the bilateral agreement on the encouragement and protection of the investments we have been negotiating. In this connection, may I tell you how much I appreciate to the full extent of their impact, the rescheduling measures taken vis-à-vis our debt that you were kind enough to undertake. In this very difficult situation, we wish, Mr. President, for the spirit of solidarity to prevail in the end and for our export commodities to gain access to world markets at their remunerative level. Solidarity indeed must become the reality in relationships among states. In this connection, distance between our two countries, the difference in our levels of development and in our respective economic impact, must not be an obstacle to a cooperation in many areas. Gabon is a peaceful and peace-loving country, stable and a welcoming country, and there is security in Gabon. Gabon is the special preserve of no one. Gabon seeks to diversify its partners and in this connection, we know that there is a place for your country. The United States indeed can bring us their know-how, their technology and their capitals in order to contribute to our development. Mr. President, the United States and Gabon have for some years now enjoyed harmonious relationships. We have a few American companies in Gabon already. What I wish for in the future is to see our relations enjoy a new impetus, particularly after we signed the bilateral agreement on treaty protection and investments. In short, Mr. President, I must make a decision to make a cooperation between our two countries.


The implications of what we talked about in the past video are manyfold, but the first that we can note is that we are now no longer dependent upon centralized organizations to define value within society. Because the maintenance of these databases where value is recorded has shifted to information networks and it's increasingly becoming possible for anyone or any group of people to set up one of these networks. It means that individuals and groups can define what they value instead of that being defined for them. And of course, who gets to define value within society is of critical importance. Previously, only large centralized institutions got to define objective units of value. The largest of those institutions, the nation state, got to define widely accepted currencies. But those tokens were always relative to a centralized entity. They only really defined what that centralized entity values. A Starbucks gift card is a form of token. The REMNMB is a form of token. A share in Microsoft is a form of token. But all of these units of value are defined, created and managed by centralized entities according to their interests and needs. What is changing now is that anyone, any group can now define any form of value through the creation of a digital token on a blockchain. These tokens don't have to have value for some external centralized entity. It can simply represent the inherent value within a network of peers. Tokens are generic units of value that can be used to quantify any form of valued resource. But more importantly, they can be used to define specific and distinct forms of value. This is why in a blockchain economy, we have so many tokens. Energy tokens, food tokens, transport tokens, social tokens and the list is ever expanding. In such a way, the token economy offers the potential to incorporate more and different kinds of value, thus giving value representation to what was previously excluded from being defined as economic activity. The potential of this is that we may for the first time start to move towards an economic system based upon full cost accounting. In recent years with the environmental sustainability crisis unfolding, the idea of a full cost accounting economy has been presented as a solution. But to date, the complexity of realizing that have been overwhelming and the tools for implementing it have remained limited. Rapid advances in big data, complex analytics and blockchain technology are starting to provide the technical infrastructure for an economy that may in fact incorporate all relevant event information and value sources, thus bringing more areas of social capital and natural capital into token market exchanges. Tokenization is the process of converting some asset into a token unit that is recorded on a blockchain. Anything of economic value can be tokenized and thus brought into the blockchain economy. Today, we have started on a long journey of migrating our entire global economy to blockchain networks. Data state, commodities, supply chains, energy markets, accounting, mortgages, loans, insurance, special purpose vehicles and all kinds of derivatives are going to migrate one block at a time into this new information based economy. As the venture capitalist Bradley Rotter-Rovetz has noted, everything that could be tokenized will be tokenized, the Empire State Building will someday be tokenized. I'll buy 1% of the Empire State Building. I'll get every day credited to my wallets 1% of the rents minus expenses. I can borrow against my Empire State Building holding and if I want to sell the Empire State Building I hit a button and instantly I have the money. With this new technology, not only existing forms of valued assets will get tokenized but with advances in information technology we are quantifying and assigning value units to more and more aspects of our worlds and our social interactions. Token networks will be used to support these new forms of economies, whether we're talking about the emerging natural capital economy or social capital.  The point is, the blockchains aren't simply extensions of existing financial and monetary systems but they're something truly different. They allow us to define, quantify and exchange new sets of values that emerge in a post-industrial economy. In so doing, they allow us to expand market systems and economies as distributed management systems to coordinate more and more spheres of human activity in a decentralized fashion through peer-to-peer exchanges within digital token markets.


So welcome everybody, this is a great occasion because this is the first, we hope, a long series of PhD seminars and I'm a bit embarrassed to be standing here to do the introduction. I was hoping that one of the PhD seminars would be doing it, but let's pick the next side of that work up and since it's the first seminar I will still be doing it. I have one request, since not the entire room is full, can I ask the people who are in the back to come a bit to the front because this is supposed to be a debate and if we're close together, it will make the debating easier. And then while you're moving, perhaps I can say two sentences about the one of the PhD seminar series. I think, and I don't know if you remember, I think it was perhaps already more than a year ago that we started discussing the idea and here actually is a rose because we promote all of us, we have such a great community of bright minds, young bright minds, previous institutes, the PhD community. All of them do very interesting work in water, all of them are young, which means I think if you're young then you're also a bit wild and you still have new, innovative ideas, but actually often within the institute all the work that the PhD community and the fellows do remains a bit in the margins. We don't see a lot of it, so we thought perhaps it's very nice to have to create an occasion where to put the PhD fellows to meet and discuss how their bits and pieces of research fit together to answer the larger questions that water questions that we are dealing with and doing that by inviting people that are inspiring, provoking, that we admire or that we hate, but somehow people in the water world or beyond that can promote discussion and debate. That was the idea. So I'm very happy that Deepak agrees to come here all the way from Nepal and that Ken agrees, he is what he already, that Ken agrees to engage in debate with Deepak. I've known Deepak for a long time. He's an old friend in the let's say the critical water community. He is a hydroelectric electric engineer. That's one part of his training. He was trained in Russia, so he speaks Russian, but he's also a political scientist from the United States, so we combined these two which is already very interesting. Deepak for a short period has been the minister of water resources in Nepal, so he combines many insights, many experiences, both from different disciplines, from having been in charge of water resources in the country, but also in a way and I hope that he will say something about that today. He has also learned a lot from by being on the receiving end of a lot of development cooperation and so that gives a very different perspective. What does it mean? How do we negotiate all these development loans and grants and what good does that actually do? Nepal is one of the countries, I don't know what the current percentages are, but it's one of the countries that receives a lot of development aid and that has always received a lot of development aid, so that will give a very interesting perspective. I can say a lot more about Deepak. This is very long, it has a very long list of publications. Perhaps I will only say one more thing is that Deepak is very vocal and very provocative and very articulated, so that makes him, I think, a perfect speaker for our first presentation seminar. Shall I also immediately introduce Ken? Or can I introduce Ken? No, let me also introduce Ken. Most of you already know Ken. Ken Irvin, he is the Professor of Aquatic Ecosystems here in the Institute. He comes from a different disciplinary background, an ecologist. But of course, I think he combines with Deepak a deep interest in development, sustainable development. So, I will focus on how do we do it, realizing that we can never achieve any sustainable and just development from just a disciplinary angle that you always need to broaden and think about ecology, technology as well as about society and human beings. So, Ken, I really hope that you agree to engage in a discussion with people. There's a lot more to say also about Ken, perhaps I also won't do that, I think the debate will speak for itself. So, Deepak, let's give him a big hand. Both of them, perhaps you can go first Deepak and then Ken will... Thank you for inviting me. I'm reminded of my law battle in Utah in 1985, I think in 30, when we were asked as graduate students to organize our own four credit seminars. And we've done one on what's called the debate on growth and development. And people still talk about it today. So, it was fun. I hope you have as much fun as we did when I was a birthday organizing something like this. Now, what I'm going to do is talk to you about what is development for Oxy. I will talk a little bit about the wickedness of some of these problems that we face. Water, energy, food, climate change, these are all wicked problems. And then I will talk about, you know, why I think the way I do and take an extremely critical attitude towards much of development orthodoxy from the lived experience in the past. We've seen all kinds of developments come and go. And Nepal has been a laboratory since 1948 when Truman's four point program was started. And then I'll talk about why I have problems with development aid orthodoxy. I will not talk about what needs to be done.  I'll come to, you know, what I think the solutions might be to a better international cooperation phenomenon. Now, development orthodoxy, let's step back. You know, this whole idea of development as we know it was born after the First World War. Second World War, sorry, it didn't exist before that. And it came with the, you know, the close of the Second World War with the Cold War as it started. And that's where Marshall Plan in Europe, you know, somebody got the right idea that if Europe could be, you know, put back on its feet and developed after the devastation of the war with something like Marshall Plan, then why don't we do it for the rest of the world and, you know, you have development. The trouble was, you know, Europe was in the case of Europe, the institutions of, quote, unquote, development. You know, the market, the laws, the insurance, the banking, everything was in place. It had been shattered by the war, but it was like a wounded animal being healed that all you needed was a little bit of infusion of money and things like that. In the Global South, or what we used to be called the Third World, you're talking about creating that animal in the first place. That's not a wounded animal that needs to be healed with a little bit of infusion of money. So that's a huge problem and these last 50, 60 years, we have seen a huge disjunction in that practice. So it started with Truman's 4-point program in 1948, just after the war, and Nepal was one of the first countries where this was started. Each way it was one, you know, a focus on market, you know, and also a focus on sort of like parliamentary democracy or whatever as the solution, markets and parliamentary democracy and solutions. It hasn't worked in many parts of the world and the contrary, it has actually led to a collapse of democracy often. It has led to all kinds of malfeasance, you might say. One big problem there has been in this orthodoxy that development is seen as economic and not socio-political and that is one of the problems that politics has been sanitized. Now, development is highly political. It is very difficult, uncomfortable, but it has to be done. It also ignores the informal ground reality of what we choose to call toad's eye science. Your eagle eye science and your toad's eye science.  I like to go down to the village and see actually what is happening down there. But a lot of the work, including a lot of academic work, it's just confined to this massive, you know, global GPS data and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, it's necessary that some perspective, but it loses the connection to the ground. And as a result, you end up with something that's very, very imperfect. The other problem has been with development orthodoxy. It's not fixed. It changes, but changes in the wrong way. There's a shifting of goals and ambitions and I'll talk about what has happened in Nepal. But this goal setting is all talked down and seems to miss that toad's eye perspective of what is it that people really want down there. And that has been a chronic persistence problem, persistent problem with the aid industry as I call it. Weakness, you all know what that is, I'm sure, you know, it's the fact that, you know, there's a different interpretation by different groups of what the problem is. People can't agree on the definition of the problem itself, of a wicked problem. And when you can't agree on the definition, you sure as hell are not going to agree on the solution that goes by itself. And give you an example, from another field, Kathmandu's air pollution is pretty bad. But what is it due to? What is the problem that air pollution arises? One set would say it's because of adulterated fuel, you know, people mix kerosene and petrol and make a lot of money these petrol owners. The other says unpaid road that's kicking up dust all the time. Other says overloaded buses and trucks, you know, that carry about two to three times more than they're designed to carry. So the engines don't really combust properly. There's also a brick kiln, there's also the normal burning of agriculture wasted from North India all the way to Nepal and Bangladesh, that Pajjal and Pakistan, that gives rise to this brown cloud, Asian brown cloud thing. Now, why I'm saying this is important is because, you know, depending on what you define as the problem of air pollution, who is to blame and who is to, where the solution has to be found, if it's adulterated fuel, you've got to cast oil suppliers. If it is unpaid roads, you've got to cast the municipality. If it is overloaded buses, the police who are not looking at this overloading in highways. If it is brick kilns, it's another thing. If it is agriculture waste burning, it's industry, it's tradition. How do you handle that? How do you go to every farmer and, you know, make a policeman after every farmer? So this is where wicked problems are and neither government institutions in our kind of countries nor international development agencies are institutionally so structured as to be able to handle such problems. Not just government ministries that are working in silos and not nexus thinking, but international agencies also have their departments and a project promoted by one department as a water supply project refuses to see it also simultaneously as a hydro power project, you know, or a river training project. So this is where the problem lights up. Now, Nepal has been a laboratory of aid failure.  You know, you want a disease, you come and see it, you'll see it there.  This is bad, bad. We've seen it all. Like I said, it started with President Truman in 1948. And since then, a book of ours has come out and a colleague of mine, Dr. Sudevar Sarma has got a brilliant chapter of six decades of aid in Nepal and how the aid fad has changed every year. Sometimes it's import substitution, sometimes it's export lead, sometimes it's basic needs and sometimes it's poverty alleviation, sometimes it is this and that. The current fad is climate change. So everything has to be defined in terms of climate change. Gender and climate change is obvious.  So what is happening now? Somebody joked that, you know, if you really want some money, you want money for water supply project, there's no money for that. Define that project as climate change, gender and water supply and you'll probably get some money. But that means not touching your nose like this, it's touching your nose like this and in the process also the distortion will happen. Now, the trouble is with all the six, seven decades of now foreign aid funding, we had just as bad as before, so the question has to be asked. You know, what went wrong? And some of us are asking this question and we are not getting the answer. It's not that there are no success stories. There are amazing success stories, as we've highlighted in this book, the climate friendly and mountain friendly transport system called the roadways, cable cars. It's consistently ignored. It's already shown that, you know, energy consumption per ton of good transported is about half, you know, but nobody wants to do it. You know, they're so locked in into petroleum and cars and trucks and highways and roads and mountains. It's amazing, you know. We've finished our research on why springs are drying across the Himalayas. Sadly for climate folks, it's too early to blame climate change.  But right now the drivers are something else. I mean, I'm getting great in discussions. You can also download that report. Electric vehicles. And this is efficiency wise way, you know, beyond the chart, so good. But there's a resistance to allowing, there's a whole chapter in our book on electric vehicles and why there's so much resistance for the government. The Nepali environmentalists have to fight their own government to get electric vehicles. Now why does that happen? And no donor really comes forward. The Dutch did come forward at one point, but then withdrew. There is community electricity. Use success with community electricity. But there's a resistance and several political parties, including the Maoists. Now you'd have thought Maoist community, communes, you know, almost anonymous. The Maoists wanted to shut it down completely. Why? Because this was an organizing principle in the village, outside of the political chain of command. I mean, it's amazing that you look at these kinds of things. Small farmer programs. Use success in Nepal. But no donor wanted to pay it up afterwards. There was a pilot. After that it went all through a Nepali bank and all that. I used a development bank. So these successes are just not picked up. And then there's a huge orthodoxy that comes in. And every project, every building has to be defined. Now my objections to aid orthodoxy is that there is no critical self-evaluation. We even use the word incestuous. The same sort of people who design the project probably come back after a state somewhere else and come and evaluate it. So I have yet to see any evaluation report that really is critical. There are two examples I'll give you. One from the World Bank, where a report called the Wappan Hans report. You can Google and still see it there. They haven't removed it yet. And it was an independent kind of review that really showed that most World Bank projects are a failure. And the reason is very simple. It's designed so that you are in the World Bank. Let's say you and I are working in the World Bank. I push a $5 million project in Nigeria and you push a $50 million project in Colombia. Your chance of promotion in the World Bank is about 10 times more than mine. Number one. Number two, once you push the project you are not responsible for what happens to that project. You move on to other projects. So there's an institutional structure there. The other independent review is the University of Helsinki. I was involved with that in studying the impact of water supply and forestry projects in Nepal through the Philly Duffey. It was a highly critical thing. But it was because the university was a separate thing and they did that. Similar story with the Australian University, National University that did the community forestry. But otherwise you find that these evaluation reports are a disaster. There is no self-reflection and critique at all. There's a lack of towards science. I mentioned it. I'll get to that. Millions of development goals are predecessors of this SDGs. I'm a critic of SDGs and I hope to be a critic of this one also. But the MDGs, there's a lot of chess thumping in Nepal right now. That was the old Soviet expression to over-fulfill your plan. So we over-fulfilled our plan on MDGs. Nepal over-fulfilled the goals on girl child enrollment, whatever it is, death rate, child birth. All sorts of things we are way beyond what the MDGs listen to. The trouble is you can't link it causally to any Nepal government policy and any donor policy. It happened because of something else we had done and what was it? Because of the Maoist insurgency, it was in the interest of every mother in every village to send their children away from villages because either they were recruited by Maoists or shot by the Republic. So they went off in rows. In the last 15 years, out-migration to the Gulf countries and Malaysia and Korea has labors. Now the bad, broke-up families did all kinds of things. But essentially they started sending 10 times more income back than they had a job in Nepal. Now that increase in remittance meant that there's a lot of them bought better education for their children, better health, everything. And so the MDGs went up. But this had nothing to do with any donor policy or any Nepal government policy. So this I am afraid is going to continue with the SDGs because the lesson has not been learned. Now also with the development orthodoxy, lack of development is defined as lack of money. Now we see Nepal has nothing to do with it. Nepal government revenue. And essentially we don't have any effective government right now. We are in the same situation as Belgium. We are also in a long period with no prime minister, no government. Currently too we are in the same situation. Over the last almost 5-7 years we've been in a similar situation. For a country that has effectively no government, the revenue of Nepal government is growing per annum at twice the growth rate of China. How does that happen? Remittance. Because people buy more, there's indirect taxation, VAT all these things. And so the government revenue is increasing so fast. There was a call for investment in a hydro power project that wanted 2 billion Nepal rupees. There was an oversubscription by 46 billion rupees. Similar story with other. So lack of money is not a problem. So when development orthodoxy tries to define this as lack of money, you're already on the wrong track. And on climate change, and I have a piece that you might have seen in the blurb, where I wrote in the bulletin of atomic scientists why I think Trump is going to be good for climate change. My main argument is that, you know, after 2 decades of adaptation, climate adaptation funding in Nepal, our carbon footprint has doubled. Now we are small to start with, but we shouldn't have gone higher. But it's doubled. Most of our electricity, we are a hydro country. Now most half our electricity comes from a dirty coal-fired plant in Bihar. Rather than generating our own hydro power. So if this is what is happening with this so-called climate adaptation funding, I'm happy that Mr. Trump has come around, not that I like the guy, you know. But the problem is at least he's going to shape things up. And maybe it will force northern development agencies, the USAID in particular. But let's not talk about USAID. Trump is shutting it down. He's cutting the budget of the State Department by 28%. And all the USAID friends come to me and say, can they find a job at my small NGO? I said, take over my NGO for a little bit. Find your own funding after that. But 28% budget cut in the State Department, the USAID will probably not exist. Okay. But so there's going to be hats to the education. But Trump's, you know, within a China shop attitude is going to force a lot of northern governments and northern development agencies to start rethinking a little bit more critically about why is it that all this massive funding. I'll give you another example. Copenhagen. Nepal had what? Eight cabinet ministers attending Copenhagen. 600 Nepalese in the delegation. Now you would have thought that Nepal probably had some Nobel Prize winning stuff and climate change to showcase there. Nothing of the sort. It's just that every donor had money, every ministry on climate change unspent money. And what better way to show policy impact than to take the minister on a junket. Now this is what is happening with climate adaptation funding.  Get something more serious going on. Okay. Nepal's consumption of just in the year 2008, 2009. Nepal's consumption of petroleum jumped from 300,000 kilometers per year to 600,000 kilometers. Simply because it was opened up to the import of all these luxurious Pajero's SUVs, cars, and all kinds of private generators and all that. So this is the direction we are going with all this climate adaptation funding. Yes. And with SDGs, now my problem is if that is what happened with MVGs, SDGs are much, much more ambitious. You know, the much, much, you see all those 17 goals, 169 whatever criteria and all that. My problem with the SDGs and climate change is this very simply. First of all, these SDGs have worked in Nepal foreign ministry and finance ministry people called unfunded mandates. There's no money, essentially, you know. So where the money will come from is doubtful. I doubt if with Mr. Trump around there's going to be much money for these kind of things coming at all. Okay. I think Europe and all will be more worried about Syrian refugees and others than far away in Nepal and other countries. It's also politically, my problem is it's so far away 50 years later, you know, with what happens with climate change. Political processes in our countries don't even last 5 years. You know, it's a normal term of a panel. So what happens is, you know, governments last 5 months, 7, 10 months, whatever we have had 25 prime ministers in 25 years. And so to think that the political system can even think of these long term things is impossible. But it makes everybody look nice. You can always say, yeah, yeah, we're thinking about climate change. It makes it look green. It makes you look nice. Without having to really do something about it. Okay. And finally, it sanitizes the politics. It does not address the other drivers. Like, I'll get into a spring while springs are drying across the valley. It's impossible to get any government agency or anything or any donor agency to look at it. So this is where I think there's a lot of problems with the development day. A lot of problems with the industry as it has grown. And there's something serious that needs to be done about it. But we'll talk about it a little bit. Thank you. Well, thank you, Deepak. I was quite enjoying that. And I was waiting for you to continue. But now I have to say a few words. I wanted to try to listen to what you have to say. So I could somehow challenge you on some of those issues. And there seems to be two main points that you brought to us today. One is that the autopsy of aid has failed. That the money invested since the Second World War and the paradigm of a European-centered view world-wide to the developing world has failed. And we need a rethink. I mean, I think it's fair to say that when you look at the projects, global projects, there are indeed many lessons to be learned. And those lessons need to be taken forward. And I believe that the solution to the richer countries supporting the poor countries is not for them to say, entirely, we leave you alone. We have failed. We have had projects. And where is the solution? I'll give you a personal example. I worked on Lake Malawi many years ago. I lived in Malawi for three and a half years. I worked on the lake. I was doing a technical job to do the fisheries project. The job itself was very interesting. The science was terrific. We published lots of interesting papers. Almost all of the team that I worked with went on to get nice jobs and good salaries. But the Malawians, most of the Beaconson and Tanzanians who I worked with, some went back to their institutions, back to their low salaries. And some, because they worked on our project, found their career path in a political way, even one person becoming the ministry of fisheries 20 years later. So the question is, was that a success or was that a failure? That was an aid-funded project. It was funded by the Overseas Development Administration. It was a much higher budget than any science program. A science program would have given, like, one PhD and a little rowing boat and a few bags of ice to preserve the fish. Had to only be small fish caught because it would come from a rowing boat. This program provided a purpose-built vessel from a built in Wales actually. It was actually built by a mining company in Wales. So we were all very concerned that the only thing that mining companies knew about was sinking shafts. So we were very concerned that we would sort of, you know, somehow find a way of going down on our boat. But they built a very nice boat. We did very nice work. The boat was donated to Malawi at the end of the project. And did it improve sustainable fisheries? No, it didn't. I can't say. I don't think it improved the sustainability of fisheries. Should the project have been funded? Should the capacity development infrastructure have been put in? Should the people who were trained, should they have been trained? Should their careers have been fostered? I think the answer to that is probably yes. Where the lessons learned from that scientific program funded by aid in terms of the sustainable fisheries of Malawi into the future, I think the question also is yes. So if you look for absolutes in the aid funding, you will be disappointed. I wonder the problems which I see in hindsight, and I've seen that in many other cases, and some of you may be involved in this, is the short-term nature of the aid pulse. It's a pulse world. We fund, we do nice work, the money dries up, and things either by some sound, they might continue in a sort of de facto way, or they collapse and people go, or sometimes the trained people go off to the private sector. You could argue that is a diffuse capacity development because it helps the economy. So the solution to that example is not that those sort of projects should not be funded, but there has to be a rethink in terms of what is the longer-term view. So rather than having an 8 million pound, as it was or was it even more, pound project in Malawi in between the half years in 1990, maybe it should be an 8 million pound project over 20 years in Lake Malawi, of which 5 million could have been spent in the first three years to get the basis, and then this longer-term funding. So the solution or the problem is not so much the principle of funding. It's the principle of the longer-term governance and view of keep people in positions who are, you have trained, keep them there, keep them going, pay them a reasonable salary and you will get development off the back of that. In the same way, I think Deepak also mentioned that the World Bank, the project of the World Bank had failed, and what I've been struck by the World Bank is the World Bank is a very generous organization. It's particularly generous in the pediums. It dishes out. I was once in a situation, again working on African freshwater, where I ran a meeting in Dublin, West of Ireland actually, and I invited a colleague from one of the partner countries, and I had so much budget. I was on a research project now. I had so much budget. I invited a whole bunch of people.  And I thought that was very generous. I had an individual turner to this meeting with a letter from his, and this is completely true, a letter from his director general reminding me very politely that the going rate for a daily redeem was $220. And so I'm left with a situation, okay, do I say no way, Jose? Or do I cough up the $220 in the interest of diplomacy and politics? I made the decision to cough up the $220, but I was very careful in the future of how I did things. And so there's this distortion. The problem is not so much that the funding is there, and it's not so much that the intention is wrong. It's the way it has been distorted in, for example, the funding regimes and the way that money often dissipates away from the court issues. So there were many, I know very, very, very many nice land goers which were running around the Congo and Zambia and Tanzania funded for a GF project, but not so much to do with the actual nitty-gritty of let's find out what's going on in that length. The money was dissipated for political reasons. It becomes a political process and decoupling that aid budget and that aid, the politics of aid and trying to decouple that from the, that's how we say, the less attractive side of the political process is actually the way that we can disseminate money in a more effective way. I'm currently also, I think we might share this view and I think it is the way to go that increasingly you talked about having the Toadside view or the top-down approach. We fund from the top and we expect things to happen. In a way, we are paternalistic. We know best. We are currently involved and many people in this institute are currently involved working more at the community level. The impact you said you wanted to go to the village but you don't go to the village and you say, okay, what really is happening here? Not what do I think is happening or what would I like to see or believe is happening in order to build that bottom-up capacity at the appropriate level. So the appropriate level is not giving everybody from a village in Uganda an opportunity to do an MSC. It will lead to frustrations. The appropriate level is a little bit of seed funding to enable people in a micro-financing way to invest in their own capacity and it's not a gift. It's a loan. It might be an interest-free loan and it might even be a loan which you accept you may never see any return but the return is within the communities and building that responsibility within the communities to actually take the opportunity and I think aid has suffered in my view too much from this paternalistic view that doesn't give people a responsibility of using that money in the way that they feel fit. There are so many examples of projects being implemented where this is how to do it and this is how to do it if it doesn't take account of the local circumstances, of course it doesn't work and I've seen that many times and there are lots of records on that and there are success stories and success stories are about either local champions or local integrity and taking local ownership to actually build that capacity and to take responsibility and I firmly believe that the aid in the future with or without Mr. Trump needs to build that responsibility in a much more considered way and in a much greater way for example if you look at IHG as an example where we need to build in again this longer term we talk about impact but to have impact you have to act to be engaged for a longer term you can't be engaged in a two year DUC project I think you have impact you need to extend it so I think that's where I would like to see the money shifted I don't have a problem necessarily with reduction in aid per se but I think if we suddenly say we step back and say that gives people ultimate responsibility it's like the Russian roulette game maybe that's the inappropriate term these days to use but it's a Russian roulette where things you leave things to chance and to devade ways of the local political and sometimes the local corrupt or not such good governance so there are some controls and it's more of a guiding hand that I would encourage action aid I interacted with some years ago I thought I had a good model their model was to make themselves redundant we're finishing go ahead their model is to make themselves within a country redundant so they bring in the expertise they're there for a number of years and they are working with in order that at a certain point comes where they can step back and go we don't need to be here anymore and the action aid model from what I can see has generally been a successful one I just round up the thought about Mr. Trump and I think Deepak and I probably agree that we wouldn't want to go for dinner with him necessarily but I think Trump is a disaster for the globe I think he's a disaster for international security a disaster for poverty alleviation because I don't think his policies will cause a chain reaction for people to become more self-reliant I think he would just cut the tap and actually leave people in a dreadful situation for example his cut of of of clinics because of his some of the policies to do with funding so no funding can can lead to family planning that is like regardless of your view of a certain issue if you have such a blunt instrument that you say we are now going to cut all funding to women and to children and to communities because of one component of that funding you will lead to poverty and you will lead to higher mortality and I think Trump will directly lead to an increase in mortality in many parts of the world and that's why I find his policies very disturbing I could talk all night about Mr. Trump I don't necessarily want to but I'll leave it there, thank you I'll ask you to now react and perhaps I'll do a slight suggestion because I think if I take it from what both of you said there are some points of disagreement I think one disagreement or perhaps use a different definition is that Kent is saying yes perhaps it orthodoxy has failed but at the same time many good things have happened and perhaps if I rephrase it what Kent said is if you look at it if you look at the formal system of formal reports the formal system of accountability the formal impact evaluations perhaps results are not that positive but if you look at what happened in the interstitial spaces had those that are not reported but that come through the continuous maintaining of relations in complex networks of funds, people and stories then a lot of interesting things happen and so a slight slanting of the way of looking at development as the maintenance of relations perhaps so that is I think Kent's counter argument then that's one point perhaps that is proved to continue the professional and the other point that is perhaps interesting where I think you really disagree is that Deepak is saying what is totally wrong with the aid system is that it continuously sanitizes politics it leaves politics out and that's where it goes wrong whereas Kent says we need to even further decouple decouple technical aid from politics because when politics enters it becomes dangerous and ineffective so I think perhaps these two points to start out the debate can I interesting I think we will open up this Pandora's box very necessary because I think whether we like it or not he's going to bring this cold turkey thing it's not a good thing I agree with you and it's going to disrupt just about USAID shut down imagine the number of countries they've been working on and this project should be left high and dry already there is a complete we're stepping back nobody in the USAID I know really wants to take any initiative any decision right now because their careers might be it's already shaken and they might go so it is cold turkey but I'm trying to see a silver lining in that because ultimately what happens is that and this is an answer to your second question on the sanitizing the politics what has happened since 1985 we all observe in the mid 80s somewhere in the mid 80s can the stuff that you talked about the technocratic part of aid started when you lost most development agencies USAID, DFID Finita, NANIDA all this sort of stuff they were up to that point still concentrated on development you know and trying to bring development in various ways successful unsuccessful but whatever with structural adjustment what happened was aid started becoming more and more bluntly and instrument of foreign policy and where this was expressed in Nepal's case was that the USAID office in the place called Rabi Baba in the US complex they you know they shut it down they sold off the land and now it's housed within the USMBC now you want to go and talk about an American aid project you know with your manager on fish farm or whatever you can't enter them with your computer you can't enter with your mobile phone you can't enter even the memory stick now if that is how they want to manage securitized aid you know say why are you need business at all in the first place okay so the question the point I have is that I would agree that you know you don't throw out the baby with the bath water what I am looking at is a situation where Trump has already thrown out the baby with the bath water I think this is within the American community but I am not seeing that I am seeing you know sort of a hands up kind of thing most people are just you don't care what do we do now you know what I am arguing is that yes there were success stories there were good ones but the nature of aid also was distorted by the fact that first aid used to come to governments and then you know that shifted in the 80s mostly in the 90s with this Washington consensus that the developed countries decided oh third world governments are corrupt and we don't want to fund them through third world governments we are going to do it through NGOs on the one side and we are going to do it through the private sector now the private sector doesn't exist and what private sector came in the androns of the world remember that company oh yeah you know people blame George Bush for many things but the worst one in India and Nepal happened under Bill Clinton and much of that financing irrigated and left the 2008 crash also happened with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton so we forget that so what happened was and with the NGOs what happened is we well I use an expression you know we got a distinction between service delivery NGOs and activist NGOs unfortunately activist NGOs are getting less and less not just in the south in the north with the maybe exception of a few like Greenpeace and Oxfam to some extent and all that very few but most of them are now just tied to the business of raising funds so you see most NGOs are just more occupied with fund raising than actually getting the work done or actually trying to get some you know serious institutional reform and change happening so what I am arguing is that you know what we should do is you know we should be prepared for what I call the end of the age of aid after the collapse of the Berlin Wall this aid thing that started of the Second World War that age has ended you know to save ourselves a lot of grief women as we will accept that and now talk about how to rethink international cooperation where money and aid pay plays only a small part an important part alright but not the dominating part it has become as an aid industry that we should now talk about the best example in Nepal is you know we talk hydropower and the world banks on the mess with Arun Sri and all but the best work that hydropower was done by a norwegian missionary called or Oxfam who came worked in Nepal and not only that he had capacity building he is a poor country you know we were completely like Japan isolated till 1951 we were completely isolated you know and starting that late with the people like or often who came we manufacture hydro turbines in Nepal they set up some of the best workshop one of the best engineering workshop is in Butwal now where even the Chinese bring their turbines to be in Tibet to be repaired to Nepal is that good but this is all thanks to this crazy norwegian missionary you know who started all this capacity building so it is possible to rethink development around those models and not have it as an instrument of foreign policy of foreign governments forcing this that or the other so I think you know this whole thing about USAID and different coming up with the slogan called doing more with less it sounds so good you know putting more money in third world country having a smaller office in London or Washington it sounds good but no that's bad I say because development is a messy clumsy process you know and it's not just about how much money you push through the bureaucrats in Nepal they love this you know because it gives them a chunk of money and they can play around with it as they like and of course all the corruption and feedback that goes with it what you should have is the Dutch had this volunteer system the Danish had that I was on the advisory board many years ago and they had a wonderful system where volunteers came to work there and they had what was called objective B which I said what is objective B I said doesn't concern Nepalist about Holland or Denmark I said no but I want to know but it turns out that objective B which is forgotten by now is that okay you send a bunch of volunteers to Nepal or wherever to work and they do some good work building schools and all that fine but then objective B says how does that help Holland or Denmark with these guys returning back and becoming better global citizens do you see that yeah but that's lost now that's lost and that's what we should really sort of recover that it's also the developed northern countries that need to be developed in the right way okay very quickly because I want to hear what people have to say and I'm not a very fan of the confi chair panel discussion so I'm pleased that we don't have confi chairs anyway you know what I mean I think there's a solution and I think it is back to activism I think it's about the kickback against the former paradigm which we talk about and you've said and it's the developing world or the global south whatever term you wish to use has been very willing to accept those dollars and you're very willing to accept the conditions of those dollars and even when there is blatant human rights abuses or blatant filtering of funds large funds I might add multi-million funds there are vested interests which keep the flow of money going and I think civil society and the institutions that surround that in the agencies and governments can play a role in kicking back against those dominating forces and I think in India we are beginning to see some of that reaction of civil society going hang on this isn't working very well this is either corrupt or it's not serving the purpose that we want to and if you take an example you mentioned Hydropile Hydropile is a really good example of the good the bad and the ugly and there are good Hydropile schemes and there are ugly Hydropile schemes and there are very dodgy financial laundry of money of Hydropile schemes including in the Mekong Delta and I think that the increasing awareness and for oxfans etc. not just to be money gatherers but to be encouraged through civil society at the local level to build that awareness to actually say what are we receiving what are we doing with the money which is coming and I think there has to be a rethink with Trump I think the last thing I want to say really is the SDGs are an extraordinarily ambitious global endeavor and they have not been imposed they have been negotiated now you can criticize perhaps some of the mechanisms but the principle of engagement this is a global experiment this is the first time this is really and it is now for the citizens of the globe to actually go well hang on this could be if you look at the planet the reasons for the MDGs compared with the SDGs well you look at the reasons for the sustainable development goals compared with the millennium goals it is about the protection of the planet we are going to break our 1.5 degree centigrade barrier pressure above pre-industrial temperature we are going to move beyond that we already have massive thermocross melt and massive methane emissions we are in the 6th extinction the 6th extinction on the globe this one caused by human activity not by meteorite strikes etc so it is when the communication when the citizens of the world actually go well hang on there is something just not right here and we have to fight against disinformation misinformation and downright lies which could also come out of some political entities and through education and through awareness and through little little shall we call them for want of better words soviets that influence everybody else so each one each person in this room can create easily 20 activists easily who are not activists on the street marching but they are activists in terms of saying we have to question what is happening and each of those 20 people who you influence can influence another 20 and so it goes on and then you get a mobilized civil society that can make a difference so that is my hope with the STG that is very nice so I see very nice questions on the table that perhaps are nice to start off the open up debate and those are the calls of both Kenan Deepak actually I think it is something on which we more or less agree and not disagree is a call for rethinking what is international collaboration and rethinking AIDS not in terms of a donor country and a recipient country but in terms of forging international relations of collaboration how to do that and the second one related is how can all of us reclaim this space to become global citizens and articulate all the nice things that and do the nice things that Kenan just said I think those are very nice starting points to engage with many of the things that Deepak and Ken said but feel free also to get to anything else the floor is open Sandra hi, thank you I could be a little bit to set you don't have to the moment I hear you your body actually talk about the STGs I still have the idea that we are talking about only AIDS while in my opinion the sustainable development goals are not just AIDS and they are actually a governmental thing so you can't even split that away from each other these things have not been discussed by AIDS these things are discussed by the governments in the U.S. system to actually hold all countries to these goals and not just development countries not golden and actually a lot of developed countries will also not be they will fail in a lot of these kind of things especially for example on climate change I think I missed a lot in the points you made I was kind of curious I don't want to give the impression for one second that I think the STGs are only about AIDS they are certainly not they are about responsibility and about a recognition of the things that we need to fix at every country I wonder a thing that I like about the STGs over the MDGs that it's not only targeted to the poor and the developing world and to the global south it's actually targeted to every country so each and every country has its targets and has its responsibilities and what I see the aid connection is that the aid funds can be used to facilitate some of the STG mechanisms and the aid perhaps in the not too distant future we have to seriously consider actually funding some of the targets that the STGs have laid out so for Nepal or something maybe somebody has to go actually in terms of an ecosystem service to use a termite we need to look after some of those glaciers and some of those rivers in Nepal because that's to everybody's benefit and so I see a sophistication I don't see it as a separate thing at all can I pick up something you said this activism that's the key I think if STGs are going to succeed they're not going to succeed because of how governments did this and how they fulfilled it they're going to succeed if there is activism that holds governments accountable this is a wonderful thing to me just for one reason I can catch the government by the throat and say you signed up to this damn thing what have you done and so that's where now fail activism this is going to be a meaningless thing because lots of things are going to fail there like we just mentioned that not the country is already failing on their emissions we are already failing on how many other things but that activism this is the challenge I have before academia actually not just in the south but also in the north we are we produce PhDs and masters and all such things but then the question has to be asked you do these very fancy you know learn fancy tools and do all these fancy things so why are you doing this what do you hope to do with it 20 years from now yeah some of us will learn a lot of money doing consulting or something of that sort but that really cannot be the goal that really cannot be the goal because you have to go back to relate to your society as you see it either at the local level or at the global level you know and feel the passion so if that passion is missing and activism is driven by passion of how strong do you feel certain things and it's helped by intellectual rigor if there is and my complaint with a lot of the activists in India and Nepal is you know it's all hard and very little head so put a little bit of head also and it helps okay so but if that happens then these things can be meaningful but I'm not seeing that not seeing that at all that's a challenge in all of the US wait awesome I'll meet you I mean these are enormous goals so pay to achieve and all the government is too early to achieve these but these are very complex these are very complex to achieve and these are mechanisms for monitoring but because of that there is a lot of confusion whatever is done in the name of investment or other frustrations is linked to STG by for example I gave you a lot of childhood lots of investment is being by between Pakistan and that's being linked to STG because it's so hard to find it so you can link it with us easily but then it can come with a lot of costs as well for example look at the investments in Africa and then governments do welcome these kind of investments I mean they have side of these goals but still they welcome these kind of investments at the cost of the environment but they have to show the progress and that's what we are showing it I can see it in there's a big investment coming in Pakistan building from Kashgar from the south all the infrastructure so the danger with these kind of goals is that they are ambitious but then it's very hard to really judge or stop things that can affect society in a negative way I mean there are really these are good goals but there are lots of challenges that's my point I would like to see that Can I respond? See you guys are well in point my argument is that if you look at Kyoto Protocol for instance and I have a colleague who is going to build a chapter in the book I also have a chapter called Clumsy Solutions for a complex word where he argues that the title is very provocative it says is Kyoto Protocol merely useless or positively harmful and the argument is positively harmful why because without that critical activism what happened was it was completely confined to what I choose to call procedural fetishism it was all procedures now I give an example in Nepal we should have been to address climate change issues forget Kyoto, forget Copenhagen, forget Paris we should have been cutting down our fossil fuel use and going for hydro and solar like there was going tomorrow unfortunately because of Kyoto and because of all these things what happened was even rather than going and building these things on a no regret scenario building hydro or building solar would not really harm there is a no regret part to it we just wait maybe we will get some money from clean development mechanism which never came so we lost 20 years so this is where there is a danger that without the activism you might end up putting you are getting lost in procedural fetishism rather than something substantive and so the academic community has to be I think more critical now not just accepting all this even the goals have to be challenged constantly to put people on their toes ok, touch up I want to say two things the first one is that when we talk a little bit about activism and when we look at like world bank projects other development projects as having been accepted or the money I think aren't we being a little bit anachronic because there has been a lot of activists in the 70s and 80s there have been huge resistance to water world bank projects not only on hydro power but you know the big privatization projects in the 90s I don't think that there there's always been activism that it's also of course caught in the dynamic of finding funding but I don't think all of it has been caught I don't know I think it's a bit anachronistic to think oh we need more there has always been activism resistance to development at any price the second thing is that like what I said what makes me very suspicious about the sustainable development goals it's that well there is a focus on social and cultural rights rights like instead of reducing the qualities distribution or historical reparations it's completely out it is already very sanitized it is already very before it is sized so I don't see how that is going to change like the status quo or the big inequalities that are making things to go as business as usual two small things one is that I think we can think of activism yes the protests the Green Creek protests you know logging the protests that you are familiar with and you are referring to and of course there has been activism in a very focused political way actually and in a very antagonistic way and I think what I would like to see is a greater lower level activism but in a much broader way this isn't everybody's interest it can't then be hijacked by large corporations for example there is a current court case of a large logging company which is suing Greenpeace for activism in Canada now if the corporation wins Greenpeace could actually be more or less shut down because the money is so large that they've been sued for so the idea then is to say what's the root of this problem the root of this problem actually is because people buy books and if people buy the book say well we don't want to use the paper that's used from it becomes a much more lower and it becomes an economic activism and that has an impact and if you've been following some of the American politics recently which I have become almost obsessed with I'm afraid you see where you know actually things happen because people withdraw their economic support suddenly people who make out on cable news program suddenly get moved because advertisers go well actually this isn't good business so there's different levels of activism engagement maybe engagement is a better word and it's a sort of intelligent engagement and I think the other thing which we have to be careful of is just when we think about reaction to economic systems which you touch on and the redistribution of wealth which you touch on which we recognize as a problem this is not like it or you know whether you like it or not this is not how the capitalist functional world operates and so one has to engage with the capitalist paradigm in order to address this which is a very difficult thing because it's a sort of the market process which in the neoliberal world is not going to help poor people so this is what has to be engaged with in an intelligent way and so there's some very nuances here I think I need to know this is probably sorry I don't know your names so go ahead my question is what do you think about sanctions and still the case if you said like in Nepal you said you should have been already built lots of like solar projects over on congress but because of these aides coming in the future so people but whatever what if there are sanctions you also mentioned Q2P now it's over in India but sanctions in what sense sanctions in terms of conditions but not how much is your name maybe who? I'm Iranian okay so the people here saw because of sanctions because they said okay we're not buying your oil anymore and then our government step back and say whatever you want the discussion this week which has just started as far as I can talk and see which is about sanctions against the US what do you mean producers so Europe can say to the US well actually it's all very well Donald saying we're not going to support you on the article 5 of the nature of treaty which if you are familiar with that and the reaction if you have been following this this is very dramatic week because Merkel from Germany actually says well we cannot rely on the US anymore effectively that's what she said back to Truman this is 70 years of a US-Europe alliance actually being shattered in one week and what are the reactions to do because you know Merkel first isn't going to be a Merkel first if trade with the rest of the world is sanctioned so maybe there's a way of doing sanctions in a very sort of different sort of way than traditionally we've reviewed I have problems with sanctions I mean I'm not sure that the Iran thing really worked because of the sanctions I think there were some other forces at work pragmatism on both sides that said you know this can't go on now I had an argument with the Swedish diplomat on this you know the sanction of Russia I said Russia is just too big a country to sanction they can survive in 300 years of selling timber but I said sanctions don't work I said I'm not talking Iran I'm not talking Russia I'm not even saying I'm talking Cuba you know right off the American coast they've sanctioned them for 50 years and Mr. Castro was just you know hell and hearty right till the end it didn't work so it required America to go back and say we need to do some other engagement so I think it's engagement that produces better results than sanctions sanctions have a hope I think especially when the Americans they think that just because they try to sanction things it doesn't work people live there if I just sanctioned that it's someone who would do name I don't know I'm sorry you like what you're doing nothing I know but I didn't do it in order no I have some some different ideas but in minor sanctions I think the failure of the development we should not direct you to the the total analysis I think the failure is because some reason behind is like the weakness of the government and the mentality of the the local people as well as the government and third point what I want to highlight is how the development is designed in terms of the sustainability and the ownership there are some cases like in terms of the weakness of the government they have to force the analysis like oh this is our vision so you have to invest your money best on our reasons so this is our master class but even the weakness of the government is like they are dead master class so they can live in first and then they are dead master class very weakness of the government so that's what I've seen I know what I have in minor sanctions like the design how they design the projects the failure is on that there is a few example I would like to give a word about projects it is already 30 years and it's still sustainable it's a donor for the project and it was a demand different process so it's not forced by the analysis it was demanded by the local community so it should be like that it should be a demand driven process and what they they incorporate one component in the design process like what they did it was a community based process and they make a community the president of the community member they make the person who lives on the downstream side of the community the person who has a house in that tell India that project so he has to be very active with the operation and the maintenance of the project otherwise you have no water in the house and that project is a demand driven project and it's sustainable for more than 30 years my quick answer to this is yeah if projects have been designed I've always maintained that when you have blame has to be approached I always say that 60% of blame has to come to us because we ultimately agreed to this nonsense and 40% maybe to the external donors and all that again you can debate whether it is 60, 40, 40, 60 whatever but I'll tell you one thing the southern governments are not as powerless as made out there's a brilliant PhD thesis I partly supervised that out of the University of Helsinki by a girl called Elia Heinenin and University of Helsinki you can get that in the water supply schemes in Nepal and the policy changes it's one of the most brilliant thesis I've read because you know she shows that how southern bureaucrats, Nepali bureaucrats could run rings around the World Bank and USAID and everything and get what they wanted even local governments they could do that, it's brilliantly cataloged she's done that so the question is that if projects have been designed interventions have been designed bottom up towards AI demand driven, call it what you will many instances I can show you where they have worked but unfortunately we are talking about these global kind of designs where yes, there was some consultation but then you find out that that consultation never went below the national government level and as a result I'm not really hopeful that even if the money comes through which is number 17 I don't think it will come through at all but even if it does there's a good chance that this kind of running of rings around donors are bureaucrats the past masters and they have seen all this proof the water supply I was just going to make a point about sanctions that in my experience reading about them they always seem to affect the wrong people they affect the children so that's very much against them a couple of other points you were talking about activism at a sort of grassroots level which in theory I think is great I'm certainly like the idea of not always preaching to the converted because all this at this level is always engaging the same people who probably are often thinking with their hearts also intelligent people but they are often academics or intellectuals but getting to the people at grassroots level is hard and also holding governments to account is a luxury in the democracy that's the only country certain A, the information is not available but B, if you were to write a blog about it for God's sake you wouldn't be able to see the next day so there are these huge odds to close that thing that's that all about the world governance or whatever that is that's going to be a huge challenge it's a huge challenge my concern and this came out previously also you know also the stuff you said is I'm not as optimistic as you are yes there is activism but unfortunately I've seen that in the activism of the 80s and the 90s was the high point in a global sense I'm talking about somewhere towards the 21st century yes we still have there's one good activist in Nepal life you know but most of these guys they've been co-opted completely they're not just co-opted in a financial sense they're also co-opted intellectually and as a result they are not in the critical mode that they should be most activists should be on the critical mode that's their their religion that's what they should be doing but most of them are turning out to be cheerleaders for any program the donor brings about we had a horrible case in Nepal once when the USAID announced that they had money for aid awareness and overnight 27 age years were registered that just did exactly and most of them you found out were relatives of the government secretaries and all that you know this is the kind of nonsense that's going on so activism is dying because there's too much pursuit of money and I really love to see more activists who are not really who are motivated by something else some other calling rather than this and to blame and this is where I blame the donors now that the co-optation of the age years happened so brilliantly and so horribly we've lost some of the best journalists you know who are very critical writers and you say where are they now and you find out some are working for different and some are working for USAID they're no longer writing critical pieces anymore they made a name by that but then they got co-opted it happened to USAID professors in a part of the world because more than teaching they are all running around doing projects for different donors a hard day seen in class this is going on so this is where the problem arises and this is where when the challenge gets much bigger and when Mr. Trump looms on the horizon there is really nothing countering him I am not seeing that intellectual counter my Berkeley professors I got a long response to the radical of mine on why Trump is good for technology he said yes yes activism starting I said no it hasn't started yet yes you spent your frequent flyer miles to send a PhD student to Washington DC on that science marks or something yeah but that's yeah it's good but that's hardly enough I mean your force is coming out now out of the woodworks when you have an oil company chief that's a state secretary and US State department is under him now can I go to the USAID even with a kind of proposal of social justice so this is where the problem is and so it's for the academic community I think really where some real intellectual criticality has to come out oh and I also don't know I am Lisa from the ISS I just wanted to add to that I think we as researchers actually have a responsibility to be scholar activists as well that's really a concept that we've discussed a lot in the ISS where researchers move beyond just research into practice where they co-create solutions with communities instead of just studying them so I think that maybe adds to the kind of engagement that we as intellectuals make but one of the observations that I've also made from my own research is that activism is also relying down because of distrust in democratic mechanisms that are not functioning in developing countries and where people protest but they see no difference and maybe I can just illustrate what's happening in South Africa which is when my research is focused is that there's a big drought and basically what happened in small towns is that the crisis were handled very badly and the water systems collapsed completely and the water supply system was cut off in more than six months but I really expected some form of protest or conflict when I went to three research sites but there was nothing people just accepted it and I went on and I think that kind of political apathy really comes from distrust in the government so I don't know what one would get communities to become active given that I think you've touched on something which is really very fundamental and I don't have a solution to it unfortunately but I think you've touched on something very fundamental and it's what is it and it's like it's a research question in a way what is it that makes communities so passive in those situations and it's not just South Africa I can tell you an anecdote from where there was a town in the west of Ireland a large town actually which had a cryptosporidium in the water so cryptosporidium was contaminating water supply so the water supply of the city was actually shut down to months and a large water company made a huge amount of money by selling their bottled water at half price in big containers during that period there was the water framework directed policy of the European policy which had public participatory it had stakeholder workshops and it had a public participation workshop in the centre of this city of which I think 33 people turned up so this was in the middle of a city of you know an affluent city where people couldn't drink the water for months and yet 33 people went to the water policy stakeholder meeting so that empathy I think isn't true because you are right and there is an environment where people can voice their opinion and they don't voice their opinion and I think that's a hugely important question this is a subject that in the kind of social science I do call culture theory you have four organizing styles you have bureaucratic hierarchism market individualism, egalitarian activism and you have fatalism voter and consumer this is together now each one of the other three are trying to influence that fatalist crowd to do things and accept them according to what they want the market wants them to continue buying products the government wants them to continue following unfair laws but it's up to that activist egalitarian community to really educate and sort of incite them but what is happening in South Africa I have reminded of my own country there comes a point in a country's kind of history where there is a sense of betrayal by the intellectual community by the political class that's all right now you had a Maoist insurgency now Maoist insurgency gives a very different standard we know so very well but the plan is that has led to a lot of that resentment so when you try to talk political activism people just look at you and say which party did you come from are you another con man that's come by, we've seen enough of them so tasks can become very very difficult and this is even globally true also that's that's first hand moment and then Tatyana and then perhaps your last word thanks for the last place we were talking a lot about activism and it has still come down but why is it activism? there was a question in the 80s and 90s there was a peak and it came down my hypothesis is that big guys have become so self centered we somehow feel that there is nothing to fight for my grandfathers were fighting for independence my father was a social justice but now that I have everything what should I fight for? I don't really see the need that I really have to go to the street and fight half or something and even if I ask for something I don't get it so if I refuse twice I don't go and ask for it twice that happens at the institute and that happens everywhere so what is it that's this with the question about citizenship and the solidarity because somehow we feel that we are all small islands even though we are connected we don't really see the need to go on a night in the street I don't know how you see that but this is what I think Mr. Trump is so good he is forcing people on people like you in America would never think of activism even people who are consultants they are all up in arms I said good I haven't seen this for a long time maybe nothing will come out of it but hopefully you know you will get the American civil society activist community now coming back to react because this guy is such a you know blow to everything and inventing new forms of activism so we don't know and it has happened in every society in its own way because every society has gone through its own kind of history and that history determines a lot of the trust it determines a lot of politics Tatiana you want to say something to her? No, I just want to be a little bit a party pooper party pooper and I really believe I really mistrust this narratives about apathy about apathy about how it's activated people so they will become activists I think that when you stay in a place like long enough or I think there are different ways of activists that are going on and perhaps communities will be very worried to be like related to communists or whatever but they will engage in activism in other ways by voting for one or the other flex and wicked I just don't like oh this is happening to them and they don't react they are so apathetic I think that's also I think that is a little bit naive of course there has been something but it just it was just them I think the examples we've heard I witnessed an example that you've given to South Africa that would appear on the face of it to be quite an apathetic response to something which is not people's interest of course there are other situations where people, communities mobilize at all different levels and on one hand you look at South Korea in the last six months where people fill the streets until the prime minister went and well you're right so activism of course but it's on so many different scales but standing those scales I think is the point I was making not that we are saying oh everybody is so apathetic I didn't actually say that I used I picked up on one example and I showed another example but then we hear also of people mobilizing and what I said earlier was there are different levels of activism it doesn't have to be on the streets it can be in a different multitude of types a typology of activism maybe not a typology but you do it many do you want to say something yeah okay and this has been an interesting discussion we all in our own society face different problems some diamond problems justice problems whatever and I think it has to be rethought but at the global level there are also certain emerging common concerns that are coming out now the question to me is again addressed to the world the academic community and this is this that if you have a wicked problem a wicked problem can only be addressed or tackled through what we choose to call uncomfortable knowledge our mantra is wicked problems uncomfortable knowledge clumsy solutions uncomfortable knowledge probably got you into the problem with the first place textbook engineering or whatever so you have to be the academic community has to be more active itself in generating uncomfortable knowledge that will make governments unhappy north and south that will make funding agencies unhappy or not unfortunately what is happening is much of the research agenda is being defined by the funding available the real problem is coming out and in the funding also I am finding out I am getting more and more irritated as I get older and I find less reason to collect you have very bright people in these funding agencies who I call gatekeepers they didn't like it when I had to say this I said there is something called gatekeeping so they are there they got their PhDs and all that but rather than sitting and doing actual research they are sitting there judging the research of other what can be funded and what cannot be funded I call them gatekeepers there is a brilliant American professor he is Iranian I will try to recall his name I will come in a second but he is like a brilliant book about the sociology of intellectuals Max Weber and the sociology of intellectual and he defines this gatekeeping function he calls it the sacrifice of intellect so people who have got brilliant PhDs rather than going out and doing their own research doing their own stuff there go and join some funding agency and then become gatekeepers you are a professor you submitted the sorry your research can't be funded I think you have experienced that I have experienced that you have and this is to be really really this gatekeepers we have a system we are now defining a global system in the north and the south where you don't even trust your own professors you don't even trust your own senior bureaucrats and you have so many rules and regulations and these gatekeepers are in charge really it's timing critical you know research so I am arguing that what we really need to do is pluralize the voices in the table get more more voices heard and I conclude by saying that we really need to worry about 3 types of innovation unfortunately when we talk innovation we only talk of technical innovation no technical innovation the market is really good at governments don't do technical innovations but governments also have to innovate in the sense that to address new challenges brought about by internet whatever you need to innovate with new management systems not technical and that is not happening with many of the governments and others but then that is not sufficient you also need in the egalitarian community in the activist community you need innovation which we call behavioral innovation because these are behavioral changes and new systems and assertion of justice and things like that define what the value system is so these 3 types of innovation I am really worried about I am not seeing that 2 others coming out I am seeing a lot of fancy iPads and iPods and also the things technical innovation coming out where is the behavioral innovation coming where is the management innovations coming out that is not happening so this is where I see the problem okay what last word for Ken I don't want to I just wanted to give this opportunity because one of the things I was mentioned in the discussion was engagement produces better results and I am wondering whether you want to see a 4 minute and 16 second video about which is you may have seen this already I saw it this week for the first time and I thought this actually when we talk about Trump and we talk about the difficulties of the world and this is not a bad little snippet to make us think and it goes back to Ostrom I think the famous social scientist who if I am right you will know better than me her principle was when people are really antagonistic of course each other getting them in a room to talk is always a good idea and I saw that myself from Ireland and I saw that in Northern Ireland where the fractions who were killing each other actually eventually started to speak to each other and over 20 years or 10 years this back room talking actually had an impact so you may have seen this and by the way I hate Heineken I want to say that it's not an ad for Heineken so before you start just because it's very close to the closing words that I have in mind is that I like the discussion about activism and engagement and I think it's very good to think about it also in not just in terms of marching the streets and protesting but also in finding the spaces finding the spaces where there is room for negotiation there is so much pressure on all of us to comply and no more questions no I have an answer okay there is so much pressure on all of us we know this to comply, to go with the system to make careers to do the comfortable knowledge and to to tell donors what they want to hear to tell governments what they want to hear but there are also only spaces there are spaces, sometimes there are small sometimes there are bigger and we can make them bigger and sometimes we can change the throwing the revolution but sometimes it's in these spaces where you can actually make a difference so go ahead a small video, I think this is a very that's before the video I think it was wonderful it was a very good start of the PhD seminars and I hope to have many more okay, thank you Bapit stop it was safe so in Netherlands they have an sg cafe where groups come together look for action so if you are interested ask me and I can get very contact with that but that's for Dutch sg campaigns but well it would still be interesting to get to know about or try and change I think that's how these people go I'm going to describe the life of the physical fears about the new crime I'm going to say that now I think it's a tiny I think that's how these people go of the handle problems that actually exist it's actually the most important casting but I don't know what's special I don't know what you're doing I don't know what you're doing I'm always facing my head that seems funny it's like what it's like to be invited to okay, frustrating dedicated to being needed lucky, ambitious attentive someone might have asked you else strong, upset, tax misunderstood named three things you and I haven't gone for 10 minutes sure, you seem quite ambitious and positive and it's really got to go I'm sensing a few or a million feet people have said that but there is no history about you then if she makes ministry I'm very proud of you already overall a bit of a rough state I've experienced homelessness I don't know what it's like to have absolutely nothing so you're definitely most grateful just for life we don't expect what I think we'll listen to me and we'll update the description below then I'll get you to tag out with that let's go we'll check we'll just stay right there let's go to the log let's sit on it let's go to the log attention, please don't stand towards your short film so it has been today it's definitely an excuse for missing dreams the climate change is destroying the world and I'd say that is so difficult so try to not stand up to understand or see things over I am I am now on the choice you may go we'll stay in the description of differences over a billion I love you Trigga but you wouldn't seem to convince people I'm your employee with the productive things you need to you're an age I've been brought up in a way that's back on my but my distance back on my yeah okay, you're touched I'll be texting another girl so do you start with the view cut I'll keep going