Cover Story
The five billion dollar woman
by Ruth Laugesen
Helen Clark talks about her new UN job, tackling poverty, and leaving Parliament after 27 years.
They say all political careers end in failure. But Helen Clark has cheated political death and emerged from the rubble of her prime ministership with a supersized new career.
From leading a nation of four million, she is now confronting the challenge of making a difference to the lives of the so-called “bottom billion”, the world’s poorest.
When Clark, 59, starts work in New York later this month as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, her brief will extend well beyond the UNDP’s US$5 billion budget. During her four-year term she will also chair the UN Development Group, an umbrella group for the 33 UN agencies, funds and departments that play a role in development around the globe.
Clark will face not just a change in the size of her job. She will go from leading a governing system known for its ability to act quickly and yank levers fast to being a top player at one of the most intractable and unresponsive bureaucracies on the planet.
Her transition will be much like putting an adrenalin-charged racing driver at the helm of a slow-moving ox. And a blundering ox at that.
The UNDP is criticised for the hugely variable delivery of aid across 166 countries, where it relies on local representatives. In some countries, the UNDP representatives are hard-working and effective, and the aid projects they oversee make a difference. But in too many, the representatives are corrupt, inefficient or in the thrall of the host government, meaning precious funds are wasted.
Clark clearly hopes she won’t be mired in the way some of her predecessors have been. She is signalling that she has a mandate from her backers and from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to go in with a fresh approach, and to push reform if necessary. And as anyone who has followed New Zealand politics for the past decade knows, if anyone has the drive, intellect and bravura to forge a new path, it is this farmer’s daughter from the Waikato.
The UN bureaucracy is such a quagmire, notorious for inefficiency and the slow pace of change. What attracted you to that environment?
I’m attracted to being in the leadership of an organisation. I’m never attracted to being immersed in the middle or lower levels of a bureaucracy.
We’re in the middle of an inter-national recession, which has devastated living standards for the poorest people, we’ve got the climate change challenges, we’ve had last year’s spike in food prices, which was devastating for poor people and developing countries.
So, I pitched my candidacy as having the background in leadership and advocacy to be able to articulate that case when it comes to discussing how to tackle these issues.
Such as the climate change talks [UN Conference on Climate Change] at the end of the year in Copenhagen. The developing countries’ needs are going to have to be paramount.
Because whether we can bring -developing countries into the framework will make or break our efforts to deal with the climate change problem. That’s going to mean funding, and it’s going to mean technology transfer.
People have the right to development. But can we make that development possible with a lower carbon footprint? That’s going to mean a tremendous amount of support from Western countries.
Advocacy for developing countries to develop with a low carbon footprint, and also to get support for adaptation and mitigation is going to be absolutely critical.
In your bid for the UNDP job, you could easily have fallen between two stools. You weren’t from one of the big donor countries, and you weren’t from one of the developing countries. But you ended up getting support from both camps, even though there is said to have been a strong Third World candidate in the running. Why do you think you were able to overcome those obstacles?
I think the case that I made about the need for leadership won the day. There was no other former head of government presenting themselves for it. And the people who backed me backed me because they believed that was what the organisation needed. And also they knew me.
In order to get the support of some of the big donor countries, what did you tell them in terms of assuring them that aid is going to be spent in an accountable way?
It hasn’t been a discussion conducted at that level. The critical thing that developed countries and developing countries were looking for was someone who could give the organisation a bit of profile, bring a bit of energy, dynamism. When I first noticed the tiny news item about this coming up, I sounded it out first with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
They said, “You’d be terrific at that”, and it sort of rolled on from there. They said, “You can get buy-in from very significant players.” And then I had scarcely got my feet on the ground back in New Zealand from being away five and a half weeks when the Norwegian Prime Minister, a personal friend, whom I’d had brunch with earlier in the month, was on the phone to me. “Helen, you should do this!”
It was that I was someone they knew, respected, had worked with, and I was available.
Does that search for a leadership person by the UN suggest a change of gear for the UNDP?
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