PND: In what ways has the context changed?

JHL: September 11 reminded everyone of the essential inter-connectedness of our circumstances. The attacks showed with shocking clarity that the circumstances of people halfway around the world can have a direct impact on our daily lives. In particular, we now can see much more clearly that chronic conditions of deprivation and discrimination in remote areas of the world provide fertile ground where terrorism can take root and develop the capacity to reach globally. In a way, this awakening to our shared fate has created a new opportunity and urgency for those of us who believe that much more can be done to increase efforts to engage a broad cross-section of individuals and organizations to address these circumstances. This is where the involvement of the private sector will be key. Bringing a permanent end to global terrorism will require not just the military defeat of terrorist groups that have a global reach, but also a pooling of the world's strengths, ingenuity, and resources to help create capable societies able to deal with the underlying issues that permit terrorists to exploit the vulnerable.

PND: Economic globalization and market capitalism have been in ascendance since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Yet in many respects — the number of people living in poverty, the environment, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the rise of global terrorism — conditions in the developing world seem as bleak as ever. What can private philanthropy, which represents just a tiny fraction of the global GDP, do to change any of this?

JHL: You know, our age is marked by a number of ironies. One of them is that never before has so much good been so possible for so many of the world's people, while at the same time never before has the destructive power of weaponry been as great, never before has the precariousness of the global environment been as apparent, never before have the effects of disease pandemics and economic deprivations been so transportable.

In other words, it's no longer possible to understand and address local problems as merely local. Many of the problems we now face — international conflict, environmental degradation, chronic poverty, and so on — have the capacity to spread on a regional and even global basis, and to bring profoundly destabilizing effects with them. That's the reality we now face. So if the question is, "What can philanthropy do about these enormous global problems," the answer is something, but not nearly enough.

But that's true no matter who's looking for solutions to the problem, whether it's government or international organizations or the private sector. So the question then becomes, "What can we do collectively to solve these problems, and what comparative advantages does private philanthropy have in dealing with these problems?" And one of those advantages, in my view, is that it possesses a certain agility that governments do not. Governments, by their nature, reflect — or should reflect — the social adjudication of priorities with regard to the allocation of resources to deal with those priorities. Private philanthropies, on the other hand, can pick and choose their priorities because they're answerable only to their boards and to others whom they identify as stakeholders in their work.

Private philanthropy can also identify problems, can shape debates and frame options in a way that gives them a salience they might not otherwise have. And that's a critical role. But it's not enough. In order to have maximum effect and leverage, private philanthropy needs to partner with public-sector entities, and vice versa, to ensure that good ideas get implemented and that the follow-through required for those ideas to succeed actually happens.

PND: How important are partnerships to the work of the UN Foundation, and what is the foundation doing to bring more people and organizations, as well as different types of organizations and resources, to the table?

JHL: Partnerships are essential to our work. We're really intent on changing the way the world does business in this regard, which is to say we're interested in taking the message of the importance of public-private partnerships and disseminating it as widely as we can, using whatever leverage we've developed over the past four and half years. It's a deep conviction of ours, and we try to act on it in several ways, while keeping in mind that this is an evolving practice for us and that there's not a lot of precedent to follow.

So, what are we doing? We're opening dialogues with funding partners familiar with the UN system, or, if they're not familiar with the UN system, familiar with international giving, or, if they're not familiar with international giving, are just interested in the kinds of problems and challenges we face in our international work. We also do it by telling the UN story and by exposing an ever-wider audience to the value that the UN and its various funds, agencies, and programs add to the different areas in which we work. And we do it by opening up opportunities for people to partner with us — opportunities that are largely created through project development within each of our program areas. In the area of women and population, for example, we focus on the reproductive health of adolescent girls. In the area of children's health, we focus on the immunization of young children. In the environmental area, we focus on biodiversity and climate change. And in the area of peace, security, and human rights, we focus on preventing the spread and renewal of mass violence.

Again, our partnerships involve entities that are familiar with both international work and the work of the UN — the government of Canada, the government of Great Britain, the government of the United States, and so on. But we've also gone beyond the public sector and partnered on specific projects with a range of other foundations, including the MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Hewlett Foundation, and, of course, the Gates Foundation.

We've also worked to create opportunities for private individuals to give to specific projects. And we partner with corporations like Coca-Cola and Estee Lauder and with international institutions like the World Bank. It goes back to the vision Ted Turner had when he established the foundation, which is a vision of personal wealth being pooled with the resources of other wealthy individuals and countries to meet the needs of the world's needy and, at the same time, to open up a broader range of resource-sharing possibilities for the UN.

PND: Can we ever hope to solve the chronic problems we see in the developing world without first initiating a major institution-building effort in most of those countries?

JHL: You know, there's an old saying that goes, "Nothing about us without us." I think for a long time now the international community has approached the development problem and efforts to alleviate chronic poverty at a kind of remove from the people and leaders who are actually dealing with these circumstances and crises. But I also think that's changing. We certainly saw that in Monterrey [at the UN-hosted International Conference on Financing for Development], and it's changing in terms of the sensibility of the development community, which has been on the frontlines of the struggle with these problems for a long time.

Institution-building, capacity-building, really begins with human capacity. Are people's basic needs — their health needs, their ability to earn a decent living and get a decent education, their ability to live free of fear — secured? This is a much more fundamental issue than the health or sustainability of institutions, which exist, after all, to help broker the social relationships of individuals who come together to form a community. And I think what we're seeing is that, for a large number of the world's people, individual circumstances are more dire than those of the institutional structures that have been created to improve the circumstances of individuals.

It's a roundabout way of answering your question, but what I think we've developed at the UN Foundation, and it's by no means novel to us, is the ability to see all the dimensions of the problem. To see the circumstances of the individual human being, as well as the strengths of the institutions within specific societies and countries that are working to improve those circumstances. And against that kind of backdrop, we consider the appropriate role of outsiders — outsiders being not only the private philanthropies that largely exist in the northern hemisphere, but also the governments and governmental institutions in the developing countries themselves.

PND: Were you encouraged by what came out of the Monterrey conference? And what, in your view, are the three or four most important next steps the international community should take to address the problem of global poverty?

JHL: I think anyone who's been in the field for a while has to be encouraged by what they saw in Monterrey, both in terms of certain specifics as well as in the response of the Bush administration. Cynics may say the administration's announcement, just prior to Monterrey, that it would increase U.S. development assistance by $10 billion over the next three years was a hollow gesture, but I think it certainly is evidence of the administration's determination to engage in a meaningful way in finding solutions to the problem. I also think it's important that we not overlook the fact the people are beginning to recognize — and are saying in public — that the dire economic circumstances that many people and states find themselves in really is, in large measure, an issue of governance. And that we cannot afford to distance ourselves from the problems of governance that exist in many developing countries where chronic poverty and despair have persisted for so long.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that the problems of governance, while they may be most acute for the world's poorest countries, are something that no government is immune from. Clearly, the very nature of governments and governance is changing. I mean, governments historically have dominated three areas: the control of lethality, the control of capital, and the control of rule-making. But increasingly, governments are losing the power to control those domains.

PND: Losing power to whom?

JHL: That's the interesting question. And the answer to it is also the reason why the context for so much of everyone's work has changed. Governments are not losing that power to opaque international institutions — you know, the unelected bureaucracies with the black helicopters lurking over the horizon that the truly paranoid are always talking about. They're losing it, instead, to the private sector. In many countries around the world, private armies are far more significant and capable of organizing lethal force than official government institutions; Colombia, for example. In many cases, private capital is a far more significant force than public monies. As we all know, there are many individuals around the word who have accumulated more wealth than entire countries, and it's easier than ever to secure that wealth beyond the reach of governments. And finally, we're seeing that people can band together, both internally and across national boundaries, to impose rules on others in spite of the preferences of major states; the landmine phenomenon is just one example of this.

So what we're seeing is the growing power of the private sector in at least these three areas — there are probably others — which, in turn, may reflect the emerging awareness, in a global context, of the individual human being as a political actor with standing. And that is something that must be taken account by anyone who is looking at the challenge of governance. No government is immune from these trends. And so the question is, "Can the resources that exist in the private sector continue to be excluded, by default, if not by design, from efforts to engage in finding solutions to social problems? How do we bring those resources into the equation in sensible, non-distorting ways and really make progress in pooling the world's strengths in order to share the world's burdens?" The UN Foundation is an experiment in the conviction that we can answer that question positively.

PND: You alluded to the rise of private individuals as players on the world stage. Are you talking about "super-empowered individuals," to use New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's phrase? Or do you have a different group in mind?

JHL: I'm talking about the average individual. I'm talking about the accumulation of developments, in different areas, over the past century. I mean, the human rights agenda has been kicking around for at least a hundred years. And what we're seeing is the slow but steady accretion of rights; it's not a perfect record, it's not an even record, but look at how far we've come. Sovereigns that once ruled without accountability are now being held to account — by their own people and, increasingly, by the world community. Pinochet and Milosevic are just two examples.

Similarly, people are emerging with rights and the means to assert those rights. Again, the record is imperfect, but we can see, with the emergence and dominance of markets, that private regulation is occupying ever more economic space where public regulation used to rule the day. In fact, what we're discovering is that there are certain economic realities that you simply can't regulate. And so what's far more interesting to me for our work is the importance, the emerging importance, of the individual human being — only a few of whom may stand out from the crowd but who nevertheless have more and more of the power.

PND: What is your advice to the average American who cares about these kinds of issues but looks at the enormity of the problem and says, "Well, what difference will my twenty-five dollars make?"

JHL: You know, there's a wonderful poem called "For Want of A Nail": "For want of a nail, the war was lost; for want of a war, the nation was lost...." I mean, there are so many stories about the presidential election in the United States last year, what a difference one or two votes here or there made. Or, ask somebody what a second means, what an hour means, what a lifetime means.

As responsible citizens, we have two obligations. One is to know what's going on, to be informed in order to make wiser choices. And the second is to do what you can with what you have. Nobody can do it all by themselves, but we all can do what we can. People just have to ask themselves the question, "Am I doing what I can?" And if you're satisfied with answer, then okay. I mean, there's no golden standard, no ten-percent test for the meaningful contribution.

PND: When you look ahead over the next decade or so, do you do so as an optimist or a pessimist? Will the planet be a less violent, healthier, more prosperous place for its inhabitants in ten or fifteen years, or should we expect an increase in violence, disease, and despair?

JHL: Of course, I'm an optimist. I have children. I owe them that much. And I believe very deeply in the ingenuity, creativity, and basic goodness of the human spirit. I've never quite understood how you could believe otherwise and then teach your children to treat others with respect. Those two ideas — that people are basically evil, but you have to respect others — never co-existed very well in my head. The reason you have to treat others with respect is because people, basically, are decent and good and well-intentioned. That's not naivete; it's a belief that allows you to see the possibilities. I mean, I don't think anyone who lived through the events of 1989 gets to say that some things are just impossible. Nothing is impossible.

I was a soldier for most of my adult life. I absolutely don't think war is inevitable. I don't think war happens in the passive voice. To think that is to strip human agency from war. Civilizations don't simply clash; anarchy does not simply show up on your doorstep. People start wars. War is a phenomenon of leadership, a phenomenon of choice. And it's a choice we can affect. To put it another way, wars happen except when they don't, and they don't more of the time than they do, and we need to learn more about why they don't happen and how we can engage to prevent them from happening.

Or take the environment. There is no naturally occurring drought phenomenon, as we know from the work of prominent economists like Amartya Sen. People don't starve naturally. Certainly today they don't starve naturally. More often than not, their food has been manipulated as a weapon, and people suffer as a consequence. We can do a lot about that choice, and, as I've said, we can do a lot more to pool the world's strengths in order to share the world's burdens.

So, I absolutely can imagine a world in twenty years where there are more market democracies. Is that an American agenda? No. It's an agenda where people will have a fundamental say in how they're governed and a basic opportunity to improve their economic circumstances. And I absolutely can imagine a world in twenty years where nuclear war is unthinkable. It's certainly a worthy aspiration, don't you think? And I can imagine a world where basic educational opportunities and adequate health care and living in relative security are things that all people can enjoy and create for themselves. And I can imagine a world that tolerates the richness of diversity — in thought, in culture, in religion, in language — that is all around us. All of these things are possible.

And I would end on this note. Much of that future, whatever it turns out to be, is in our hands right now; it's the responsibility of all of us to make it what we want it to be. What's that famous line from Lawrence of Arabia? "What will they say about us? Whatever we write!"

PND: Well, thank you, Jane, for spending time and sharing your thoughts with us this morning. You've inspired me, and I think I speak for our readers when I say that we wish you continued success with the important work you and your colleagues are doing.

JHL: Thanks very much.

Mitch Nauffts, PND's editorial director, interviewed Jane Holl Lute by phone in late March. For more information on the Newsmakers series, contact Mitch at mfn@fdncenter.org