particularly in places like brazil where you have legislation who supports recyclers in this dialogue and looks at how do you create consciousness among communities who they themselves can produce re higher quality that leads to higher incomes for low income people. we were talking about higher incomes and we're really talking about people who can earn up to two or three minimum wages living off of recycled materials and these are not low-paying jobs. these are jobs that are somewhat messy and often what happens is that they're opportunities for their children to scale up and to look at professional opportunities within the recycling field as well. so again, this is just one of the many, many examples that i encourage us to look at from latin america and from the developing world as a whole. i see aid as being a two-way street and i think we have an awful lot to learn from our neighbors to the south. thank you.

>> thank you, judith. now we come to the point of the program where we invite the audience to ask questions of the panelists and we have about 30 minutes because this panel ends at 11:30 and i understand we are encouraged to leave the premises about that time. so question. yes, sir? do you have to what? i'm sorry. >> do i have to wait for the microphone. >> it's right above you. >> oh, there it is. the previous panel was on global warming and so i want to know if there's a way to avoid this being a zero sum gain. in other words, you talked about the development and i'm well aware of the fact that in pakistan, for example, i thought

about maybe putting in a huge down and the carbon dioxide levels and is there a way around this that recycling sounds wonderful is there a way to not contribute to the problem that the previous panel and is it a zero sum gaim gain? if so, -- can you hear the question? so the question has to do with global warming. is it a zero sum gain? is it a way to sustain growth with the problem of global warming. >> i just had a conversation just abouta i week ago and it was a fascinating new model to look at pine resins, actually, in mexico and other parts of latin america, and it's a sustainable source of revenue for community and one of the

things that he said that i thought was actually very wise, and i think i've heard it from other individuals in the environmental movement is that if it's between feeding your family and a tree, the tree always loses, and i think that one of the thicks thngs that we to create the opportunities that are sustainable where communities have adequate information to make good decisions, i think that understanding and really giving a financial value to the biodiversity and to the natural resources of the countries is extraordinarily necessary. it's becoming popular, but it's necessary and that it's needed. the reason is that in the place like latin america where i work you have some of the richest biodiversity in the world and to a great extent in the indigenous communities they've done an excellent job through land resource management and they understand the notion of seven generations out and how you need to protect these resources, but if push comes to shove and

communities don't have a way to eat, you're looking at some real significant challenges to the environment and specifically to biodiversity. you're bringing up the whole energy and resource issue in the region, and i think we need to be much more conscious about our consumption. i think that alternative energy is not enough. i think we have to look at some decentralized off the grid approaches to energy provision. whether it's on a very small scale through solar and other community and sustainable mechanisms. if not, the energy demands are tremendous and we know that as more and more people get access to cell phone technology and we need to plug in and we need to have more sources of energy. i've seen innovations in haiti that are fantastic and it started before the earthquake and it's taken off now. so these are young guys who -- would have probably been gang members, actually, if they hadn't gotten together and doing productive activities and they

created backpacks with solar panels that are locally produced in haiti so that kids can power up small light sources so that they can study at night and they've been tiebl take that technology and now they're being used as streetlights and much of haiti are being provided through individual solar packs, but this is something that would be a relatively easy technology to employ that maybe would decrease some of the energy demands in the regions where we work in the developing world and we, ourselves are extremely and what happens when your cell phone goes down, it's like your life is over. we have to talk seriously about efficient energy and talk about scientific and technology -- technological solutions to improve energy consumption. the only thing i would enforce it the economic growth model that our country has pursued with increasing wealth and what have you is actually the biggest gains of my adjusting our own

lifestyle. i think that's what we really have to be look at. >> yea, and coming to the zero sum question you really get in trouble if you frame this as a zero sum debate because then what you get is quite legitimate pushback saying, well, you know, of course, we're going have cell phones and of course, we're going build roads and of course, we're going to build dams if we need energy and to understand that there is going to have to be -- there's no getting around progress from the developed countries on climate change and that you're not going to talk anyone out of it and i think your comment about choosing between the family and the tree and that's true at a national level, as well and it has nothing to do with rich country, poor country, and it has to do with the bigger incentive and is there a bigger political incentive than to provide electricity from a dam for your

citizenry, and if you can't provide one then you're going to have a dam and that's a basic sort of question about how willing we are as a global community to deal with climate in a way that changes the incentives and that actually has really very little to do with how developed or undeveloped you are. >> okay. next question? yes? >> i obviously am very pro-al truism and stories like elizabeth are very important and i wonder if foreign aid treats the symptom rather than the cause and i would be interested in your responses to that. >> did everyone hear the question? the question is does foreign aid treat the symptom rather than the cause. is that fair? okay. >> i mean, i think that there is a lot of validity to what you are saying and i think we often

try to treat the symptom rather than the cause and there's importance to things like economic disparity and the root causes generating equality, for example, so i see in the past couple of years a lot more focus on addressing some of those root causes and i think especially as some of the developing countries gained leadership and take ownership for their problems that there's more focus on the root causes than when donors drove the aid agenda. >> so, judith's analogy to community development in this country is a really great one because you -- wheile you want o be conscious about the root causes and thinking about what to do about them, the long-term solution is to empower folks to go out and solve their own root causes and this is something that we completely lose the string of because how do you help people empower themselves?

and it's basic education and basic health and basic levels of human dignity and helping in education and so when people say why do we care whether one person in zambia has a healthy baby or not, that's a child that has the opportunity to be more empowered and go after root problems in his or her choice, but we very often forget to make the link about why it's worth putting band-aids on gaping wounds. >> i think also if you look at some of the development literature in terms of what motivates communities, often you will see it's a combination of a crisis that will move local communities and a couple of inspired actors and kind of good, political conditions and some openings. so i think the notion of root cause to some extent you can also -- it sounds terrible to say, but you can create different and there are many reasons why there's poverty. i think you can address multiple

root causes sometimes getting through the symptoms. we talk about aid and sometimes cynically if we just gave all of the money that we're spending in foreign assistance to low-income communities and what would happen and certainly giving the money within certain contexts of training individuals and strategic planning exercises and it could be a revolutionary idea to get money directly into the hands of low income people which to some extent is yes, dealing with the symptoms, but if the symptoms are extreme poverty, to some extent the conditional cash transfers are an examples of how by encouraging healthy behavior and teaching people to be responsible for themselves you do get the money into their hands and they've proven to be responsible about how they use the money and part of the reason for that is we understand looking at the role of women and communities this you give the conditional cash transfers to women and the women are the ones

that make sure they're taken care of. and research has shown that if you identify one thing you can do would be educating young girls. >> yes, ma'am? the other day i heard a program on kgnu, a man was discussing, and i think he called it population growth literacy and he talked about brazil actually trying to do this literacy and has had some progress with it and there was a population growth and it kind of blew up in our faces because it seemed like it was repressive from our point, but i just wondered what your thoughts were on that? >> okay. so the question has to do with

what are the panelist's thoughts on population literacy, is that fair enough? >> and population growth, literacy with respect to growth? >> i think carrie's last point was extremely relevant to this that when women are given access to education and professional opportunities, the population declines and it's just -- it's happened everywhere. it's just kind of a fact. so i think that population growth literacy is a very interesting concept, but i think it also has an awful lot to do with gender empowerment and the role of women and the empowerment because when women are empowered we will have control of fertility and we look at the example that carrie gave of elizabeth who went out and she took control of her health care and these are decisions that women need to be empowered to make and ultimately fertility is very much in the realms and in control of women.

>> so now that you've said that, i want to come back to what something judith said in the beginning of her remarks about the gender and the panel and i want to invite the room to take a minute and look around at each other. >> mostly women. >> and this is my fifth panel so far at this conference, and because my day job has mostly to do with quote, unquote, hard national security. i spoke on a panel on turkey. i spoke on a panel on the arab spring and the panel on nuclear weapons. this is the only panel i'm on with two other women. this is the only panel i've been on with this many women in the audience and that tracks exactly with what judith said about this as a career field, and on the one hand, that's wonderful and it's terrific and it's leading to really wonderful things and understanding the importance of the empowerment of women in every area that you could name, but what that also means is that my field, the national security field, looks way too much like it did 20 years ago. i mean, it's much better.

i wouldn't have been running a non-profit 20 years ago. we have four-star women generals now, but when we talk about why there isn't money for aid and why you have to fight frankly even within an administration, about why does aid matter and what its role is and who are the reporters who cover these issues and who are the academics, thi divide is mirrored in academia, depending on which aspects of international relations you study. so i would challenge those of you who are young and who care about these issues that this field isn't the only place you can work on them and that it's critically important, i think, that we don't settle into some kind of unofficial gender apartheid where women and men make war and women clean up afterwards and i'm very concerned about that. >> if i can add one thing and i was on another panel of

transformation and what we talked about was this exact phenomenon and the fact that women in positions of power is critical. if you look at our own country, and our own congress, 17% of the congress are women. 17% of the parliament in afghanistan are women. enough said. >> just very briefly, also, if you want to get into international development i strongly encourage you to look at economics and economic models and econometrics. we're using econometric numbers and don't get stuck in the ghetto of only looking at a very, very small sdal and that's why you have to take it up to policy. there's a great organization speak of women in national security that's called wise. i encourage all of you to look up wise. it's a fantastic organization, and if you know how to think strategically and in military terms and in development terms you can certainly think in

military terms. >> there's another organization that's represented here that's called white house and their goal is to put women in the white house and put women in elective office so that's another thing to consider. >> we do have a question from the gentleman in the back row. >> here he comes. okay. i can't really see who is asking the question. >> ask your question, sir. >> yes? >> you mentioned critique of aid from the left and if you thought that critique was incorrect, would you expand on that, please. >> i don't think i said it was incorrect, i said it had some elements of validity. there are two critiques from the left and there's a domestic critique and an international critique and the international critique is one of the most, i think, interesting developments in the field that has happened in the last decade or so which

is that you have people from traditional aid recipient countries standing up and saying no, thank you, we'd be better off without your aid. one of my favorite anecdotes about this is from the west african country of gan where the ministry declaration declared a holiday where they refused to meet with any representatives of any foreign organizations of donor governments and we said thank you very much, we need some time to get our work done and that, carrie, referenced this problem of coordination, but that you had increasingly strong voices from traditional aid recipient countries saying you distort our markets and you take away our product of choice and you impose priorities on us and you destroy our cultural traditions in the name of scale and frankly, we would have been -- you try out ideas on us that don't work. you send us your rejects, and

frankly, we would have been better off without you. and as i say, i think that critique is overblown, but for actually reasons that judith laid out is very important to hear and to take seriously when we think about the kind of large scale, quick, let's run in there and let's put on a show in the barn and build democracy kind of foreign aid that comes naturally to americans and not for bad reasons, either, that culturally we're such a let's get it done and let's fix it and we have to get the money out the door for the next year. there are many aspects of it that don't come from ill will or that don't come from sort of deep-seated imperialism, but that do play out on the ground in ways that have been very damaging and this is a critique that we need to listen to. at the same time, you get the critique from the left that judith mentioned getting from her family. why would you spend the famous words of john carey, why would you build firehouses in iraq instead of firehouses in the

united states? the answer might be because maybe we knocked down the firehouses in iraq, but secondly, because maybe, as i said in the beginning of my talk it's very important to the u.s. that the country x have a functioning civil society where people feel confident that people are bringing it down, and my problem with the domestic left critique is that they tend to have the isolationist critique and we should spend it at home. to my mind one of the things that it means to be progress sif to realize that it's all connected and as wealthy and powerful as we are we simply don't have the choice to take the wrong approach and say the rest of the world can look after itself. so -- >> a question from the gentleman against the back wall. >> the question is what is the grassroots policy?

>> i think i mentioned a little bit about grassroots development which is the notion of bottom-up development so you take local community ideas or local community approaches. there's a big discussion right now about the -- this kind of the bottom of the pyramid that's also kind of a little look at. you have all these people that have tremendous needs that are beginning to get access to financial resources, and they need to purchase things, and sometimes very legitimate things, whether it's cell phones or health care services, how can you provide services to these people that make up the bottom of the pyramid that is pretty significant proportion of the world's economy. the world's population there for the world's economy and the world's market but the grassroots, it's not necessarily grassroots policy but grassroots development approaches. >> yes, ma'am. >> -- use of economic models and

the importance of those models, are we beginning to redefine the paradigm for how we measure poverty based on new or different economic models, for example, environmental models or even cultural models that -- where, you know, we are always thinking about the dollar and a person's take-home income but a lot of communities, poor communities of the world, don't think much about dollars. they think about whether or not they have enough land to grow their food and i'm just wondering if we're trying to broaden our paradigm. >> so the question as i understand it, and correct me if i'm wrong, has to do with economic models, is there a need to broaden our definition of poverty or change it such that it's not measured only on individual income? is that fair enough? okay. >> i think one of the challenges is when we're trying to make comparisons across countries, across context and across cultures, we do tend to

oversimplify and i think there is a recognition that the models are often very simplistic. but if you look at for example what goes into the human development index, it's often -- it's kind of a minimal level of basic services. again, those services may be slightly different depending on the local context and there are actually, someone mentioned to me within the context of this conference, a discussion on the bhutan and i don't think she's in the audience here, but she was involved in the bhutan happiness index and that discussion at the u.n. i think there's a lot of challenging of the models. at the same time, i don't want us to lose sight of the fact that you know, having good health care one or two hours distance from your home, having access to clean, safe drinking water, having access to basic education, these are things that i do see as universal rights and i think we don't want to cloud the notion of having local models and kind of losing sight of some of those others. i think for the most part, most development practitioners are aware of the limitations of the

models but it's so difficult to make comparisons across countries and they are really needed to push policy, to be able to say that this country's doing better, that things are moving forward. it just makes governments feel really good about their progress or it kind of gives -- puts a spotlight on situations that are particularly dire. for example, we do a lot of work with indigenous peoples looking at gaps that are tremendous in countries in the region between the indigenous population and the nonindigenous population. it's almost as if you're looking at two completely different countries. you do kind of need some of those measures but they're very limited. >> i just wanted to say one more thing sort of coming from your discussion of bhutan and the gross national happiness index. i think we assume the traditional model assumes that you have to be rich to be happy or at least you have to be a certain level of rich to be happy. i don't think that's necessarily true and this gross national happiness index is interesting because it showed that people in china are actually happier than people in the united states.

but just a tiny anecdote, my son spent a couple months in liberia during the summer. he was 16 years old and he was working with an organization called right to play. he was helping them teach soccer to kids who were formerly child combatants, many of them with missing limbs and they lived in very dire conditions. i said to him after a month and a half of doing this, what are you learning from this. his number one learning was you know, mom, they are so much like us. the things that we have in common are exactly the same and the things that are different from us are very small. you know what, they're happy. they love each other. that was an important thing. i think we assume that people who live in poor countries are less happy, that somehow their lives are not fulfilling and i think that's a fallacy. [ applause ] >> okay. so question from the woman here. we might have time for two more

questions and i will -- you can have the second question, if we have time, depending on the length of the question and the answer. >> thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge with us. it's been a great experience for me. you both, all of you have touched on the importance of measuring results and it was kind of a lead-on to her question. you had mentioned the paris declaration as a possibility. i recently worked with an international ngo and a lot of our work had to incorporate or assimilate the mdgs so i'm really interested to hear from all three of you on if you feel that the mdgs have been a successful tool for measurement and if it has or has not been, what's your recommendation for tools of measurement for impact and finding results? >> so the question is is the mgd a good metric, good tool for measurement. i don't know the term.

>> millenium development goals. i think actually probably you've done a lot of work in this area. one thing i want to say, mdgs are goals and underneath those goals are all sorts of, literally hundreds different indicators that organizations or governments use to measure whether or not they're achieving the mdgs. but i think you've done a lot of thinking on this. >> yeah. the millenium development goals were a set of ten broad goals and then as carrie said, a bunch of subtargets that were adopted by all the nations of the united nations in 2005, because the deadline is 2015. and i'm going to comment on this from a public affairs perspective rather than from a development practitioner's perspective and maybe that's a partial answer to your question already there. and they did a tremendously good job of drawing attention to the problems that they were intended to rectify, and especially in 2005 when they were first

launched, they got a lot of attention, you hear about them still in a lot of community groups, churches, my own church spent all of lent this year praying for the mdgs. i thought boy, that's really asking a lot of god given what i know about the mdgs. couldn't we do something that's not my day job, please? so in that sense, it was an inspired marketing stroke, but like many marketing strokes, it was -- the initial idea for the campaign was unsustainable and not closely connected enough to the reality of it, which is that these are enormously complex issues. it was a largely rhetorical campaign with no real ability to compel anybody to change what they do to make the goals happen, and there have been some amazing pieces of progress, some areas of total failure or even moving backwards, and then that makes it easy for people who want to be critical to say oh, that was a meaningless p.r. campaign.

so were i doing it over again, i would have picked fewer and i -- well, this of course is very hard to do this at the u.n. where everybody has to be happy, but ideally, such an effort you would have picked two or three and you would have asked everybody to make some commitment about how they were going to be actualized, so that's my critique in terms of getting people who aren't immersed in this stuff all the time to care and be motivated and involved. i will let these two speak to the practitioner critique of whether it actually helped and how it helped and how it hurt on the ground. >> i think one of the challenges with the millenium development goals particularly in latin america is the whole region was basically seen as kind of moving on track. in fact, there was some discussions in the very early years about this is really about africa and about development in africa. the millenium development goals are very good on gender. not so good on cultural and ethnic equality, and one of the challenges i think also is that they're taking averages. that's part of the reason why it's really easy for latin

america basically, you don't have to have a lot of policy changes to make sure that the targets are met because in countries and regions where you have inequality, it's really the gaps between the groups that are most important, not necessarily that growth is moving and things are moving in the right direction. it's is it moving in the right direction for kind of all of the population. you can still have really severe, we know that also kind of the historic case of brazil, where you had huge income inequalities. one of the most unequal countries in the world, yet you still had kind of brazil was moving towards target which is what is making this kind of development so interesting in brazil is that brazil is saying okay, it's not acceptable for us to meet targets when we have such levels of inequality and poverty in our country. again, i think some discussion on racial and ethnic equality or cultural difference, cultural values and maybe a little bit more discussion beyond the averages with the commitments by the individual governments, because then you have teeth and then everyone has something to work for. it doesn't become an exercise for just certain parts of the world and not others.