Life After the Pandemic Vol I: An Exploration of Society During and After COVID-19

AFTER THE PANDEMIC AN EXPLORATION OF SOCIETY DURING AND AFTER COVID-19 VOL I | MAY 2020

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AFTER THE PANDEMIC AN EXPLORATION OF SOCIETY DURING AND AFTER COVID-19 VOL I | MAY 2020

ANA C. ROLD & SHANE SZARKOWSKI EDITORS

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | MEDAURAS GLOBAL WASHINGTON, DC

A Global Affairs Media Network

Editor-in-Chief

Creative Director

Ana C. Rold

Christian Gilliham

Contributing Editors

Photographers

Duncan Cox Rebecca Graham Paul Nash Chris Purifoy Winona Roylance Jackson Smith Shane Szarkowski Shalini Trefzer

Michelle Guillermin Sebastian Rich

Editor-at-Large Molly McCluskey

Advisory Board Asmaa Al-Fadala Andrew M. Beato Fumbi Chima Kerstin Ewelt Ghida Fakhry Sir Ian Forbes Lisa Gable Anders Hedberg Greg Lebedev Anita McBride Clare Shine

Contributors Ido Aharoni Burhan Al-Gailani Omeed Alerasool Ryen Bani-Hashemi Roland Bennett Allyson Berri Irinia Bokova Andrea Bonime-Blanc Luca Brunner Elizabeth Cohan Matthew Davie Thomas Dichter Dante Disparte Noah Dowe Pierre Ferrari Stephenie Foster Jon Gregory Dan Hackmann Hakima el Haite Taylor Kendal Roland Klüber

Margery Kraus Nic Labuschagne Greg Lebedev Susan Markham Melissa Metos Arun S. Nair Ben Nelson Lauren O’Leary George Papandreou Jan Pflueger Chris Purifoy Philipp Reinhold Tim Roemer Joël Ruet Kasen Scharmann Mariam Safi Iris Shaffer Jo da Silva Michelle Sindyukov Aftan Snyder Karen Studders Nathan Tonani Tyl van Toorn Shalini Trefzer Anna Tunkel Daniel Wagner Andrew Wilson Stavros Yiannouka Kaliya Young

Copyright © by Diplomatic Courier/Medauras Global Publishing 2006-2020 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. First Published 2016. Published in the United States by Medauras Global and Diplomatic Courier. Mailing Address: 1660 L Street, NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC, 20036 | www.diplomaticourier.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-942772-07-1 (Digital) ISBN: 978-1-942772-06-4 (Print) LEGAL NOTICE. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form—except brief excerpts for the purpose of review—without written consent from the publisher and authors. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information in this publication; however, the authors, Diplomatic Courier, and Medauras Global make no warranties, express or implied, in regards to the information and disclaim all liability for any loss, damages, errors, or omissions.

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6 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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CONTENTS FOREWORD 012

LIFE AFTER THE PANDEMIC POINT :: COUNTERPOINT | THE EDITORS

1. WORLD VS. VIRUS 018

A BLEAK POST-PANDEMIC FUTURE FOR THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD | THOMAS DICHTER

025 A NEW, DEADLIER FRONT IN AFGHANISTAN’S WAR | MARIAM SAFI 031

A GLOBAL HEALTH CRISIS IN FOUR PARTS | MELISSA METOS AND KASEN SCHARMANN

037 GLOBAL PROBLEMS NEED GLOBAL SOLUTIONS | MARGERY KRAUS 040 LET’S TAKE OFF OUR BLINDERS AND BUILD A NEW WORLD | HAKIMA EL HAITÉ & JOËL RUET 047 WHAT WILL NOT CHANGE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR GOVERNING | JON GREGORY 052 HOW COVID-19 IS CHANGING THE SOFT POWER GAME | AFTAN SNYDER & MICHELLE SINDYUKOV 056 THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A PANDEMIC-ERA IRAN DEAL | OMEED ALERASOOL & RYEN BANI-HASHEMI 061

COVID-19 WILL HERALD A SEACHANGE IN GLOBAL AFFAIRS | BURHAN AL-GAILANI

065 GOVERNMENT AID POST-PANDEMIC | ARUN S. NAIR 071

THE CASE FOR A NEW GLOCALISM, POWERED

BY AI | LUCA BRUNNER & SHALINI TREFZER

078 IN A QUARANTINED WORLD, WOMEN HAVE THE MOST TO LOSE | NOAH DOWE 082 COVID-19 DEMANDS WE RETHINK GENDER ROLES | STEPHENIE FOSTER & SUSAN MARKHAM 8 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

CONTENTS 2. BUILDING RESILIENCE 088 THE EMERGENCE OF POST-PANDEMIC INSTITUTIONS | DANTE DISPARTE 092 DISASTER VS. CRISIS? HOW THE NATURE OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS AFFECTS OUR RESPONSE | JO DA SILVA 096 HOW THE HEALTH BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM SHOULD REINVENT ITSELF | ROLAND KLÜBER, DAN HACKMANN & ROLAND BENNETT 104

HEALTHCARE NEEDS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE | IRINA BOKOVA, HAKIMA EL HAITE, GEORGE PAPANDREOU & JOËL RUET

109

FROM CONVENIENCE TO LIFELINE: TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMING THE LOGISTICS OF TOMORROW | PHILIPP REINHOLD

113

HOW TO FIX THE GAPS IN OUR FOOD SYSTEM | PIERRE FERRARI

117

REFUGEE CAMPS FIGHT FAKE NEWS ALONGSIDE PANDEMIC | ALLYSON BERRI

122

CLEAR, CONSISTENT COMMUNICATION IS CRUCIAL DURING A PANDEMIC | IRIS SHAFFER & LAUREN O’LEARY

126

A NEW AGE FOR MULTIPLIER PARTNERSHIPS | ANNA TUNKEL & ELIZABETH COHAN

130

IT’S TIME FOR A NEW APPROACH TO SOLVING COMPLEX GLOBAL CRISES | NIC LABUSCHAGNE

134

COVID-19 AND THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION | STAVROS YIANNOUKA

139

A TALE OF TWO UNIVERSITIES | BEN NELSON

143

MOURNING THE GRASSROOTS OF EDUCATION | MELISSA METOS

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 9

CONTENTS 3. PATH FORWARD 148

LIFE AFTER THE PANDEMIC: FUTURE SCENARIOS | TYL VAN TOORN

153

THE NEED FOR NEW CODES OF CONDUCT | DANIEL WAGNER

156

EDUCATION INEQUITIES: MOVING FROM RHETORIC TO ACTION | CHRIS PURIFOY & TAYLOR KENDAL

160

WE NEED TO RETHINK OUR VALUE SYSTEMS | KALIYA YOUNG & KAREN STUDDERS

166

PANDEMICS, BLACK SWANS, AND PREDICTIONS | TIM ROEMER

170

THE POST-PANDEMIC SWEET SPOT | NATHAN TONANI

176

FUTUREPROOFING POST-PANDEMIC GOVERNANCE | ANDREA BONIME-BLANC

183

CAN WE PREDICT THE NEXT PANDEMIC? | ALLYSON BERRI

186

USE OUR COVID-19 RESPONSE TO DRIVE FINANCIAL INCLUSION | MATTHEW DAVIE

191

HOW WILL WE KNOW WHEN IT’S OVER? | GREG LEBEDEV

197

SIX ESSENTIAL THEMES FOR AN ECONOMIC RECOVERY ROADMAP | ANDREW WILSON

205 GLOBAL TRAVEL: THE WAY TO RECOVERY | IDO AHARONI 210

LESS MOBILITY, MORE FLEXIBILITY | JAN PFLUEGER

10 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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POINT: COVID-19 IS SCARY, BUT THE WORST IS YET TO COME

T

he world is in a frightening place right now. The global public has largely lost trust in government institutions and the media, and as populist sentiment grows, our societies are becoming increasingly fractured at a time when a world-spanning crisis threatens our well-being.

Then came a pandemic. Crises famously bring out the best and the worst in people. COVID-19 is showing us plenty of examples of both. Unfortunately, with governments the latter is arguably prevalent and in our largest democracies a fractured public is ill-equipped to hold them to account.

From the United States to Afghanistan, national and regional governments are struggling to coordinate healthcare responses in a meaningful way. In vulnerable countries—like Afghanistan, Mariam Safi tells us—these struggles can lead to more death and economic cost than decades of conflict. The pandemic has laid bare frailties in our economic systems, which leave officials and the citizenry debating whether economic well-being or physical well-being are more important. This fractious debate is made more contentious and damaging to our social fabric by the proliferation of disinformation—which, Allyson Berry argues, is not only worsened in times of pandemics but reaches into every social grouping with dangerous results, from your relatives’ Facebook feed to refugee camps.

While the citizens of the world struggle to separate fact from fiction (and often disagree violently with their peers about what is true and meaningful), many governments aim to misbehave.

In Poland, the government is aggressively shoving through a legislative agenda that before social distancing restrictions would have led (and in previous years similar attempts did lead) to massive country-wide protests. In Sri Lanka, the government is accused of using the pandemic as cover for further censoring 12 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

the country’s media. China and Russia are purportedly embarking on disinformation campaigns, which suggest the U.S. is behind COVID-19, or is at least “hiding something.”

Meanwhile, the most vulnerable segments of our global society are suffering (and in the aftermath almost certainly will continue to suffer) the lion’s share of bad outcomes. “Essential” workers and healthcare front liners are exposed to excessive viral loads and likely to become far sicker than most inflicted with COVID-19. Noah Dowe reveals additional hardships visited on women and minorities during pandemics, while Dr. Dichter paints a bleak picture for post-pandemic recovery among the less resilient countries in the underdeveloped world. The most frightening thing about this is that, for many of the most vulnerable, this only looks like a more extreme iteration of trends we’ve talked about but done little to correct for years. Jonathan Gregory argues most of the trends we can observe during this time of the pandemic are merely iterations of trends that existed before. This in turn suggests even a world-spanning pandemic isn’t enough to catalyze meaningful change and that not only will the most vulnerable be worse off, but the most advantaged will be even better off after the pandemic.

Are you depressed yet?

Worst-case scenario estimates of potential aftermaths of COVID-19 are frightening. More likely, however, is that things will continue to get incrementally worse post-pandemic—following trends that have been developing for the past decade. Such an outcome is far more frightening because it would suggest something ugly about us. Here we face a world-spanning crisis—undeniably the greatest in living memory for nearly everybody reading this—and we as a global community are responding with a collective “meh”. In recent memory periods of great structural change—post-WWII, post-Cold War—governments took decisive action to reform old institutions or build new ones to meet emerging challenges. Today, many of our governments are taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to erode institutions meant to protect us. Businesses, civil service organizations, and common citizenry have the capacity to force better out of their governments. However, the deep fault lines wracking our societies and growing fundamental distrust of governance institutions make this seem vanishingly unlikely.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 13

COUNTERPOINT: NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE

E

ven before the COVID-19 pandemic locked down the world, we were living in an age of paradoxes. We produce enough food to feed the entire world but people still go to bed hungry. Healthcare innovators are hacking aging and extending our lifespan, but people still die from preventable diseases.

Now, the novel coronavirus is spreading an even more dangerous strain of inequality. Those with higher incomes are still getting paid and can work from home, while the working-class and poor are far more likely to have to keep going to their workplaces and face greater risk of infection. Underlying diseases that make COVID-19 more dangerous and fatal predominantly afflict poorer populations (who were already dealing with obesity, heart disease, and other non-communicable diseases at epidemic proportions). Government aid was already painfully inadequate for those most in need (or in most cases never arrived), but now desperation is climbing faster on the charts than infections.

We’ve been tested before and rise of populism nearly everywhere in the liberal democratic world has made it clear that our worldview is being tested. This pandemic is simply accelerating the test of what kind of a society we want to be.

Life After the Pandemic is the first of several special bookazine editions by Diplomatic Courier’s vast trove of multi-disciplinary and multi-generational global experts. They are industry leaders, policy and diplomacy experts, as well as students. They have a strong grasp of the issues we are facing together as a society. More importantly, they aren’t afraid to not make sure this crisis won’t go to waste.

We made a call to action to hear their thoughts during the height of the lockdown. We asked for scenarios for a world remade. We didn’t quite expect a fast “vaccine” but what we received certainly 14 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

gave us hope. You will feel this optimism while browsing through the “Building Resilience” section of this anthology.

Call us opportunists, but here are but a few of the big pivots the pandemic can help us take, once and for all.

We start with Dante Disparte’s essay on the emergence of postpandemic institutions. Just like the post-war era gave rise to the international institutions that maintained peace and advanced multilateral collaboration in the 20th century, the postpandemic era will give rise to new and improved institutions.

“The fastest institutions to bend or break with the onset of the pandemic should be the first ones to fix in the post-pandemic world,” he explains.

What better system to improve than healthcare itself? We know it’s broken but up to now have been lazy to fix it. This is a perfect time to improve existing institutions like the World Health Organization as well as put in place the global health governance mechanism we are lacking. Irina Bokova, Hakima el Haite, George Papandreou and Joël Ruet make a very compelling argument on how to do this in their essay.

And as for going it alone? The very thing that brought this virus to our doors—our interconnectivity—is the very tool that will help us overcome it. Without diplomacy, sharing of science, data, and technology we will suffer. Anna Tunkel and Elizabeth Cohan are architects of multiplier partnerships. In the post-pandemic world, they say, we have no other choice but to join forces. Partnerships between private sector, governments, and individuals will ensure that we are quite literally addressing these challenges together and that no one is left behind in solution-making.

Does this sound like a pie in the sky? “Societal expectations of the private sector have never been higher and what companies do during the COVID-19 will have direct implications on their global reputation and license to operate—both locally and globally,” say our authors.

Simply put, what do we want the legacy of COVID-19 to be? It’s up to us to call the shots now.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 15

UN PHOTO BY KIBAE PARK

1 WORLD VS. VIRUS

A BLEAK POSTPANDEMIC FUTURE FOR THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD

BY THOMAS DICHTER

18 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

I

f you think the post-pandemic future of the advanced economies looks bad, consider the far bleaker outlook faced by developing nations, especially the poorest among them. The 47 countries the United Nations refers to as LDCs (least developed countries) have barely made a dent in their chronic poverty. The 15 years (2000-2015) during which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were to be reached saw barely half of them achieved. Their promised successors, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are likely to fare no better.

Two sets of factors will play a role in this bleak future. The first are largely external and thus beyond the LDCs’ control. They include: Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) already slowing as part of a retreat from globalization. FDI will recede even further as economic trauma in the richer nations drives down the confidence to invest in riskier countries. Second, those emerging nations for which tourism is an important source of income and jobs (e.g., Morocco, South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Cambodia, Thailand and others) are already seeing tourist arrivals dwindle to a trickle and post pandemic pent-up demand for travel may not mean that people will return to these places in the numbers we’re used to seeing.

As unemployment grows in the advanced economies, remittance transfers, the lifeblood of many poor households, are likely to decrease. The billions in aid that developing countries depend on, the LDCs especially, might decrease as the OECD donor countries tighten their own belts and philanthropic giving to NGOs takes a dip. Even though some donors such as France have pledged not to forget their friends in Africa and elsewhere, and calls for canceling debt are being heard from the IMF and others, it seems likely that foreign aid for development will be a lower priority for the donor nations than it has been.

Those developing countries that rely heavily on natural resources (oil, lithium, manganese, bauxite, phosphates, copper, iron etc.) will see short term demand go down as the richer nations pull back on production. This will hit the LDCs especially hard, since fully 23 of the world’s top 50 countries in terms of the percent of GDP based on natural resources are also on the list of the 47 LDCs, countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for example, with 32.7% of its GDP from natural resources (huge deposits of cobalt, tin, copper, tantalum, diamonds, lithium and gold), or Sierra Leone with 22.15% of its GDP linked to diamonds, iron, bauxite, chromite and other natural resources. Nine of the forty-seven LDCs derive about 20% or more of their GDP from natural resources. (To put this natural resource dependency DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 19

in perspective the United States’ % of GDP from natural resources is just under 1%, (0.47) and the average for 186 countries is 6.53%.)

The second set of factors has to do with resilience and these factors are largely internal. We, in the advanced economies face unprecedented challenges in the post-pandemic future, but eventually we will bounce back. Not so in much of the developing world. In our case the very word “bounce” shows our faith in resilience, the underpinnings of which we have in abundance. (The physics of bouncing provides a good analogy. A rubber ball gets distorted when it hits a hard surface causing a temporary storage of kinetic energy, energy that “wants” to be released, hence the bounce.) The underpinnings of the richer countries’ resilience include productivity, innovation, talent, management, data collection and analysis skills, many of which are linked to science and technology; all are linked to education, and all are intertwined with, and embedded in, a relatively stable enabling environment that encourages those talents and skills. This is an environment that consists of physical and institutional infrastructure, from government to roads, to laws and courts, and financial systems. For all the flaws in our systems— and the current crisis has exposed them vividly (27 million people in the U.S. without health insurance, one half of households without emergency savings, over a half a million homeless living on the street…) we are still fundamentally resilient. Obviously, countries lacking in those attributes, and especially those beset by civil or religious strife, will be less resilient in the face of the present crisis and its sure-to-linger after-effects.

Yet we should not be at all surprised by this bleak picture. For as much as one might blame slow progress in the past on the inadequate response of OECD donors to developing nation poverty, or the fact of endemic corruption, the deeper issue is a long-standing misunderstanding of what it takes, and how long it takes, to become “developed.” In the seven decades since the world began thinking about helping the newly independent and largely poor nations develop, we have somehow assumed a linearity to the process (world history notwithstanding). Thus, once one becomes developed (in Rostovian five stages fashion), the gains are held in place and advancement continues ever upward. From the end of the World War II until about 2000 this seemed indeed to be the case. More wealth was created, more countries became more productive, and we began to see increasingly high growth rates in poor countries. China brought hundreds of millions out of poverty, South Korea (which was more or less where Ghana was in the early 1960s) became a fully advanced industrial economy. India, since major reforms were instituted between 1990 and 1992, made 20 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

forward movement on many fronts. The assumption of an ever upward trajectory clearly also embodies the idea of “catching up” and again, growth rates between the late 90s and now seemed to support that premise. The richer nations began to show lower growth rates in the 1% to 3% range while many poor countries moved up to the 5% to 9% range.

During these years we forgot the enormity of the development project, and in turn lost the humility needed to face its obstacles.

The late anthropologist Clifford Geertz described what the new nations needed to undertake, a long list of tasks that was, as he put it, “just for starters:” “It had to organize, or reorganize, a weak and disrupted, “underdeveloped” economic system: attract aid, stimulate growth, and set policies on everything from trade and land reform to factory employment and fiscal policy. It had to construct, or reconstruct, a set of popular (at least ostensibly), culturally comprehensible political institutions—a presidency or prime ministership, a parliament, parties, ministries, elections. It had to work out a language policy, mark out the domains and jurisdictions of local administration, elicit a general sense of citizenship—a public identity and a peoplehood—out of a swirl of ethnic, religious, regional, and racial particularisms. It had to define, however delicately, the relations between religion, the state, and secular life; train, equip, and manage professional security forces; consolidate and codify a thoroughly pluralized, custom-bound legal order; develop a broadly accessible system of primary education. It had to attack illiteracy, urban sprawl, and poverty; manage population growth and movement; modernize healthcare; administer prisons; collect customs; build roads; shepherd a press. And that was just for starters.… It was a heady time. No wonder it was followed by ambiguous successes, precipitate turnarounds, sobering disappointments, and often enough, murderous disruptions.”

Remarkably, a few have managed to complete most of Geertz’ list and in the course of it have built resilience. But most have not. In the poorest nations, the lack of resilience is critical, and this time the disappointments are likely to be even more sobering. Many on the list of LDCs, countries like the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Niger, Haiti, and Yemen, lack even the most basic underpinnings of resilience. Sierra Leone has all of 13 respirators DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 21

in the entire country. In Yemen, (where I worked in development aid 30 years ago) a grossly inadequate medical system has been dismantled, one of many victims of the war.

Moreover, in almost all the poorest countries employment is concentrated in the “informal sector,” thus un-regulated, un-taxed, un-counted (one often hidden obstacle faced by almost all the LDCs is their lack of capacity to collect data, much less analyze it). While the noise and bustle of informal sector markets might give the impression of a vibrant precursor of growth, the informal sector is almost by definition a default economy—a last resort of people desperate to make a few pennies to survive. Its existence is already a sign of failure. And of course, these hundreds of millions of “jobs” are not backed by any kind of safety net. Social divisions, widening in many of the advanced economies, will widen even more in the poorest. And just as the coronavirus feeds on the weakest among us, there is the danger of more non-state actor interventions causing more “murderous disruptions” in the least resilient of the LDCs. As for those nations on the next rung up the ladder, the ones that have gingerly begun to “catch up,” they are likely to find that even a 12- to 24-month setback will have dire consequences, and that is because the nature of catching up in today’s world is considerably different than it once was. Speed is now the key because the path is so steep (see the Geertz quote above). Whereas the U.S. could take 200 years to reach its advanced state, today if you don’t advance quickly (China is a perfect example of hyper speed development) you begin not just to stand still but to fall back. Anyone who travels widely in the poor countries today and compares things to what one saw 20 or 30 years ago, will notice a one-step-forward-two-steps back (or at best a one forward one back) pattern. Get a bit ahead on one front, get way behind on another. For example, an unintended consequence of a decline in infant mortality rates is a growing youth bulge, which in turn strains other sectors, fueling among other things urban in-migration, with just one consequence being a less promising future for agriculture. Just as many poor are financially wiped out by even a minor medical emergency, the same is true for entire sectors of developing world economies. The holding power of gains is weak.

A small setback can cause a giant disruption. The recent plague of locusts in Kenya seems to have come about because preventive measures like spraying were curtailed by the country’s lockdown, with thousands of hectares of crop land affected. In countries with millions suffering from malnutrition, drops in subsistence agriculture from events like locust invasions can be lethal. It is especially sad that in those sectors of society meant to provide the human 22 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

seed corn of the future, health and education, the likelihood of falling backwards is great.

In Morocco, for example, a country that has moved, one might say, to “second world” status, with many solid institutions, an increasingly diversified economy, a modern infrastructure including Africa’s first high speed rail line, enormous progress has been made in literacy and universal primary education. Yet today as a result of over-crowding, labor disputes, and a general lowering of quality, 22% of all schools in the country are private, whereas 50 years ago the percentage was miniscule. The private school movement is fueled by a lack of faith in a weakened public education system.

As in many countries, people are less and less willing to wait patiently for weak institutions and systems to get their act together.

Of all the ways people now vote with their feet the most palpable is economic migration. The young, the courageous, the healthy, the risk-takers, seek and often find ways to leave their poor countries to work and live elsewhere, depriving their origin countries of energy and talent. And even though there are signs of a diaspora “giving back” to their home countries, most who leave do not return.

In the best of times, the world’s poorest countries face daunting challenges, moving forward, when they do, haltingly. In the postpandemic future, there is even less prospect of sustained forward movement. As for the people themselves, the third world’s poor have generations of experience surviving in the face overwhelming circumstances, husbanding their social capital, living at subsistence level and expecting very little of their leaders and the larger world. Whether the grim post pandemic effects are short or long lived, they will continue, albeit painfully, to muddle along. ***** About the author: Thomas Dichter has 50 years of hands on experience working to promote development in over 60 developing countries on four continents, working for such agencies as the U.S. Peace Corps, USAID, the World Bank, UNDP, and the Aga Khan Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. He holds a BA in European history from Columbia, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has published numerous articles, research papers, and two books on development issues, including “Despite Good Intentions, Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed,” University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst and Boston, 2003.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 23

IMAGE BY PIXABAY

A NEW, DEADLIER FRONT IN AFGHANISTAN’S WAR

BY MARIAM SAFI

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 25

D

eaths in Afghanistan due to the coronavirus could potentially exceed the total number of civilians killed during the past two decades of conflict. As of April 22, Afghanistan had 1,178 confirmed cases compared to 840 seven days earlier, with 40 deaths and 166 recovered patients. Estimates published by Foreign Policy on April 17 suggest that ultimately up to 25 million Afghans could be infected with the coronavirus, with 110,000 deaths.

These numbers would be catastrophic for Afghanistan, whose fragile health care system, declining economy, scarce resources, and weak governance capacity are already under intense strain by the ongoing conflict with the Taliban. The pandemic also comes at a fraught time for the government due to political tensions following a contested 2019 presidential elections, impasses over prisoner swaps meant to kick start talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and declining U.S. military and financial support following the precarious U.S.-Taliban deal signed on February 29, 2020.

Countries in the global north are describing the conditions in their country as a “war zone” as their governments and health systems struggle to fight against the spread of COVID-19. In Afghanistan, the pandemic is an additional front in an existing war that will further destabilize the state’s capacity to meets its citizens’ needs.

The Afghan government’s COVID-19 response prioritizes service delivery, emergency health care response, and improved communication but realities on the ground mean this response has been ad hoc and unevenly applied at best.

COVID-19’s Economic Impacts In an interview for Diplomatic Courier, Afghanisan Deputy Minister of Finance Naheed Sarabi said, “The Afghan government is trying to break the chain and following steps of countries who have successfully controlled this pandemic.” said A joint survey conducted

by Central Statistics Organization (CSO) of Afghanistan and ICON International shows that nearly 54% of the country’s citizens live below the poverty line. This is likely to increase drastically in the coming months if state is unable to control the pandemic. According to Cordiad’s Afghanistan Director Jaap van Hierden, lockdown measures will have the greatest impact on daily wage earners as “80% of the people work in the informal sector and live from hand to mouth and millions of others are displaced and have even less.”

Similarly, Dr. Ferdows Sayedy, at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital in Kabul told Diplomatic Courier he fears that lockdown measures 26 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

alone will not be enough to control the spread of the virus if food supplies are not quickly provided to those in need “if lockdown measures continue they will have to leave their homes to feed their families.”

The Government’s Problematic Health Measures The government’s health response has been aggressive, turning health facilities into coronavirus treatment centers but rollout has been plagued by poor planning and shortages in staffing and equipment, especially at the provincial level. As of April, the country had only two designated coronavirus hospitals with 12 working ventilators between them, although there are reportedly 300 ventilators across the country. The Afghan Japan Hospital in Kabul is the capital’s primary coronavirus treatment facility, but the even this facility faces shortages in equipment, sanitizers, and ICU specialists as well as deficits in procedures and staff training. Additionally, there are only two laboratories in the country equipped to test samples. As of April 20, the only operational testing center has stopped the intake of new samples due to an overwhelming backlog. The Ministry of Public Health claims the testing center can test 600 samples every day, but Dr. Ferdows Sayedy suggested in an interview for Diplomatic Courier that real testing capability is only around 30 to 40 per day.

In Herat, the epicenter of the crises, the government built a new 100-bed hospital for COVID-19 patients. However, provincial MP Naheed lamented that after completion the “the hospital doors remained closed, there is no equipment and no staff.” She argued that “a wedding hall could have been transformed into a hospital, in Herat we do not have a shortage of buildings, we have problems related to procurement of equipment, safety gear, and health experts.”

Herat has halted testing as its testing center lacks RNA extraction supplies necessary for labs to evaluate samples. In other provinces, hospitals began dedicating wards for COVID-19 patients and Public Health officials plan to send medical experts to these areas, according Dr. Sayedy. However, a shortage in medical personnel with the required expertise tackle this virus complicates matters.

Between March and April, approximately 130,000 Afghans returned from Iran following its coronavirus the coronavirus outbreak, marking one of the “biggest cross-border movements of the pandemic.” Herat MP Naheed Farid told Diplomatic Courier that all of Herat’s MPs appealed to Public health officials to quarantine returnees but were told the state did not have the capacity to create facilities to house such large numbers. Farid stated DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 27

that MPs then approached the Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation to coordinate efforts with the governors of primary destinations to ensure returnees were safely transported to their provinces where they could get checked and quarantined by officials there, thereby sharing responsibilities and capabilities. However, both ministries failed to take appropriate steps, according to Farid.

The Government’s Uneven Public Awareness Campaign The Afghan government has made raising public awareness about the pandemic into a priority. However, provinces have not received the same attention as major cities. In Ghanzi, MP Shagul Rezaie said government awareness campaigns are very limited, and in areas under Taliban control where the government does not have a physical presence there is no public awareness at all. In Ghazni, “there has been next to no efforts by health officials” explained Razaie, thus “doctors from different medical fields in the province mobilized voluntarily and began to conduct an awareness campaign at the district and village level. Moreover, this group of doctors also took it upon themselves to gather community elders in villages and instructed them to quarantine individuals returning from countries which have large numbers of COVID-19 cases.”

Afghanistan’s Lack of Resources, and the International Response Delivery of services, improved communication, and awareness raising emergency responses are central to the Afghan government’s five-stage plan to tackling the pandemic. This plan aims to manage the health response and economic shock that will follow the pandemic in the country. However, Sarabi warns that the Afghan government lacks the resources it needs to accomplish the heavy ahead and will require significant international support. The European Union and World Bank have allocated funds to support Afghanistan’s fight against COVID-19 and countries like China, India and United Arab Emirates have sent medical and food supplies. However, Sarabi points out that the money allocated by donors remains insufficient.

According to Shagul Razaie, international donors and their Afghan counterparts must create mechanisms that can manage, monitor, and report how these resources are being spent—mecha28 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

nisms which are currently missing. She said, “MPs are often asked to monitor the government’s COVID-19 response, but how can we when we do not know what to monitor?” Others suggest that resources, capacity and quarantine will not be enough. In April, Afghan civil society organizations domestic and abroad signed a petition—supported by European Union, NATO and P5 leaders—calling on all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan to agree to a full and immediate humanitarian ceasefire to facilitate immediate preparedness and response efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus. ***** About the author: Mariam Safi is the founding Director of the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies (DROPS), an independent and multidisciplinary policy-oriented research institute based in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ms. Safi brings over a decade of research, strategy-building and leadership experience working and engaging with the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, think-tanks and academic institutions in Central and South Asia, Europe, and North America.

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IMAGE BY UNSPLASH

A GLOBAL HEALTH CRISIS IN FOUR PARTS WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED FROM EVENT 201

BY MELISSA METOS & KASEN SCHARMANN

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 31

I

n October of 2019, a simulation was assembled to demonstrate how woefully unprepared the world is for a pandemic—an outbreak eerily similar to that of COVID-19. Event 201 (which was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) assembled a “Pandemic Emergency Board” of 15 leaders from government, civil society, public health, and business to provide guidance and recommendations in the midst of a fictional quickly evolving crisis involving the rapid transmission of a highly contagious and lethal coronavirus referred to as CAPS. The participants were asked to address four primary challenges over the course of the simulation: medical countermeasures, trade and travel, finance and economic fallout, and communications. Here, we’ve outlined the challenges they faced in these four areas in addition to their recommendations.

1. Medical Countermeasures The panel faced a severely strained healthcare system. There was a shortage of medicines, masks, and ventilators. Global and national regulations set the development and distribution of a vaccine out over a year—making it unable to address the immediate situation on the ground. The lack of proper equipment coupled with distrusted and under resourced governments led to cases being severely underreported.

Beyond the practices vital to slowing transmission—speedy distribution of accurate information, hand-washing, social distancing, and avoiding large crowds—the panel soon found itself needing to figure out how to develop and deploy certain medicines and medical equipment when it became evident that quarantines and tracking cases individually would be insufficient. To oversee distribution then, the panel recommended the World Health Organization (WHO) assume the primary role as a central conduit between governments and the private sector. WHO would decide how much of which resources should go where and when to combat stockpiling by individual nations. Recognizing that having a central authority in this position could breed a lot of distrust, the panel also advocated that WHO should hold daily briefings and commit to certain reforms to ensure maximum transparency. They recommended a global stockpile needs to be developed well in advance of an outbreak. And moreover, relaxing as many non-essential regulations around developing vaccines would be necessary to combat the pandemic’s spread as quickly as possible.

32 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

2. Trade and Travel Given concerns around travel and disruptions to supply chains and trade networks, the panel needed to balance the economic benefits of flowing goods, against the health consequences of the virus spreading.

The board urged against measures that would too severely contract national economies and suggested that travel—but more importantly, trade—shouldn’t be overly restricted, for it could further damage the countries struggling the most against the outbreak. Maintaining global trade routes amidst an outbreak is vital to supporting national economies and distributing vital, lifesaving commodities; suggesting that certain routes should be subsidized by governments in order to safeguard against their potential collapse. That said, travel advisories and limited restrictions would likely be necessary. But to protect those who do travel information should be widely distributed and accessible for anyone planning to travel. Furthermore, the WHO and national governments should make prospective investments in ensuring transportation workers have a reserve of equipment that can protect against the virus.

3. Finance and Economy At this point in the simulation, projections three months out suggest 30 million cases and three million deaths in the CAPS pandemic; financial markets the world over are in a free fall. At the one-year mark of the outbreak, global GDP is down 11%—by year two, 25%. This would be an economic collapse unseen since the Great Depression and given the loss of customers and workers, it could take even longer to climb out of.

Although the panel recognizes that there are numerous economic crises underway—especially the downstream impacts on national governments and industries that are “too big to fail”— money needs to go, first and foremost, toward stopping the pandemic itself. The economy will never be able to recover until that happens. International organizations like the World Bank, in addition to national governments, need to be willing to borrow significantly in the short term to mitigate worse effects down the road. Money needs to be moved into spaces that are yielding far higher returns. Once financial stimulus has been injected into the economy, investments need to be made in areas that generate value in terms of ending the pandemic and securing people’s livelihoods.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 33

4. Communication With now 4.2 Million cases, social and political unrest is beginning to pose significant challenges on the ability to communicate accurate information about the crisis. Social media companies are struggling to quell the spread of disinformation—especially from certain political leaders all over the world. Conspiracy theories are developing about healthcare workers and minority populations, leaving them vulnerable to acts of violence. Trust in governments, pharmaceutical companies, and international organizations are beginning to fall precipitously.

Asked about how to ensure reliable information is getting to the public, and false information stamped out, the board argues that the institutions which continue to see high levels of trust need to step up and take a leading role in disseminating accurate information and promoting best practices. These include people’s employers, local community institutions, faith-based organizations, and civil society actors that people frequently interact with. Social media companies need to recognize that they are not neutral platforms, but broadcasters, and thus need to partner with public health officials and experts to be sure the information being disseminated on their platforms are accurate. If they don’t, governments will then need to codify regulations that make certain that they are. However, governments shouldn’t overreach to the point of shutting down social media platforms all together as that would likely heighten tensions and concerns about their trustworthiness.

The WHO and reputable public health agencies should be holding daily briefings to provide accurate, up-to-date information.

What We Should Have Learned In addition to their obvious health risks and economic threats, pandemics reveal society’s worst, near-sighted tendencies. For years, the threat of a pandemic—despite all evidence—has been treated as some distant, abstract, or theoretical exercise. Leaving governments to cut funding to their public health systems and companies to maximize their short-term profits instead of investing in their workers, and preparing for a sharp economic downturn of the sort we are seeing now. COVID-19, like climate change, is exposing the full cost of our collective unwillingness to make difficult, short-term sacrifices, for the sake of securing a safer, healthier future.

The Event 201 board recognized that while these exercises are crucial to preparedness, they only matter if their advice is taken seriously.

But action is what counts; and the actions the board recommended 34 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

take years of ongoing planning and spending, which may be immediately unpopular. Instead, efforts to prepare for a pandemic of the kind we’re now experiencing have routinely been put on the back burner. Time that could have been spent ensuring a global stockpile of N-95 masks, or establishing a sound testing regime, was wasted in favor of pursuits to drive evening cable news cycles, polls, and quarterly profits.

Revisiting Event 201 in light of COVID-19 is unnerving given how many of the board’s predictions are proving accurate in every category they considered. Due to a lack of preparedness at the governmental level, citizens everywhere are now being told to isolate themselves from their own communities and loved ones, small businesses are primed to close, and workers are being laid off. And while individual sacrifices are indeed required, and do help to slow transmission, it’s evident that—by avoiding the hard work necessary to prepare well in advance for an outbreak like this—governments everywhere have shifted much of the burden of action onto people, who, because of their leaders’ obvious unreadiness, are panicking. ***** About the authors: Melissa Metos and Kasen Scharmann are Washngton, DC-based Diplomatic Courier Correspondents.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 35

IMAGE BY BIGSTOCKPHOTOS

GLOBAL PROBLEMS NEED GLOBAL SOLUTIONS

BY MARGERY KRAUS

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 37

A

s the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the world, nations are scrambling to protect their population and industries from the potentially devastating socioeconomic effects of the virus. Governments are increasingly restricting travel—domestic and international—to reduce contagion. According to Pew Research Center, more than 90 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries that restrict certain people arriving from other countries.

Many governments and international organizations are also hastily deploying stimulus packages to aid citizens and companies ravaged by the sudden, drastic changes in financial and economic outlook.

The World Bank and the IFC approved a $14 billion package to fast track financing to sustain economies and protect jobs. The United States recently passed a $2 trillion relief package—it’s largest in history—and the European Central Bank announced €750 billion in relief focused on flexible asset purchases meant to shore up the Euro.

China is also working on an effort valued at $183 billion to jumpstarts its economy emerging from the crisis.

Despite these measures, markets continue to reel from the downturn rippling across the world, fueled by fears of uncertainties and grim forecasts, plunging the global economy into what International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently called a “recession.” With so much for each government to address domestically, the notion of nations working together to fight this pandemic may seem like a far-fetched fantasy.

In fact, even before COVID-19 pushed nations to fend for themselves and protect their own interests with extreme prejudice, the world was already headed down a path towards greater regionalism and jingoism. Despite facing challenges of immense proportions and global scale requiring global solutions, the world had moved on from the euphoria of globalization in the early 1990s, to an era of backlash against globalization.

Climate change dominated headlines with no clear path for an organized response or solution. The fake news bandwagon gathered momentum and tore at the fabric of democratic institutions. All the while, nationalistic sentiments emerged in the rhetoric of populist political strongmen who ascended to new heights of power around the world.

Given this backdrop, the global COVID-19 crisis has the potential to exacerbate the increasing division and push countries and their citizenry to adopt more reclusive and protectionist economic, social and political policies toward the rest of the world. With a vacuum in global leadership and geopolitical skirmishes rousing diplomatic ten38 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

sions, the COVID-19 pandemic can easily be misused to disguise and justify isolationist policies as protective measures guarding against the debilitating impacts of the outbreak.

Throughout this pandemic, many affected countries have introduced an avalanche of measures to minimize the impact of the virus on public health and the economy, among other considerations. However, amidst this chaos, it is important to look through the noise and distinguish isolationist policies—such as calls for closed borders justified by political or ideological reasons—with isolation policies—such as calls for temporary cease of normal relations among countries justified by health reasons. Under the cover of a global pandemic, policies that undercut the foundation of a cooperative global society may slip into the core of governments around the world.

No single country can deal with a global crisis of this magnitude— with such existential consequences—on its own. The sheer scale of the challenges in the road ahead to recovery is just simply too much for any single country, or even a single region, to address alone.

If anything, this global pandemic has demonstrated the true extent to which we rely on each other to sustain the modern world and highlighted—albeit in an extremely painful and heartbreaking manner—certain weaknesses of our global, interconnected life.

However, as much as certain elements of globalization may have exacerbated the extent and the scope of some of the impact of the pandemic (e.g., countries not yet hit by COVID-19 facing supply chain disruptions due to factory closures in another country), the same element may help in the long road to recovery, if we work together (e.g., countries hard-hit by COVID-19 receiving aid from countries ahead of the curve).

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a critical blow against globalization. It’s a harsh reminder of the fragility of the global system supporting our interconnected and interdependent world—not your world or my world, our world. We must learn from our mistakes, reassess existing systems, prepare for future responses and work to come back stronger, together. Global problems need global solutions, which, in turn, require all of us to work, together. ***** About the author: Margery Kraus is the founder and executive chairman of APCO Worldwide. Ms. Kraus founded APCO in 1984 and transformed it from a company with one small Washington office to a multinational consulting firm in major cities throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 39

LET’S TAKE OFF OUR BLINDERS AND BUILD A NEW WORLD

BY HAKIMA EL HAITÉ & JOËL RUET

40 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

T

hree billion human beings confined. It’s not fiction; We are not on another planet! We are well on Earth—but an Earth where we feel threatened, where each country erects barriers, closes its borders, stops all activity including that of breathing on the street.

For the past couple of months, the coronavirus has been raging, wreaking havoc at our borders, and destabilising the world order.

We are left with a feeling of helplessness and inferiority in the face of such an imperceptible threat.

Every day the virus erodes the health of our citizens but also the heart of our economy, and forces us to make urgent decisions and in doing so destroys the foundations of our democracy.

The impact of the 2008 economic crisis is historic; that of the Covid-19 is even more so because it targets the very core of our system: the human, which we suddenly remember as being central to our economic and governance models, which are today threatened with collapse.

Never has such drastic action been taken by any country, much less by dozens of countries, placing nearly three billion humans in simultaneous confinement. Terrorism, the migration crisis, climate change, economic crises—none of these challenges have generated such extreme, individual, and radical reactions on the part of states.

Each country defends itself as it can and with the means at its disposal. But can we be satisfied with this “Each for himself and God for all” attitude?

Many countries, although having taken drastic measures for fear of the unknown, are struggling to treat and contain the virus and manage their populations.

Every day the pandemic causes more deaths and more confirmed cases. Every day the pandemic is gaining ground and penetrating new countries indiscriminately. This is largely our responsibility, because in the past weeks we have all been slow to take stock of the situation we find ourselves in, we still lack information as to how this pandemic will affect our health, social, and economic well-being. The general feeling that is taking hold is that of a war against the unknown.

Faced with the inability of the most powerful nations to contain the virus, a feeling of intense fear has developed, and the unanimous conviction that no country in the world is, nor has ever been, prepared to handle this kind of crisis.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 41

And yet the world has known many epidemics from which we have learned from, even if we seem to have forgotten some of the lessons.

Our worldview has been shaped based on the belief that wealth equaled prosperity—a confusion between power and resilience.

The Black Plague, which started in the Black Sea region around 1340, and spread quickly in Europe and in certain regions of Asia because of fleeing populations, ended the lives of 75 million people. It would have killed between 30% and 50% of the European population from 1347 to 1352, according to some estimates. From this, the world learned—then forgot—the usefulness of containment.

The Cholera pandemic that raged from 1852 to 1860 in India, Russia, and the rest of Europe killed more than a million people. This pandemic is still raging but only affects poor countries, particularly African countries, and still causes millions of deaths. From it we learned the importance of preventative hygiene.

The Spanish Flu, at the end of World War I, which originally came from the United States, killed between 50-100 million people in 1918 and 1919 worldwide. From this we should have learned (and always remembered) that societies impoverished by unequal economic systems and wars are the perfect ingredients for the propagation of an epidemic.

In 1970, when it had already been eradicated in most of the world, smallpox killed 20,000 people in India. From it we should have learned that development must be inclusive.

Finally, from Ebola, a highly contagious and deadly virus, humanity should have understood that it owed its salvation only to the geography of a virus that appeared in an almost totally disconnected area. The borders were already hardly crossed there, and the world in 2014-2015 passed by a disaster without paying much attention to it.

Many pandemics have raged in the world, but they are either old and are part of the side of history that humanity believes to have overcome by fragile wealth and power, or they still rage in countries qualified as underdeveloped despite decades of economic and social progress, and are part of the side of history that we want to ignore because it does not concern us.

Humanity, has therefore not capitalized on the historic health crises which affected practically all continents long before globalization.

The big powers have not capitalized on the recent health crises which still prevail in countries in the global south because of a misguided 42 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

idea that their development, and their knowledge is such that no new microbiological or viral disease could resist their defenses and cross their borders. That the economies were robust due to complexity, and not vice versa, complex therefore, fragile.

Covid-19—just as the swine and avian flu could have had this sad privilege before it—has demonstrated that the origin of pandemics is not always associated with underdevelopment, that the borders of contamination did not stop at the doors of the most developed countries, that the answers are not simple for anyone.

Many, including us, believe that the world before and after Covid-19 will no longer be the same. But it will be what we will do in its wake; each stone must count in the new system we build.

“Crisis” comes from the Greek “krisis”: to decide.

Will we work to lay the foundations for a better world? Or will we again miss this opportunity, as our capacities for financial, climatic, ecosystem, and moral rebound become exhausted?

Several scenarios are possible as to the future of the post-pandemic world: What do we want?

A rise to power of a cynical capitalism where the nations most advanced in research would try to take advantage of the distress of the least advanced and would turn this health crisis into an economic or geostrategic opportunity?

A rise in nationalism and protectionism, by obscuring the foundations of solidarity and global consensus based on multilateralism and international cooperation?

A rise in authoritarian regimes that would take advantage of temporary restrictions on rights and freedoms by establishing lasting mechanisms for their control, thereby threatening the most basic principles of respect for human rights and democracy?

Or, finally, do we want to build a world of hope, opening up prospects for the sustainability of peace and security between our communities? To achieve this we must, from this instant, start to build the foundations of this new world order.

Here is how: Strengthen international collaboration, based on the belief that the health security of the most powerful nation in this world is dependent on the health security of the weakest nation.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 43

It is clear that the prosperity of the most developed nations is conditioned on that of the least developed, often the holders of vast deposits of primary resources. We must pledge to work toward sustainable development.

We must work toward a world where nations are putting in place a common governance base with objectives, procedures, and means for health security, with ambitious, permanent, and collective treatment plans in place to prevent crises.

We need a world where people finally realize that protecting natural ecosystems is imperative for their survival. How is it possible that in an era where 80% of species are threatened with extinction we are still surprised at the spread of new pandemics? How is it possible that with the climate change crisis, man has not yet realized that he is creating new ecosystems? New diseases? New viruses?

What is happening today with the Covid-19 should challenge us to consider our humanity and our relationship with nature. We are transforming the Earth and the order of nature; so, we should not be surprised if nature resists us.

Humanity has experienced pandemics in each century of its history, our stubbornness and our models of development are precipitating us towards more frequent and destructive crises.

Unprepared, blinded by our own blinkers, we have accelerated social breakdown by asking the most vulnerable in our society to shoulder the burden of the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2008. We were rushed into emergency; conversely, the deconfinement, the resumption of activity, but also the human and economic choices of the future will have to be done with transparency, in debates bringing together all expertise and especially all human experience.

What is certain is that it will take a real discussion on health systems and a global pooling of capacity and health solidarity; that recovery will have to be driven by investment for the climate, nature and the planet, including humans, and not by short-term consumption in supply loops, which we know are not sustainable and which have just demonstrated their fragility.

What is certain is that this time the debate must be real and democratic, just and lasting economic strategy for absorbing the cost of the emergency measures, and, more deeply, we must not consider these measures not as a “price� but as a first investment towards a human-centered society. Humanity already has all the tools and the solutions, and good will abounds. This world is already accessible.

44 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

While we are giving in to the emergency, nature and its ecosystems are already preparing the next tornadoes, freezes, fires and floods, the next viruses to resolve the matter, in one way or another.

We have this choice, all together, today, to remove our blinders. ***** About the authors: Hakima el Haite is President of Liberal International, a climate scientist, entrepreneur and politician. JoĂŤl Ruet is an Economist with the CNRS (France) and President of The Bridge Tank, a G20-affiliated think tank.

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IMAGE BY PIXABAY

WHAT WILL NOT CHANGE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR GOVERNING

BY JON GREGORY

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 47

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redicting the future is always a risky proposition but turning to history as a guide can give us valuable perspective. The world is living through arguably the most significant crisis since World War II or the Great Depression, and there are many predictions of what it will mean for the post-COVID-19 order. While the pandemic will undoubtedly create some changes—some temporary and some long-lasting—current facts and historical comparisons suggest the world won’t be fundamentally different.

COVID-19 is tragedy with sickness and loss of life spreading across the planet and a global economic impact as dire as the world has seen since the 1930’s. Yet its long-term impacts are unlikely to be felt as keenly as in the case of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, or the Cold War. The latter two events a rethinking and realignment of the global order and global governance that we’re unlikely to see from COVID-19.

The aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis is likely be defined by its lack of scale, intensity and impact compared to the defining global events of the 20th century. This shouldn’t minimize the terrible nature and impact of the pandemic, which is already more deadly and disruptive that SARS, H1N1 and Ebola combined. Instead, let’s admit that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t create the global changes or develop the clarity of purpose that defined the aftermath of the 20th century’s defining events.

That is not to say that COVID-19 won’t bring major changes. It will significantly accelerate the trends that existed before the pandemic, locking current dynamics into place. But COVID-19 will not reverse or reinvent the years that preceded it. The framework established over the post-World War II era of globalization and the end of the Cold War remains in place, despite globalization’s relative decline—was already in motion.

A useful way to examine the aftermath of COVID-19 is to look at trends in economics, governance, and human capital that existed before COVID-19 and imagine the extent to which they will fundamentally be different that today. While admittedly nonscientific, this approach can lead to some informed conclusions.

Trends in the Private Sector In the economic realm, big tech will continue to dominate as more consolidation occurs, market share increases and innovation grows. Tech will drive the global expansion of wealth crea48 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

tion and displace or disrupt traditional businesses. In entertainment, the creation and distribution of content was already moving online. In energy, the abundance of fossil fuels combined with alternative sources of energy was already undermining oil markets, but they will bounce back when economic activity resumes. In finance and securities, stock markets are likely to remain dependent on big tech to drive growth, track with the disruptive impact of technology and geopolitical instability, keep faith in central bank policies, and rely on the stable value of the U.S. dollar. Since the 1930s, the stock market has been in negative territory for three consecutive years only once, from 1956-1958.Banking will continue to be defined by the post-2009 global framework and how to cope with changing demographics, government regulation and technology.

For global trade, the World Trade Organization’s most dire estimate of a reduction in trade is 32%, putting the global economy at its 2006 trade peak after non-stop growth since 1950.

While agriculture, food service and traditional retail are in serious trouble and may experience the greatest changes after COVID-19, they are essential and getting government support in some countries. Traditional retail’s market decline, which was moving quickly before the pandemic, will accelerate, as will the diversification of supply chains that began prior to the current trade wars and the pandemic.

Governance During and After the Pandemic Governments are currently being defined by their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. These performances may predict their post-pandemic approaches, but they are also reminiscent of trends seen in those countries before COVID-19. Countries like the United Kingdom, South Korea, the United States, Germany, and New Zealand have sought to balance civil liberties and pandemic response. Countries like Hungary and China have responded in ways that critics worry undermine the rule of law, diminishing human rights and civil liberties. Many other countries, such as Poland or Brazil, are somewhere in-between.

These are essentially the trend lines the world was experiencing before COVID-19, which suggests geopolitical trends aren’t changing in the way they did after World War II or the Cold War. Individual governments are responding to the worst pandemic in 100 years by considering domestic implications almost exclusively. There is no major coordinated global response by global powers and there are few incentives for leadership China’s atDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 49

tempts to lead are compromised by their initial involvement and potential hidden motives, while the U.S. focus is domestic due in part to concerns about global institutions and the EU lacks a hard consensus or the true global capacity to lead. This situation is unchanged from a year ago and is likely to characterize global cooperation after the pandemic.

Human Capital After the Pandemic Healthcare and education will continue to be disrupted by technological innovations like distance learning opportunities and health treatments, but that is also is creating classes of people who have access and can benefit and other classes of people who don’t have access and can’t benefit. Climate change has naturally abated with less economic activity, but this experience while has not produced the moment of clarity that will fundamentally change industry or public attitudes. Immigration and migration have been seriously disrupted by COVID-19 but will resume as economic activity resumes. In short, the world’s success on the human capital agenda will be mixed at best, with the same inherent contradictions and gaps that existed in 2019.

What Won’t Change After the Pandemic The pandemic crisis is dire and should not be minimized, but we should be clear that the post-pandemic world will resemble the world we live in today in important ways. The pandemic will not alter the fundamentals of the global system because there is no international consensus on its causes, severity, and outcomes.

At the moment, key parts of the global responses to COVID-19 are being led the medical, scientific, business, and NGO communities. These communities are the most likely to adjust and develop their own resilience programs for the next pandemic, but they have little hope in leading a global movement.

Over the past 10 years, populations across the world have increasingly viewed globalization and multilateralism with distrust. This sentiment is now mature and expanding as the world suffers its second major economic crisis in a decade. However, the world will continue to be defined by the current globalization framework.

The durability of the post-World War II and post-Cold War framework is not by accident. Central banks and monetary policy were derived in part to deal with crises like COVID-19. So 50 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

were organizations like the G7 and G20 blocs, GATT and the WTO, the UN and WHO, the World Bank and IMF, and regional alliances like the EU, ASEAN, and NATO. The irony of the current situation is that these institutions, which were designed to create global peace and security and have done so fairly well, are being called into question by populations around the world.

In late 1945, the world was in crisis as millions of lives had been lost or destroyed and economies and entire nations had to be rebuilt. We don’t know what the world will look like a year or two years from now, but based on what we currently know and what history has taught us, we can be hopeful that it will resemble much of the world we left behind in 2019. ***** About the author: Jon Gregory is Vice President at Yorktown Solutions, a foreign affairs advocacy and political risk advisory firm in Washington, DC, and worked previously in government, public affairs and non-profit roles, advancing policy initiatives to address emerging domestic and global issues.

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HOW COVID-19 IS CHANGING THE SOFT POWER GAME

BY AFTAN SNYDER & MICHELLE SINDYUKOV

52 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

T

he COVID-19 pandemic is changing how countries assess and deploy soft power—nations that do not recognize this and fail to evolve their own strategies may be left behind when the virus eventually abates.

“Soft power” broadly refers to the ability to shape the preferences of others. It involves attracting and co-opting others into doing what you want, rather than coercing them via hard power; this attractiveness can come from a country’s culture, political ideals, policies and more.

COVID-19 has wrought a couple changes upon how nations exercise soft power.

The main change is that a nation’s ability to project influence now significantly hinges on how it has responded to the crisis.

Countries that have responded relatively effectively (e.g., South Korea or Taiwan) find themselves with a larger voice in issues or platforms where they might not have held as much sway before.

For instance, South Korea’s capable mitigation techniques have transformed the country’s brand from tech know-how into exemplary public health and citizen cooperation.

In contrast, struggling countries have seen their influence shrink.

They now serve as a stark warning of what could happen: in Italy, footage of Italian mayors chastising lockdown-dodgers went viral, and the Italian Prime Minister cautioned that the EU’s very existence was at stake.

Resource-sharing is an important component to the changes in soft power. While aid has always been one way to shape diplomacy and politics, it is usually a tiny proportion of budgets and tends to occur in the background. For instance, in 2019 the United States’ foreign aid accounted for less than 1% of the federal budget. In 2018, South Korea spent $2.8 billion on official development assistance, or 0.14% of gross national income.

Today, through what analysts call “pandemic diplomacy” or “COVID diplomacy” or “mask diplomacy,” the virus has made foreign aid a more public tool, giving it proportionally more weight than its minimal budgets would imply. Most prominently, China has sent donations of medical equipment and professional support across Europe and Africa. South Korean President Moon Jae-in has developed a campaign to provide testing kits and other resources. The UK is giving £744m in supplies to help developing nations battle coronavirus. And even tiny countries such as Cuba are responding by sending doctors abroad.

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Research shows that a country’s response to the crisis is affecting how people view that country’s leadership.

A recent APCO Worldwide survey measured how 10 countries’ responses to COVID-19 are changing Americans’ perceptions of those countries. Results show that South Korea, Canada and Germany have the highest net positive change in impressions (+19, +18, and +15, respectively), while China has the most negative (net -24), followed by Iran (-13) and Italy (-4).

Government response during a time of crisis is not the only variable affecting how people perceive a country’s leadership. COVID-19 has given private citizens and companies an outsized voice in the creation of soft power, as well as an unusual opportunity to further their own brand.

For example, French billionaire Bernard Arnault quickly converted his Louis Vuitton factories to help meet France’s call for hand sanitizers. This leadership not only amplified the company’s brand but also showed the responsiveness of French industry in devising creative solutions. Chinese businessman Jack Ma is 54 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

using the Ma Foundation to send medical supplies and testing kits to countries around the world, a move that one assessment notes will help Ma in China as well as “promot[e] China’s ability to recover and help others.” Such actions also strengthen Ma’s personal brand abroad.

Finally, COVID-19 has increased social media’s role in proliferating information about a country’s response. The digital age has made brand projection both easier and wider; any fresh news leaps onto screens and around the world instantly. COVID-19 has accelerated these trends, especially as stay-at-home orders force people onto their devices more frequently. The social media spotlight on good deeds—and on missteps—has never been brighter. This forces soft power strategies to become more reactive than in decades prior.

To respond to these changes, countries need to do several things.

First, whenever possible emulate countries that have found effective measures for containing the virus. Recognize when the crisis has brought a new player to the table. Consider which figures or companies can assist your government in the crisis, or assist other governments in theirs. And finally, consider social media: at a time when many people are home and stress levels are high, social media wields considerable authority in transmitting impressions about what you’re doing right and wrong.

Nations that do not consider these trends could find themselves left behind once the world emerges from the pandemic. The postCOVID-19 environment will certainly look different in a variety of ways, and a changed soft power landscape will be one of them. ***** About the authors: Aftan Snyder is an associate director at APCO Worldwide, specializing on the Middle Eastern portfolio as well as contracts related to security, policy, and public diplomacy. Michelle Sindyukov is a consultant in APCO Worldwide’s Campaigns and Advocacy practice, specializing in assisting governments and multinational businesses across Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

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THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A PANDEMICERA IRAN DEAL

BY OMEED ALERASOOL & RYEN BANI-HASHEMI

56 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

T

he coronavirus pandemic is straining healthcare systems and economies around the world. A failure to coordinate an effective global response and aid struggling countries at this early stage will only intensify an already dire reality. The quick spread of the virus since last December highlights the nature of contagion in a globalized world. One country’s inability to manage an epidemic can rapidly metastasize into a global pandemic.

To defeat this historic pandemic, the United States must rise to the challenge and provide aid and support to all countries—allies and foes. And success in responding to this global crisis requires coordination with one of the hardest-hit countries, Iran. Alarming forecasts from Sharif University in Tehran predict a scenario of up to 3.5 million Iranians, nearly 5% of the population, dying from COVID-19 by the end of May. Continued sanctions and animosity create a nearly insurmountable obstacle in the way of Iran’s pandemic response, and, by extension, only hamper efforts to rid the world of the coronavirus. Global coordination is necessary to address the coronavirus pandemic.

Adherence to the “maximum pressure” campaign will only amplify the global health risk. Sanctions contribute to Iran’s inability to effectively control and combat the pandemic. At the same time, the escalating harm caused by the coronavirus within Iran risks triggering retaliatory and provocative behavior by the regime, as U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie warned last month. The intended purpose of sanctions is presumably to pressure Iran from within and without, and to force the regime to the negotiating table with a weakened hand. But if the Trump administration hoped for massive protests in Iran, such unrest is far-fetched during a contagious pandemic that is especially ravaging the Iranian public. In fact, the people that sanctions intend to push to the streets are the ones staying home in the wake of the pandemic.

Continued sanctions provide a needed scapegoat. As Iran struggles to handle the pandemic, clerics, politicians, and military leaders have sought to blame the United States and intensify anti-American sentiment in an effort to shore up support. The Iranian people are increasingly dissatisfied with their leaders and U.S. efforts have sought to heighten their distrust and disillusionment. However, as Iranians die in overcrowded hospitals struggling with low supplies of respirator masks, ventilators, and raw materials for the manufacture of antiviral drugs, the regime’s rhetoric may gain traction, especially among the younger generation. Maintaining current policies during this unprecedented crisis risks entrenching the regime and alienating the Iranian DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 57

people, whom the State Department eagerly seeks to support.

The current global crisis is an opportunity for the United States to directly counter regime propaganda by easing sanctions.

In times of necessity, the United States and the Islamic Republic have found ways to put their differences aside. In the early 2000s, the Bush administration and Iran cooperated against the Taliban. Similarly, the United States quickly created immediate sanctions exemptions following devastating earthquakes in Iran in 2003 and 2012. The current pandemic is a crisis like no other. It requires truly global cooperation and coordination. Lifting sanctions, at least temporarily, ensures that the global response does not face additional obstacles to an already daunting challenge that necessarily requires the collective efforts of the international community.

In combating a pandemic, all options should be on the table.

Though formally there are humanitarian exemptions to sanctions on Iran, the Treasury Department has prosecuted medical companies for the sale of medical supplies in the past. Perceived uncertainty around such exemptions prevent the sale of critical supplies to Iran, as suppliers are disincentivized by the risk of federal prosecution. A temporary pause to a broader array of sanctions will send a clear signal that humanitarian suppliers will not be prosecuted during this international crisis. Such relief will not only boost the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic, but it will also provide a unique diplomatic opening once the battle is won. Mirroring the early days of the nuclear negotiations, coordination between medical experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Iranian Ministry of Health, and the World Health Organization could pave a path towards rebuilding trust and subsequently addressing other issues between the United States and Iran, while contributing directly to international pandemic response efforts. To ease “maximum pressure� hawks in the Trump administration, sanctions relief could include an automatic snapback feature, where sanctions would snap back into place if the post-pandemic diplomatic opportunity is ultimately floundered.

Global cooperation between experts must be matched with coordinated distribution of medical aid and supplies. As the U.S. federal government rapidly ramps up production of critically important medical supplies to meet domestic needs, the Trump administration has an opportunity to develop a global pandemic version of FDR’s Lend-Lease policy. Once domestic needs are met, the United States should undoubtedly continue rapid production in order to provide unconditional aid to pandemic re58 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

sponse efforts abroad. China has already started providing such aid as it slows the spread of the virus at home. As a major front in the battle against the pandemic, Iran would be a key recipient of supplies—whether directly from U.S. manufacturers or indirectly through U.S. allies and partners.

Diplomacy is of utmost importance in resolving tensions between the United States and Iran and the most effective way to achieve long-term U.S. foreign policy goals. Successful international coordination now creates the potential for renewed diplomatic progress once the pandemic is defeated. Though embracing such a post-pandemic opportunity would be a major foreign policy victory, rapprochement between the two foes is far from guaranteed. Nevertheless, coordinating with Iran and countries around the world is imperative right now. And, at the very least, failure to build upon any post-pandemic diplomatic openings between the United States and Iran includes a critical silver lining: limiting the harm caused by the coronavirus pandemic and ending its spread once and for all. ***** About the authors: Omeed Alerasool is a student at Harvard Law School, and formerly the Vice President of Thought Leadership at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. His commentary on democracy and foreign policy has appeared in outlets including HuffPost. Ryen Bani-Hashemi is a student at Harvard Law School.

His academic interests include the law of armed conflict, human rights, and U.S.-Iran relations.

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IMAGE BY ROBERT NORTON VIA UNSPLASH

COVID-19 WILL HERALD A SEACHANGE IN GLOBAL AFFAIRS

BY BURHAN AL-GAILANI

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“Y

ou know there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.”

This was how Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan described the political scene in Britain on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. Although COVID-19 is still in its early stages, I believe it will herald similar once-in-a-generation changes across a range of political and economic issues.

New questions will be asked about globalization and risk. The crisis has highlighted the vulnerability of our globalized, justin-time economy when international flows of goods and people suddenly grind to a halt.

Some citizens and governments may wish to prioritize increased domestic capacity, resilience and control in a range of sectors from healthcare and telecoms to food production and manufacturing. Such a move would likely drive renewed interest in liberal western economies in reshoring jobs from overseas and supporting national industrial champions alongside debates over the appropriate level of state intervention in the economy, and who should ultimately pay. Others, however, may prefer to regard COVID-19 as a “black swan” event in order to avoid asking such difficult and costly questions.

For now, governments are funding the immediate costs of their national stimulus packages through increased borrowing at historically low interest rates. It is likely that this money will only be repaid after many decades, as was the case with European countries’ Marshall Plan debts. Indeed, Britain did not finally clear its World War II debts until 2006.

Over time, we can expect political leaders to increase general taxation, arguing that because COVID-19 impacts all members of society, the costs should be shared. But alongside this the biggest international businesses seen to have weathered the coronavirus storm the best—or indeed won increased market share during the crisis, as some of the biggest tech firms are now doing—should expect higher taxes and increased regulatory scrutiny. After the pandemic, all businesses will feel increased pressure from consumers, governments, and investors to demonstrate, in a real and tangible way, their positive contribution to all their stakeholders, including employees, customers and the wider community.

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Governments around the world have been careful to frame the stimulus measures as temporary and exceptional. But as the economic damage of COVID-19 becomes clearer, the demands to do even more will only increase. Despite this there will be real political and economic pressure for things to “return to normal” as quickly as possible. This view will be particularly strong among the large numbers of people whose jobs or businesses have been disrupted by the virus, especially those who may already be skeptical towards globalization and have previously supported populist causes. Determining the right time to unwind COVID-19 support programmes will therefore be one of the key political, economic and policy questions for the coming years.

This points to a broader question related to whether it will be desirable for life to “return to normal” at all. Without wishing to minimize the large numbers whose health and economic prospects have suffered as a result of coronavirus, we are also seeing a great deal of innovation and creative thinking being applied to a wide range of problems. Technologies from AI to conferencing platforms like Zoom are helping everything from fighting online misinformation to enabling large numbers of people to work remotely. With the crisis still ongoing, people appear largely willing to overlook some of the very real privacy and surveillance concerns that arise from some of the more intrusive technological solutions that have been developed to enforce lockdowns and track the spread of the disease. But in time societies will need to decide where they wish to draw the line on data collection and its use.

While the ultimate costs of COVID-19 are likely to dwarf those of the 2008 crash, many are already arguing that people’s willingness to make collective sacrifices for the greater good shows that it will be possible to tackle long term challenges like climate change. If stakeholders emerge from this crisis more willing to consider innovative solutions to previously intractable issues, and work collaboratively to address shared issues, then coronavirus will have had at least one positive impact. ***** About the author: Burhan Al-Gailani, a public affairs specialist with over a decade of experience in the industry, is a director in APCO Worldwide’s London office, where he leads the firm’s UK public affairs practice.

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IMAGE BY JOSE CARLOS ICHIRO VIA UNSPLASH

GOVERNMENT AID POST-PANDEMIC

BY ARUN S. NAIR

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C

ountries around the world are staring at a COVID-19-induced recession that is being described as the worst since the (1929-1939) Great Depression.

During normal times, government aid—or what is called ‘Official Development Assistance’ (ODA)—from rich countries is used to boost economic development and welfare in developing nations. In times like these, ODA has become one of the primary sources of finance that help the developing world to recover.

During previous crises such as the 2008 global financial crisis and the 1982 Mexican debt crisis, donor countries deployed counter-cyclical policies to provide much-needed government aid to developing countries. Increased ODA action is also likely in the coming months and during the post-pandemic period.

China’s emergence as a geopolitical and geo-economic force is altering government aid dynamics. China already provides government aid (highly concessional finance) and “commercially oriented state financing” to countries in need, while expanding its influence in the process. China’s foreign aid is also being used to take forward its mega-connectivity project called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

According to UN Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) estimates, developing countries barring China will need a $2.5 trillion COVID-19 crisis package. This is to help them deal with economic fallout from the pandemic including “capital outflows, growing bond spreads, currency depreciations and lost export earnings, including from falling commodity prices and declining tourist revenues.” This crisis package, UNCTAD suggests, should include liquidity injection and debt cancellation—each to the tune of $1 trillion, in addition to ODA worth $500 billion.

Mobilization of ODA Thus Far How the mobilization of ODA has played out so far is not promising.

ODA provided by 29 donor countries, including the US through the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) totalled $152.8 billion in 2019. The US was the biggest ODA donor with $34.6 billion.

This ODA amount (on a grant equivalent basis) as percent of the Gross National Income (GNI) of the US was only 0.16. Keep in mind that the UN had adopted a target of 0.7% of donor GNI as ODA. In 2019, total ODA provided by DAC member countries as a percentage of their combined GNI was just 0.3. Only the UK, Den66 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

mark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg had an ODA/GNI ratio of 0.7 per cent or above that year. The picture was more or less the same in 2018.

It is important to consider ODA’s history. An ODA/GNI ratio target of 1% was proposed and circulated at the UN-level in 1958.

After detailed discussions, the 0.7% target was agreed upon in 1970 and an UN General Assembly Resolution was adopted to this effect.

However, this target has largely remained on paper. Only a few DAC member countries such as Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, and the UK have met this target so far, while the “weighted average of DAC members’ ODA has never exceeded 0.4% of GNP (Gross National Product, a concept equivalent to GNI)” (also see here).

UNCTAD estimates that if the DAC countries had been meeting the 0.7% target, it would have resulted in the developing nations receiving an additional USD 2 trillion over the decade since the 2008 financial crisis.

China’s Expanding Aid Footprint Meanwhile, China has been quietly expanding its official finance (a combination of ODA and other forms of state financing) footprint across the world. It has now nearly caught up with the U.S.—the world’s largest donor country.

China’s official finance during the 2000-2014 period was $354.3 billion as against $394.6 billion of the U.S. during the same period, according to a report by the College of William & Mary research lab AidData.

The composition of aid from the US and China displays substantial differences. Nearly 93% of U.S. official finance was ODA and the remaining was “Other Official Flows” (OOF)—or what was mostly non-concessional finance and mainly for commercial or representational objectives.

On the other hand, the ODA element of China’s total official finance from 2000 to 2014 was only $81.1 billion (23%), while the OOF component formed the majority at $216.3 billion (61%).

The remaining 16% was categorised as “vague Official Finance” (clearly official finance, but there was not enough information to categorise them under either ODA or OOF).

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Africa received the majority of Chinese official finance, but countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia—as well as Russia—were also beneficiaries. China’s focus with this aid was mainly on energy and connectivity-related sectors.

While Chinese government-aided projects have helped bring down inequality in the beneficiary countries, there are also negative effects from China’s official finance as well in the recipient nations. These include debt traps, instances of corruption, as well as problems relating to inadequate protection of labour rights and environment.

Aid in a Time of Pandemic Following the spread of COVID-19 across the world, China (still considered a developing country) has been sending aid (government and private) to several developed European countries that have been and are still ODA donor countries. However, there has been criticism regarding the quality of aid and the geopolitical motive behind China’s help.

China has also been quick to send aid supplies to several African nations. Critics claim China has not shown the needed flexibility to waive off the debt that some African countries owe it. This results in countries which rely on commodity exports being shackled in their ability to repay loans to China.

Aid from Western donors has also come under fire. A former OECD insider in 2019 criticized problems regarding how ODA is defined and reported. In its response, the OECD DAC said though some steps have been taken in this regard, there is still “unfinished business”. Western donors have also been accused of paying insufficient attention to crucial areas such as development of infrastructure, especially energy-related, manufacturing and technology in the developing country recipients, in turn leading to sub-optimal outcomes.

The Future of Government Aid Former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin and Peking University senior fellow Yan Wang referred to such problems and instead supported a development assistance strategy—similar to China’s—that combines aid, trade and investment (both public and private). Such a strategy, they suggested, would ensure developing countries increase their public sector assets, industrialize faster, and better utilize their comparative advantages.

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While government aid still has a role to play in addressing development concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic shows that risks arising from the interconnected and inter-dependent nature of a globalized world can only be solved collectively. This requires new thinking and novel approaches. It also requires donors— which previously saw government as a way to expand influence— to learn from their past mistakes.

They should consider the concept of principled aid where aid is allocated on the basis of the requirements and vulnerabilities of the recipient countries. Adoption of the principled aid concept can also ensure that ODA is not used to push commercial or geostrategic interests of the donors.

Reforms of the ODA mechanisms are also important in the context of ‘leakage’ of the aid amount from aid-dependent countries.

A recent research paper found that when World Bank disbursed aid to some of the most aid-dependent nations, there was a coinciding increase in deposits to offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management. This reflected “aid capture” by politically connected and influential people.

It is therefore important for poor aid recipient countries to adopt better aid management practices so that such funds are channeled to meet their “national development priorities” in such a manner that they can get rid of their aid dependency sooner. ***** About the author: Arun S. Nair is a Visiting Fellow at the New Delhi-based think-tank Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS). He is a policy specialist working in the areas of International Trade and Investment, E-commerce, Connectivity and Social Enterprise & Impact Investment.

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IMAGE BY PIXABAY

THE CASE FOR A NEW GLOCALISM, POWERED BY AI

BY LUCA BRUNNER & SHALINI TREFZER

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P

re-2020 common sense: “There is no way we can shut down these factories.”

“Living without air travel in the 21st century? Impossible!”

“Seriously? If we shut all these things down, we may as well just turn off most of the global economic engines and go home!”

In the past few months, this last exclamation has become more of a reality than a doomsday scenario. The COVID-19 pandemic has blown every one of these nuggets of conventional wisdom to smithereens. As terrible a toll as the pandemic has exacted from nearly every country and community by now, it has also brought about an opening of new vistas and a vision of how things could be in the future, in ways we never imagined were possible. If you believe in miracles—or at least in the power of changing the world—we invite you to join us on a journey that is at the very beginning of unfurling in the minds of millions around the world.

Walk with us as we imagine an optimistic vision for a globalized world that values inclusion and strong communities, looking out for the world and for one another.

In the world as it was, interconnectivity was a necessary condition for globalization. Unfortunately, left unchecked, that interconnectivity, which has brought so many together, has also led to an unprecedented vulnerability to economical, societal, and ecological domino effects (as Bartol & Coden stated in 2017).

However controversial its spread has been, most business and community leaders are calling for globalization in a new shape; not a roll-back of the planet to pre-global conditions. Our notion of globalization aims to be even more people-centered, supported and skyrocketed by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

At the same time, every one of us read (or perhaps even experienced first-hand) with horror the drama of life and death as it exploded and played out in and among communities. Globalization simply could not replace the local hospital, the community kitchen, the teachers who had to rapidly shift into digital education mode, the maintenance and critical service personnel who make the local worlds inside the big globe, go around. Those communities who invested in their infrastructure, those societies which responded well with the right measures, fared far better and their people endured less suffering than those that did or could not. After COVID-19, it’s a safe bet to say that no one who lived in a community which was better prepared to take care of them is going to argue against the value of building local expertise and resilience.

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Hence, we call our proposal for a new, more sustainable global narrative “the new Glocalism.” As we envision it, Glocalism in its perfect form is the inherent interdependence of high-functioning local economies and societies on the micro level, and a richly interconnected globalized world on the macro level. In a nutshell, we believe in the power of Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.

It seems that communities are in the best position to ignite this fire, and technologies like AI will play a major role in fueling it as it takes shape. And, yes, we think the time is right to leave apocalyptic scenarios in the dust and pursue this dream.

Reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic and a world suffering from many other tribulations, such as the wars in Syria and Yemen, or the global financial crisis in 2008, populists all over the world are trying to pull their old romanticized nationalist narratives out of the mothballs. Politicians like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán try to push nationalism and autocracy under the guise of protecting public health. This is the wrong trajectory. As Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, framed it, “withdrawing support from globalization is taking us in the wrong direction.”

COVID-19 has shown us that the same globalization that made it possible to spread a pandemic also made it possible for humans to collaborate to find a cure in ways they otherwise could not have. If we want to build bridges and not walls, our mindset should start shifting towards creating resilience and effective systems of checks and balances. Can technologies such AI help us do this? How?

The Necessity of “Systems Thinking” and Shared Data We have built our new glocalist vision on the foundation of three key assumptions: 1. When it comes to technological innovations—at least the machine learning that drives most of today’s AI—depends on the quality of the underlying data. There is much benefit that humanity can derive from sharing key data for the success of technology as a common resource. Our privacy debates have gotten increasingly stuck in a deadlock. To those of you who might say, “you want me to share my gold?” our humble response is, “some of it, yes.” Well done on recognizing that data is the new gold, but we need to finally make this gold a public good and start collaboratively thinking about its safe usage. A glance at Estonia’s public data system is worth a read in this context.

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2. Dialogue—and eventually consensus around checks and balances—is critical if we are going to have a world where the riches of globalization benefit communities everywhere. We cannot think in bits and pieces any more, we must all become adept at recognizing interconnections and the bigger picture.

Interconnectivity needs appropriate regulation, but more importantly awareness and preparedness for system failures or unforeseen events.

3. The way to reliably achieve both 1) and 2) is by making “systems thinking” a mandatory subject in schools all over the world.

A new common goal for our precious, but often quarreling multilateral organizations. This corresponds to the UN’s SDG 4 (Quality Education).

We mentioned AI as one of these disruptive, yet promising, forces of our proposed new glocalism. Let us examine, with some examples, how AI can support the vision we have imagined, across humanity, for all societies, enabling and transforming healthcare, travel, energy, art, and even off-planet travel.

For years, systems thinkers around the world have been calling upon us to understand the interconnectedness of our choices and their outcomes to the natural world, which surrounds and nourishes us. 2020 started off with the COVID-19 bang, which continues to foment and torment nearly the entire human world.

Every aspect of life, from the rhythms of community to the global supply chain of materials and finished goods, to intergenerational interaction, has been turned on its head; already existing crises have become even more complex.

AI in the Service of Humanity Yet, the pandemic has made seemingly impossible things happen. The skies over world metropolises such as New Delhi, Jakarta, Tokyo, and New York City sparkle blue like in pre-industrial times. Wild animals are roaming parks and places they would never otherwise dare to enter. City noises are a thing of the past (except the sirens). The night sky is peppered with sparkly stars.

Never before has the interconnectedness of the planet been on display as it is now. These are unprecedented times and they’re proving to us that not everything we take for granted is so, that we must put humanity’s collective will and creativity to use to build resilience at the community level. In our global world, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we are only as safe, or as healthy, or as sustainably prosperous as our weakest and most 74 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

vulnerable. Can AI help? We think yes. What if we used AI to understand better how to: 1. Protect industries by distributing their supply chains around the world and at the same time, building manufacturing strength locally.

2. Enable physicians and researchers to share data and research outcomes and at the same time, invest into robust hospital infrastructure and teaching programs at the country-level.

3. Create common-property data sets to power extremely intelligent global forecasting systems which can be deployed at the community level in times of threat from global events, pandemics, war or civil unrest.

Every human is impacted by today’s technological shifts. Addressing this impact on the individual level is just as important as tackling it on the societal level. When it comes to AI, for a long time the dialogue has been around whether we should strive for the development of a sci-fi-like superhuman or cyborg.

Or, should we restrict the further development towards artificial general intelligence and finally superintelligence. AI governance, legal boundaries, and stable AI ethical principles will be crucial to avoid irreversible damage for humanity, potentially caused by the evil use of AI or unintended consequences of it. In addition, we want to shed light on the huge potential of AI in the service of humanity. The tiring battle between tech enthusiasts and tech skeptics impedes our view of the countless opportunities.

Augmenting, Not Replacing Human Intelligence First of all, it is important to understand that the goal of creating and strengthening AI-powered systems should not be a goal in itself. Moreover, we stand for an AI whose goal is complementing and enhancing human intelligence rather than replacing it. A few great applied examples are: • Anticipating the risk and mitigating the aftermath of natural and human catastrophes using fast performing disaster prediction and resources allocation systems, such as a machine learning—driven map of water sources in crisis zones.

• Creation of AI tools to efficiently fight the spread of fake news, demagoguery, and targeted misinformation. As elaborated by DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 75

Marr (2020) artificial intelligence can be used to verify the truth of articles. Since the amount of content generated daily is too much for humans to effectively monitor, artificial intelligence offers a solution that makes it possible to unmask fake news and the distortion of facts.

• Remote voting systems to keep democracy alive during lockdowns, such as the current one. Democratic institutions should never be silenced, freedom of expression should not be a “fair weather human right.” Luckily, several working groups, which emerged out of the numerous fully virtual “fight COVID-19” hackathons all over the world have already attended to this matter and started advising governments and other decision-making bodies.

• A virtual “Stammtisch” app where interested people are matched by AI algorithms to other users in order to create new contacts and to fuel new inspirational thoughts, notably in times of physical distancing.

• Re-imagining what is possible for the most vulnerable among us, as well as cities and governments from being able to deploy AI right at the edge. Safely and protecting the dignity and agency of the humans it serves.

Many more so-called “AI for Good” use cases can be explored in this comprehensive analysis or by attending the AI for Good Summit in Geneva in fall 2020.

We already briefly introduced you to the concept of commonproperty data. Now, let’s apply it to human health. If there is one major lesson the pandemic has taught us, it is that sometimes learning from one another can literally make the difference between life and death. Our world, when we are not shuttered by a nanoscopic virus, is full of movement: of people, of goods, of services, of solutions, and of trouble as well. In such a world, we already have the means to use technology to bring increasing levels of care and health security to everyone on the planet. We ask ourselves, if an entire society is trained to be systems thinkers and problem solvers, what is possible for us in improving our healthcare? The sky does seem to be the limit. It is imperative that we share certain health and well-being data into a common pool that belongs to all humanity and can be made available to innovators and researchers, as well as governments and companies. This data pool will allow us to develop AI-inspired solutions faster with more effective outcomes, which can be deployed where needed in our communities and beyond. The first

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such “common pool data” examples are already out there, we just have to scale them up to a universal level. Obviously, this will require us to trust and communicate in ways beyond what we are currently used to, but what is the alternative? Not unveiling healthcare’s full potential?

Be it space-traveling, political debate, energy production or our century-old passion for the arts—our newly created glocalism provides an idealistic but achievable vision of the world in a few years. Technologies such as AI can help, but a variety of ingredients will make the right mix for this new recipe for a less vulnerable global society. Let us embark on this journey together.

In future articles, we will examine in depth how common-data pools, global-level forecasting and local application might be applied in areas critical to human wellbeing in the future: healthcare, energy, travel (get ready for a spicy debate), education, artistic visions, and even off-world topics. ***** About the authors: Luca Brunner is Managing Director of CognitiveValley - The AI Movement, a Switzerland-based foundation on artificial intelligence and its implications. Luca is also CoHead and Co-Founder of the global network of grassroots think tanks “Open Think Tank Network” and International Outreach Ambassador for the “Youth Café” in Kenya. Shalini Trefzer serves as Executive Director of World in 2050, the Think Tank arm of Diplomatic Courier. Shalini has a Bachelors in Environmental Resources Engineering and spent much of her career in managing product development programs in Technology and Pharma.

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IN A QUARANTINED WORLD, WOMEN HAVE THE MOST TO LOSE

BY NOAH DOWE

78 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 hurts everybody, but the damage it does isn’t always proportional.

If you’ve been watching the numbers, you may have noticed that men infected with COVID-19 are dying at a much higher rate than women. We don’t have scientifically proven answers for why yet, but the impacts of COVID-19 reach far beyond what it does to the human body. The United States is gripped by a bizarre debate over whether a life-saving quarantine is worth the economic damage as unemployment claims hit a decade-high mark. Millions worldwide have lost their sources of income. Students, many of whom do not have access to the internet, have been forced to take online classes or suspend schooling entirely. The infection may not discriminate, but our reaction to it does. In a world consumed by COVID-19, women will suffer the most.

Past epidemics provided important insights into gender-differentiated impacts from outbreaks and quarantines, but those lessons have been largely ignored. Research found that women’s income in the three countries most affected by the 2014 Ebola outbreak recovered much slower than men’s. This is no coincidence. Despite their ever-growing participation in the workforce, women remained burdened by the “second shift” upon returning home, taking on the majority of housework and childcare duties.

Women’s Economic Vulnerability

Because women are more frequently employed in part-time positions and the informal economy, they are more susceptible to losing their jobs in a pandemic. They are also more likely to voluntarily give up work to take care of children who are now confined to the house. In a world without public schools and daycares to watch them, one parent will have to stay home—and it’s almost always the mother.

Social attitudes toward women’s role in public spaces have progressed over the past century, with women being increasingly likely to be employed, hold political office, and obtain higher education. Despite this, a study recently released by Gallup revealed that even young opposite-sex couples prefer an arrangement in which the man works and the woman stays at home. As domestic responsibilities mount, women across the world are abandoning career ambitions to take care of the home. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently voiced concerns that the pandemic has the potential to erase 25 years of progress toward greater gender equality as women trade paid jobs for unpaid ones.

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This trend poses an additional danger. Women’s role as domestic caretakers put them at higher risk of exposure to sick family members. Moreover, overextended healthcare services now have fewer resources to handle pregnant women even as COVID-19 is reported to cause premature birth. Under quarantine, a rise in home births is likely to result in more complications. In the U.S.— which has the highest maternal mortality rate of all developed nations—women of color are four times more likely to die from childbirth than Caucasian women, and that number is likely to get worse. In the developing world, the loss of health workers in rural areas—who are often women—will have consequences for years to come.

Women’s Educational Vulnerability COVID-19 also jeopardizes the next generation of women. Sierra Leone closed schools nationwide for the 2014-2015 academic year in response to Ebola. When classes resumed, one out of every six school-aged girls in did not return to classes. Many chose to pursue a job rather than finish their education. Others had no choice—during the lockdown, teenage pregnancy rates increased by up to 65% in some communities, forcing girls to abandon their schooling in order to raise a child. These pregnancies often resulted from sexual violence or enforced prostitution after a breadwinning family member died. With medical and judicial infrastructure crippled by the quarantine, victimized women had little recourse. The global quarantine stemming from COVID-19—the impacts of which will last much longer than Ebola—will undoubtedly bring about more extreme consequences, especially as access to online education remains difficult for rural and impoverished communities. It is possible that an entire generation of girls in developing nations will not return to school after the pandemic is over.

The Pandemic and Domestic Violence Even the home may not be a safe place for women. Confined with their abusers, victims of domestic violence—which disproportionately affects women—are in more danger than ever. Incidents of domestic violence in China have doubled since the outbreak began. Women who were once safe at work or school are now trapped indefinitely with their abusers as systems of support dissipate under the quarantine. In some nations, abuse shelters have even been temporarily transformed into makeshift hospitals, while those that remain are financially and administratively 80 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

strained due to quarantine procedures. Many victims cannot take shelter with their parents after an incident out of fear that they will infect them. Furthermore, courts are mostly closed, meaning restraining orders are nearly impossible to obtain. While crisis lines and online resources remain available, their services are not necessarily be adequate for everyone.

Addressing Women’s Vulnerability in Pandemics Sierra Leone retained a law banning pregnant girls from attending school after the Ebola outbreak despite the exponential rise in the number of teenage pregnancies. Such destructive policies must be abandoned in the post-COVID-19 world. We must acknowledge women’s unique vulnerabilities in the wake of pandemics and shape our institutions to counteract them. President Trump’s selection of only two women to serve on the twentytwo-member White House Coronavirus Task Force is a great example of exactly what we cannot do. Women—millions of whom are on the frontlines fighting the virus—should be represented in the bodies we develop to address it. Governments should prioritize universal paid leave and direct cash payments to adults so that victims of domestic violence can maintain financial independence from their abusers. Emergency funding should be provided to shelters to ensure that they remain in operation during an unprecedented crisis. Most of all, we must use this opportunity to address the pervasive gender-based inequality that COVID-19 has laid bare.

Women are not the only ones in danger from COVID-19. But as long as systematic inequalities exist on this planet, they will be amplified by times of crisis. Our responses must therefore be systematic, reconstructing places for people in the world and understanding the unique challenges they face. ***** About the author: Noah Dowe is Diplomatic Courier correspondent and a student at the College of William & Mary, where he is pursuing a degree in Government with a focus on international development. He is an editor for The Tribe Attaché, an international relations publication that is entirely student-run; additionally, he is the Poetry Editor of The Gallery, which is the college’s largest literary arts journal.

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COVID-19 DEMANDS WE RETHINK GENDER ROLES

BY STEPHENIE FOSTER & SUSAN MARKHAM

82 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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nalysis of the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing the role of gender in society sharply into focus. As we look at the impact of the pandemic in subjects as diverse as political leadership, violence in the home, caregiving and what constitutes “essential” work, we are confronting the role that gender plays across the world. As a point of reference, gender is the socially defined set of roles, rights, responsibilities, entitlements, and obligations of females and males in societies.

While many gender norms have shifted, these norms still inform our actions and roles every day. These norms translate into women being viewed primarily as caregivers, while men are viewed as leaders.

In most of our societies, we see family violence is a private matter, but COVID-19 is bringing these issues to the forefront as our public and private lives have become more intertwined.

We’re able to discuss gender differently during this global crisis because gender impacts are being discussed in “real time”—as they are happening—rather than analyzed months or years after the fact. Advocates and practitioners have been working to include this type of gender analysis for years but topics like foreign policy, crisis response, and trade have traditionally—and wrongly—been seen as gender blind or gender neutral. This new focus on real-time analysis of gender impacts provides us an opportunity to create lasting change.

Women’s Unseen, Essential Role in Labor According to a recent New York Times article, one in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, and nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.

These women are core to a part of the labor force which keeps the country running and takes care of those most in need, pandemic or not. In health care, 77% of essential workers are women and in essential retail, 53% are women. According to the New York Times, 83% of those in health care jobs paying under $30,000 are women.

We know that women are paid less than men, and this is more pronounced for women of color. In the U.S., women overall earn 81 cents for every dollar a white man earns, while African American, Hispanic and Native American women earn 75 cents. We must use this window to address the twin issues of pay disparity and how we value certain jobs and types of work.

Women’s Leadership During Catastrophe Women leaders like Prime Minister Jacinda Arden of New Zealand, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and President Tsai DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 83

Ing-wen of Taiwan are taking bold action to stem the impact of COVID-19. They are praised as “voices of reason� for their clear and effective communication, decisiveness and empathy in the face of this pandemic. We need more leaders like them. As of January 2020, women serve as heads of state in only 10 out of 152 countries (6.6%) and women serve as heads of government in 12 out of 193 countries (6.2%). Women hold about 25% of the seats in parliaments globally and 24% of those in the U.S. Congress. This is a time to rethink the way we view leadership and the traits we value in leaders. These women demonstrate that a leader should be both decisive and empathetic.

Domestic Violence Spikes Amid the Pandemic With 90 countries in lockdown because of COVID-19, billions of people are now sheltering at home. While this has kept many people safe from the virus, it has put many women at risk of violent behavior behind closed doors. Stay-at-home orders put those in violent relationships in close proximity of their abusers, with little ability to leave home or reach out for help. In Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., sharp spikes in the incidence of domestic violence and concurrent heightened demand for emergency shelter have been raised by government authorities, women’s rights activists and civil society organizations. It is critical that countries make the prevention and redress of gender-based violence a key part of national response plans.

Shelter-at-home Highlights Need for Caregiving Infrastructure Finally, COVID-19 has laid bare the reality that most caregiving is still done by women. Even when both parents work full-time, women do the majority of the childcare and housework. Recent calls to build an infrastructure of care in the U.S. have gone unanswered. But now, with schools closed and large numbers of family members at home, or when people with school-aged kids or dependent parents have to go to work, it is clearer how much care and household work is needed and who does that work.

Before COVID-19, many families relied on others (often women) to formally or informally care for children or other dependents, clean their homes or cook meals. Now, many of those workers are unable to continue these roles. Once again, it is important that organizations and governments recognize that many workers have a full-time job outside the office.

84 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

Make no mistake, we are facing a global crisis. But, we can use this as an opportunity to reimagine a different future, one that values gender equality, women’s participation and women’s leadership.

Women must be part of COVID-19 response and recovery planning and decision making. We must value work the unseen work done by women. We must use every tool possible to restructure caregiving systems and address the causes of domestic violence.

We can do this, using everyone’s talent, skill and experience to inform our choices. ***** About the authors: Stephenie Foster has worked for decades at the intersection of diplomacy, development and gender. Prior to founding Smash, she most recently served in the U.S. Department of State, as a Senior Advisor/Counselor in the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, and at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Susan Markham most recently served at the U.S. Agency for International Development as the Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment, where she advised Agency leadership on gender policy. Previously, she worked at the National Democratic Institute, EMILY’s List, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and managed and raised funds for federal and state political campaigns.

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IMAGE BY GREG NUNES VIA UNSPLASH

2 BUILDING RESILIENCE

THE EMERGENCE OF POST-PANDEMIC INSTITUTIONS

BY DANTE DISPARTE

88 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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n a matter of months, the world’s economic arteries seized up. The price of oil, ordinarily buoyed by ravenous carbon hungry industrial production, bustling city streets, crowded skies, and shipping lanes, went into negative territory. This following a brief and ill-timed price war between OPEC rivals Russia and Saudi Arabia. All other warning signs on the global economy’s dashboard are flashing red. Silence descended on the world’s megacities, urban centers with more than 10 million inhabitants of which there are more than 40 around the world. In the face of a 100-year pandemic, as SARS-CoV-2 spreads around the world fueled by globalization, international travel and anthropogenic perils, such as urbanization and population density, the world’s institutions seemed paralyzed, frail and ill-equipped to rise to the occasion.

This institutional frailty was evidenced in advanced economies, as much as developing ones. The one major difference maker in the league tables of how countries and communities fared (and continue to endure) is leadership and particularly where women are at the helm. Leadership alone, however, is not a transferable skill or capability in the same way that robust, functional and highly effective institutions are when it comes to governance, accountability, readiness and response. Leadership after all is an idiosyncratic trait enshrined in people who rise to the occasion, and not a characteristic that singularly makes institutional gears turn. Rather, these gears turn based on norms, accountability, organizational mandates and the ability to spring into action.

The post-war era, for example, gave rise to a range of international institutions with the twin mandate of preserving the peace so that great wars and their great human and economic toll was consigned to history. Their second charge was to build up the preconditions for shared prosperity, therefore removing the incentive for nation state conflict by establishing and guarding a rules-based international system. From international security, to the global economy and public health, the tension between nation state interests and international institutions was laid bare by the pandemic. At the core of this tension is a deep-seated distrust and lingering doubts about the motives, efficacy and accountability of many of the world’s institutions. That doubt, in far too many cases around the world, now has a body of public evidence showing that in many cases public skepticism was warranted.

Each year for the last 20 years, this sentiment of institutional distrust is captured by Edelman’s Trust Barometer. In the year before the pandemic, trust in both public and private institutions was at an all-time low. 66% of respondents reported that societal leaders DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 89

of the very institutions that have the resources, accountability and capability to protect wellbeing, wealth and the world’s collective commons will not be able to address challenges.

There may be three silver lines in the dark clouds of this crisis, however. The first, is an enduring reminder that humanity has more in common than our short-term, partisan and often tribal politics betrays. Like in the war to reverse the tide of climate change, a war against a pandemic is also a whole of society priority—albeit waging this fight “alone together” because of social distancing. The second, is how technology can provide a semblance of operating continuity and normalcy amid such a paralyzing event—therefore we would be well served to universalize access. The third, is that people clearly need well-functioning governments at all levels and cannot merely rely on deified political leaders. Rather, we must rely on the hard-working, behind-the-scenes leaders who make public institutions run.

Pandemic response has been a crucible for effective institutional leadership and governments. We should take no comfort in the fact that the world is confronting 21st century challenges with 19th century institutions laboring under slow, often analog 20th century technologies. Just as corporate balance sheets must take the triple bottom line of social, economic and environmental priorities as co-equal business objectives, public institutions must take the post-pandemic transformation challenge of modernization, transparency and effectiveness as co-equal priorities. The dislocation of generational wealth and the forestalled economic productivity that will set many countries back decades, not to mention the dreadful loss of life when all is reckoned, demands that less is said, and more is done. Chief among these is the need to restore confidence in the social compact in many countries around the world. This is especially true for the worst performing countries and communities in the pandemic, where the crisis did not break systems or social safety nets, but rather revealed which ones were weak or broken in the first place. The pandemic is a powerful reminder that government and public and private institutions are not abstractions but are experienced locally.

The fastest institutions to bend or break with the onset of the pandemic should be the first ones to fix in the post-pandemic world.

Entirely new ones should be created to ensure the next crisis yields better coordination and outcomes in the public and private sectors. For example, earlier calls for the creation of a public-private pandemic preparedness and bio-defense accelerator should be heeded. Additionally, broad cross-sections of the population with no access to basic healthcare coverage, paid medical leave 90 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

or on the margins of the formal economy, with 2.5 billion people who are unbanked or underbanked, exacerbated pre-pandemic vulnerability. This greatly slowed relief and recovery efforts, even in advanced economies. This much was revealed by the slow pace or inability of many countries to provide direct relief payments to citizens where countries labored under a one-directional payment system—one that supports tax collection but not direct aid in a crisis, let alone in real time.

As with all large scale disasters where the coronavirus pandemic has the dubious distinction of triggering a declared disaster in all 50 U.S. states and territories, along with virtually every country on the planet, speed of government response matters nearly as much as societal adherence to public health rules. The absence of trusted, open-source technologies in the public sector has been a challenge, despite efforts to inventory working examples. These technologies could facilitate a two-way relationship between the citizen and public institutions, as well as support privacy preserving contact tracing or anything close to real-time high-quality reporting on confirmed COVID-19 cases. The fact remains that much of the fight against an invisible enemy has been like flying blind on both the numerator and denominator of affected populations. Not since the great wars, have so many owed a debt of gratitude to so few. In this case, rather than donning military fatigues, the heroes of this time are donning lab coats and medical garb. Modernizing existing institutions and creating entirely new ones to ensure the sacrifice of lives, livelihood and national treasure is not in vain is the greatest way we can repay this debt. ***** About the author: Dante Disparte is the vice chairman and head of policy and communications for the Libra Association. He is the founder and chairman of Risk Cooperative and serves on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Advisory Council.

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DISASTER VS. CRISIS HOW THE NATURE OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS AFFECTS OUR RESPONSE

BY JO DA SILVA

92 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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he continual stream of news about the current Covid-19 crisis can seem overwhelming, and it is worth us taking time to think about its nature. What do we mean by ‘crisis’ and how can that inform and shape our response—whether as individuals, communities, companies, or government?

In the field of emergency management, a disaster is typically triggered by a specific event in time and place, such as an earthquake or industrial explosion.

I witnessed the catastrophic and wide-ranging impact of a major disaster on people’s lives, working in Sri Lanka and Indonesia after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 where over 220,000 people were killed in 14 countries. Many more lost their livelihoods or were displaced as their homes had been destroyed. But, as a survivor of the tsunami in Jaffna told me “the tsunami came and was gone.

We will recover. The conflict between the government and Tamil Tigers goes on and we don’t know how it will end.”

He was describing a crisis—a period where there is disruption, confusion, and suffering that can go on for many months as the situation evolves.

My first experience of a crisis was the Rwanda refugee crisis in 1994, when more than quarter of a million people fled the country and crossed over into Tanzania, and later into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, over a period of several months. No-one knew how many people would arrive each day—a few hundred, or thousands—or when they would be able to return home. My role included repairing and maintaining dirt roads to enable food and medicine to reach the camps, building distribution centres, warehouses and latrines. I realised how important infrastructure— water, energy, roads, buildings, toilets—are to meeting our most basic needs. When cholera broke out in Goma, containing it to prevent its spread became the number one priority, just as with the coronavirus now.

The Covid-19 pandemic classifies as a “slow onset, extensive crisis.”

This reflects the gradual escalation in the number of infected people and the widespread footprint. The nature of response differs from a terrorist attack or an earthquake, or other sudden event in a specific location, which is a “rapid onset, intensive disaster.”

Slow onset crises include drought, conflict, and pandemic. The early signs of a crisis can be hard to spot, or their importance may be overlooked. Cape Town’s Day Zero forecast made global headlines in 2018 when a city of 4 million people almost ran out of DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 93

water, but water stress has been a growing problem for decades due to a growing population, and a changing climate. Today, among cities with more than 3 million people, the World Resources Institute concluded that 33 of them, with a combined population of over 255 million, face extremely high-water stress.

If recognised early enough, there is a window of opportunity to step in, manage, and terminate a slow onset crisis. Reflections from those in charge of Cape Town’s response to Day Zero tell the story of how they seized the moment decisively to avert the crisis.

Sudden onset disasters are characterised by loss of life, injury or damage to property, often leading to displacement. But, the real impact of a disaster on people’s lives and a country’s economy needs to be understood in context. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 remains the costliest tropical cyclone on record causing $125 billion of damage and 1,883 deaths, leaving millions homeless due to flooding. In Haiti the earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, left over 5 million homeless, and the damage—including 4,000 schools—exceeded the country’s GDP making recovery a significant challenge.

The response is to immediately prevent further loss of life by ensuring everyone can access water, food, shelter, sanitation, and medical care, then to prioritise early recovery so that normal life can resume in terms of schools, work, markets, and so on. It is the poor, vulnerable, and marginalised individuals, communities and countries that are worst affected and need most help to recover.

This is equally true for slow onset crises that tend to affect a much larger number of people as their impacts are wide ranging and complex. Whether livelihoods, nutrition, mental health, production or social cohesion, among other aspects, they have a profound effect on the economy and society. An effective response in a slow onset crisis relies on the ability to monitor the situation and respond to current challenges, as well as to anticipate what might happen next based on learning from previous crises.

A slow onset crisis can complicate decision making about when to act, and when it is safe to move into a recovery phase, especially if impacts are ongoing or slow to dissipate. Natural disasters will often hit the headlines quickly, but interest may fade rapidly. In a slow onset crisis, sustained public and political engagement is vital and the media plays a key role.

Leadership is vital. Leaders in government or companies, and in communities and households, must provide clarity on priorities 94 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

for action, avoid confusion, and provide reassurance. Messages need to be clear, consistent and informative, and appropriate support provided that empowers individuals to do their bit to limit the impact of the crisis and adapt their daily lives as necessary.

The impact of a crisis depends on the resilience of society and the economy, and the infrastructure that supports both. We think about resilience as our ability to withstand, adapt to and recover from disruption due to a sudden shock, rapidly changing circumstances or chronic stress. It relies on everyone being able to meet their basic needs, informed decision making at every level, and social cohesion that determines our ability to live peacefully and act collectively.

We will only truly understand our long-term resilience to the current crisis when we are able to look back from a new, stable position. However, from disaster and crises, we know that resilience must come from many different angles. Governments, businesses and communities must work together to support both the immediate response and the long-term recovery. The public and private companies who own and operate our critical services and infrastructure, from healthcare and food supply, to the roads, power, water and communications that support society, are all part of a bigger system.

This crisis is an opportunity to consider our resilience. Not just to Covid-19 and the wider impact it is having on the economy, but also to an uncertain future, and to climate change—another “slowonset extensive” crisis that requires transformational change. Every aspect of society needs to transform to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees, or to manage the consequences if we don’t and remain on track for 3 degrees or more by end of the century. Neither climate change nor Covid-19 respect national boundaries and nations must work together and learn from each other to accelerate action.

There are lessons to be learned from how we all respond to Covid-19, including the possibilities for global change, signalled by how the health of the planet improves in the short term, as human activity is forced to slow down. ***** About the author: Jo da Silva, OBE, FREng FICE FIStructE, is renowned for her humanitarian work as an engineer and has an honorary Doctorate in humanitarian engineering from Coventry University in the United Kingdom. She is on the Board of The Resilience Shift and leads sustainable development for Arup, the engineering and design consultancy.

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HOW THE HEALTH BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM SHOULD REINVENT ITSELF

BY ROLAND KLÃœBER, DAN HACKMANN & ROLAND BENNETT

96 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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any countries’ health systems are being completely overwhelmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The only thing surprising about this is the when, not the what.

Some countries prepared studies years ago that forecast this situation almost perfectly. For example, Germany published a publicly available report in collaboration with the Robert Koch-Institute already in 2012 that described a coronavirus spread originating from China. The initial reaction from all Western countries was lack of preparation, ignorance, or unwillingness to consider the report. Whatever the reasons, the effect was the same: Proven measures such as wearing face masks or social distancing—which should be termed physical distancing—are ignored or only belatedly implemented! Furthermore, fake news and uninformed opinions are proliferating, obfuscating and ridiculing those who are to better the overall situation.

A truly global problem demands the widespread understanding that a collaboration between all people and institutions is required for its resolution. It seems a global crisis is necessary to motivate more solidarity.

How We Can Become More Pandemic Ready Some Asian countries—South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have previous exposure to this kind of virus threat. They were able to successfully combine measures (i.e. thorough testing, masks, digital tracking), successfully building on previous pandemic experience.

We should similarly seek to learn from our collective experience to be better prepared for the next pandemic. It could be similar or of another kind, but the lessons we can learn are quite similar. If we follow the following set of principles and mix of methods (e.g. preparedness, supplies that are available or can be reactivated & training infrastructure) the impact and cost of the next pandemic will be much lower—therefore more cost efficient, socially friendly, and will be disruptive for a shorter period.

The following set of principles—taken from a body of early works on neurology and management cybernetics—can help manage situations we face from a risk and opportunity perspective: 1. Transparent: Facts, responsibilities, shared rules and values, competencies.

2. Fast decision making between all stakeholders and communication.

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3. Trustworthy change of modus operandi: normal <>crisis based on active capabilities.

4. Resilient: limited redundancy to be able to act in terms of capabilities, infrastructure and supplies.

5. Recursive: structures and principles applicable on multiple levels from cities to the world.

6. Relative autonomy: keep tasks, decision areas and competence in small but connected units with whole.

7. Security: no data loss, no unauthorized reuse and no patient data privacy breaches.

In addition to pragmatic ways toward a faster exit path for the Western world, there should be parallel work done on a new governance framework to tackle the unique challenges posed by a global catastrophe. Such a framework would embrace the need for global collaboration and the use of the technical infrastructure that facilitate the required transparency, security, resilience and ability to make fast decisions. For reasons of effectiveness this should be supported by interoperable technical platform approaches supporting the 3Cs: • • •

Collaboration.

Coordination—corresponding solutions must support interoperability and shared standards.

Communication.

Healthcare Systems Require Reform to Cope with Crises Healthcare systems in general are very siloed and therefore structurally slow to react to epidemic outbreaks. They consume ever higher percentages of national GDP (between 9% (AU) and 17% (U.S.) in 2017) in developed countries. These systems are perceived as administrative at best with regard to digital innovation, and “old-school” in how the actors interact through many committees and issue teams in non-pandemic times.

Figure 1 highlights some of the silos established (for good reasons) in the total system. The areas where a lack of coordinated digital transformation lets costs explode and total service quality plummet despite a lot of good will and money invested are depicted with red arrows in the following infographic.

98 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

Figure 1 – Current Health System inflexibility.

Some causes of the slow pace are 1) low use of real-time data, 2) lack of interoperability of IT systems, and 3) complex regulations that hinder innovation in hospitals and the whole ecosystem. The system is largely dysfunctional. We need to rethink and reinvent how we conceive and act regarding healthcare to reveal the real levers without ignoring key interdependencies and information flaws.

Solution: Think of healthcare as a business ecosystem (BE) that integrates all the stakeholders’ interests. Ecosystem redesign would aim at increasing efficiency, quality and patient outcomes in coordination with regulators. All stakeholders co-create and co-deliver a new networked value proposition to the patients. Making it happen requires thinking differently from a functioning ecosystem and business outcome point of view: •

Avoid “Proof-of-Concept hell”—no real progress, let alone scalability or business viability.

•

Problem: Blockage of interoperability and collaboration by incumbents that want to install proprietary solutions. This type of silo thinking-based strategy forces suppliers and customers to stall innovation. There is a paradox here that can be overcome by regulatory interventions: Demand interoperability standards to increase innovation within and across silo boundaries.

•

Increase security by reusing existing platforms and standards to protect patient privacy and data rights in more secure ways (e.g. Threema Work, OPAL & ENIGMA from MIT).

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•

Platform approaches can lower costs and increase transparency simultaneously by leveraging network effects (see Supply Chain track & trace for international transports; B2B messaging platforms) if security and interoperability are guaranteed.

Some positive examples: •

Use of AI-based DSP-1181 from Exscientia & Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma for personalized medicine helped to shrink invention time from 4.5 years to one (for treatment of obsessivecompulsive disorder).

•

Novartis’ “pre-release” of the medication “Zolgensma” might demand a change in the regulatory system—irrespective of the moral discussion around the lottery and other aspects—regulatory process time losses kill or shorten lives of patients.

•

Patient-focused strategies such as telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring can be designed to improve ALL outcomes (medical, personal, financial, organizational) if properly regulated and incentivized from a business ecosystem view.

•

Bring self-analysis to the patient instead of moving the patient to rare and centralized hospitals.

Further development If healthcare systems are to be transformed from this current downward vicious cycle to a positive virtuous cycle by 2030, new ways of interaction between all stakeholders and a new regulatory involvement must be established now. Some examples already exist: e.g.

Kaiser Permanente, Veteran’s Administration, selective EU examples.

Getting there requires that we rethink tasks and mindsets: How can regulators and pharmaceutical companies better focus on tasks to drive down cost and simultaneously improve patient services and health improvements?

What are the pre-requisites and next steps?

A business ecosystem approach allows us to perform large scale transformations beyond traditional industry boundaries within healthcare. It must encompass a total health system perspective— from active ingredients to patients. It demands a real change of purpose, delivering less costly, wasteful, and siloed health systems 100 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

without Chinese walls. Judging from other approaches it requires more collaboration and transparency (see added layers in Figure 2).

The current pandemic crisis highlights the urgency of risk monitoring and responsive systems provided at low costs. Some insights from supply chain management offer ways to devise an interoperable system of contact tracking that combines mobile phones and low-cost intelligent devices for children and elderly. With complementary solutions to encompass people without smartphones like Excalibur, the gaps can be closed.

Figure 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Improved, collaborative Health Ecosystem.

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BE thinking requires champions and evangelists. Start with a small subset of stakeholders (Minimum Viable Ecosystem) that want to make a change and involve regulators early. Wisely designed virtuous circles can then involve and engage additional stakeholders.

Digital means provide the motor for network effects and scalability. Of course, privacy and security must be well respected.

The healthcare system suffers from a margin-rich and complacent subsystem with many incentives that are not always focused on the patientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s well-being and prevention of healthcare incidents.

Figure 3 proposes a future BE view with dynamic trade-offs between alternatives:

Figure 3 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Impact diagrams help to focus on the central outcome of cost-efficient and effective health services.

New technologies can help but they are not the starting point. Rethinking healthcare systems needs to start with curious and open mindsets of relevant stakeholders to rethink the health system si102 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

multaneously from a patient interaction, data, and technological viewpoint. A significant portion of the data gleaned could be shared for the benefit of the overall health system. The health ecosystem governance must change for the better. Stakeholders should consider such questions as whether the same clinical trial process is the best choice for all patients and diseases, and whether AI can help to speed up some of the trials based on fact-based reasoning.

Questions like these need to be asked and should be answered differently if minimal viable health BEs are to avoid silo thinking and incentive traps. Rethink the mental framework and systems of healthcare that worked well in the past and fail to fulfill its purpose for the future? Are regulators, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, care workers, and physicians willing to rumble? If so, then bringing together the right set with the right methodologies and technologies is not so difficult—the starting point is the willingness and drive for major change! So why not start today with a mutually interdependent view to define a better future?

Management cybernetics, neurology, AI, technology and social sciences are some of the disciplines that can fruitfully revolutionize the healthcare industry. Our eyes need to open to a roadmap towards faster and improved collaboration to cope with future’s increasing challenges. Having infrastructures, stocks, crisis services and instants tests to fight pandemic waves is only one of those.

This can be a good starting point that we should take advantage of before going back to a slightly changed new normal. ***** About the authors: Dr. Roland Klüber is a serial entrepreneur and business ecosystem innovator in health care, pharma, aviation, trade, supply chain, and multi-modal mobility. Roland is a digital transformation and AI expert. He is the CEO Consilis, Partner at Theron Advisory Group, Member of STINT Think Tank. He holds a PhD in E-Service Success Management (University of Surrey).

Dr. Daniel Hackmann is chief advisor on business strategy and development, partner ecosystems, and high-tech trends at DWH Consulting. He specializes in go-to-market and growth strategies for high tech and service providers. His industry and technology expertise are on the use of IoT and IIoT. Roland Bennett is a Medical Informatics consultant focused on extending clinical care into the patient’s environment. Roland’s focus has been on developing highly effective therapies, using low cost solutions like embedded systems and medical IoT. DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 103

HEALTHCARE NEEDS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

BY IRINA BOKOVA, HAKIMA EL HAITE, GEORGE PAPANDREOU & JOÃ&#x2039;L RUET

104 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

A

s coronavirus spreads rapidly round the world, as sanitary measures multiply, as economic packages emerge, as shared declarations are attempted, the absence of real coordination is blatant. After years of serious warnings about pandemics that were met with shrugged shoulders, but nonetheless gathered accumulated experience, we believe no economic measure is enough to restore trust and order without a coordinated medical answer. A real solution: the immediate application of global governance principles to health security is now quite clearly right before us.

We had SARS in 2003. The Swine Flu in 2009. Ebola in 2015. In 2017, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation predicted a global pandemic “within 15 years,” and the World Health Organization echoed that prediction in their 2019 “preparedness” report. Just a few months on, and here we are already.

Epidemics are not new, but demographic movements driven by globalization intensity and climate change increase the initial risk of them occurring, and then the speed and depth of subsequent spread.

Humankind is not helpless here. We firmly believe it is time to reconsider every country’s health security, using global governance tools that already exist. If we have the will and resources to invest into financial stability or limit global heating, why is health security not on the table too?

Since the 2008 financial crash, for example, we have seen innovative quantitative easing policies, a welcome debate on tightening banking regulation. A consulting body was set up to bring together heads of state and financiers within the G20 framework, and the IMF’s intervention capacity was also greatly increased. Central banks now coordinate like never before.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis has its own panel of experts (the IPCC), its dedicated Green Climate Fund, and country plans to keep global heating below 2 degrees. While these tools offer large room for improvement, health security deserves the same consideration. Put simply: ambitious, permanent, and collective action.

Getting specific: we note that it has taken until mid-February to get leading Western research centers to work on the coronavirus. In the case of Ebola, shamefully, most centers never even responded. Today we call for an immediate global, and thereafter permanent, network of research centers to coordinate in immediately reacting together to this crisis and similar crises to come, irrespective of their geographies of origin.

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We call for political mobilization: we need to join up these research centers in dedicated alliances with the private vaccine industry, enforcing measures if need be for a pandemic. We need drug and equipment pools, which can be rapidly deployed in response to WHO priority requests, quick industrial re-deployment is feasible.

We also propose that the new â&#x20AC;&#x153;WHO Academy,â&#x20AC;? already under consideration, gets immediately implemented and must additionally encompass experts beyond the medical profession. This would include a permanent panel of pandemic crisis experts, crisis management at large, bid data specialists, socio-economic experts, and philanthropic and emergency organizations.

We call for a permanent ring-fenced emergency fund able to deal with crises that develop fast and with little warning, as national economic emergency funds appear, one should go to global health and managed by scientists.

We call for an immediate global information sharing platform, that will immediately help all these countries with still a low Covi-19 prevalence not to lose time. This platform can then become an annual reporting structure, covering risks, but also good practices.

These actions must be global in scope. Local containment is illusory; for every country that enforces good practices, others may not. Just as illusory is the idea that without enforcement, new vaccines will be spread equitably. Let us, right away, commit to a future global stock of vaccines, earmarked for the most vulnerable in both the global South and North. Finally, the debate on biodiversity must be linked to the discussion and action around pandemics.

These tools are within reach, because they come from proven tools of global governance. Given its characteristics, given peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concerns around the world, global health security is a global good and as such rightly deserves its own toolset.

There is no doubt, asking so many countries to agree on such fundamental issues will be a challenge. We can accommodate each of them by fusing concrete measures with their political and social realities at home. It is essential, we believe, to coordinate and exchange information and processes at an international level with the advanced governance tools we routinely use for other issues.

Multilateralism has become a necessity, not a nice-to-have. There will always be commonly accepted and jointly implemented responses that can quicken our responses at intra-country level.

106 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

Response time, for all of these tools, will always be of the essence.

Therefore, we call for a new intermediate alert level, before the WHO declares a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” as the system works today.

Ultimately, let all leaders resist the temptation of playing politics with pandemics. This is a boomerang that will come back to bite.

Healthcare is no place for nationalistic tendencies or policy cynicism. Solidarity beyond geographies, between sufferers, practitioners, and those who lead us is key. At the national level, the scope of the epidemic involves timely measures of confinement based on a democratic consensus.

Governments should remain committed to take the necessary restrictive measures that can have an impact on the spread of the virus scientifically, with the obligation to revert them as soon as possible. With all this in mind, the fight against this year’s pandemic will be tough, but the way we are tackling it is already the root of preparing for so many more such viruses to come. ***** About the authors: Irina Bokova is a Bulgarian politician and the former Director-General of UNESCO. Hakima el Haite is President of Liberal International, a climate scientist, entrepreneur and politician. George Papandreou is the former Prime Minister of Greece and President of Socialist International. Joël Ruet is an Economist with the CNRS (France) and President of The Bridge Tank, a G20affiliated think tank.

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IMAGE BY PIXABAY

FROM CONVENIENCE TO LIFELINE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMING THE LOGISTICS OF TOMORROW

BY PHILIPP REINHOLD

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 109

A

s we finally emerge from the turmoil of COVID-19, logistics has undergone a transformation into a network of trust and safety, while delivering fairer working conditions and environmental awareness. The old monolithic hub-and-spoke model, radiating out of automated distribution centers, has been replaced with a smarter, decentralized network of cloud-managed locations that can rapidly flex capacities between regions.

When the western world entered shutdown in April 2020, demand rapidly outstripped existing delivery capacity. While sophisticated supply chains, designed for shock resilience, could return supply to previous levels within a week or two, delivery capacities could not keep up.

The surge of demand for home deliveries exposed flaws in the existing system: deliveries required that drivers make human contact with recipients, while facing long hours under tight deadlines. Sickness and self-isolation slashed driver availability just as demand increased, and despite mass recruitment programs, adequate staffing became a significant issue. The gig economy, immobilized by legal and financial uncertainties, could no longer fill the gap. Furthermore, deliveries needed to be low-risk (i.e. contactless) and secure. The initial approach to drop deliveries on the doorstep proved unsustainable due to both security (especially for high-value, critical goods) and hygiene concerns.

COVID-19 has undercut existing practices, where workers were disposable, underpaid, and untrained. A new system—responsive enough to deal with fluctuations of demand, flexible enough to navigate social distancing and disease prevention guidelines, and secure enough to get high-value goods safely to recipients—was desperately needed.

The COVID-19 crisis required a new solution for the ‘final mile’ in logistics—drivers delivering from the distribution center to the final recipient. This solution involved extensive uptake of innovative app locker technology. While parts of the B2C (business-to-customer) sector had already built substantial capacities for such technologies (such as Amazon Lockers, DHL Packstations, and ParcelLock parcelboxes), it was the shutdown that triggered widespread adoption of the technology.

Smart lockers—combining mailboxes with IOT technology and requiring only a smartphone app to operate—have come to penetrate public spaces and both B2C and B2B (business-to-business) transactions. The lockers’ success lies in their ability to allow transactions of all sizes to be made in either direction at any hour, while providing tracking and security and maintaining social distancing. As an intelligent, secure final mile solution that preserved both staff and recipients’ time and health, companies scrambled to create and join app locker systems.

Once sufficient flexible capacity in these systems became available, new supply chains were threaded through the locker networks. The 110 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

built-in possibilities for ‘reverse logistics’ became essential in delivering thousands of privately 3D-printed components for PPE to hospitals and healthcare workers, as well as in collecting test kits, maintaining lab equipment, and distributing vaccines. The locker-based distribution networks’ capacity to handle reverse logistics has led to locker use for approximately 80% of transactions involving physical goods entering the supply chain, while the benefits of the technology have made it suitable for businesses as diverse as pharmacies, grocery chains, and energy companies.

Lockers are now visible at every gas station and row of shops, becoming as common as ATMs were before COVID-19. There is enough capacity that everyone either reserves lockers directly or uses the public locker network on a pay-as-you-go basis. Decentralized and intelligent inventory models now define best practice, and supply chain employees have become skilled workers, who flexibly adapt to changing requirements and undergo constant training.

Like the web, the smart locker network is now sufficiently developed to allow free economic agents to build new service offerings by utilizing its spare capacity. Innovative technology allowing for reverse logistics will also become an essential key to unlocking crowdsourcing capacity for aid in future emergency situations.

While we have already seen changes to the postal systems in many countries, we can expect further transformations as more adapt themselves to smart locker systems. The changes that have taken hold in western countries will extend from population centers into the periphery and will spill over into the developing world, where safe and secure—yet robust and flexible—methods of goods exchange will grant communities access to new markets.

For the environment, these changes will mean unlocking genuine efficiencies—not just reduced unit costs, but actually reduced emissions related to road mileage, traffic at peak hours, and hours spent travelling by recipients. For customers, the commonplace experience of receiving and sending items will take place at a new standard of security, transparency, and quality. And for logistics itself, these changes will continue to transform the industry into a sphere of continuous innovation, where efficiency is measured not only by volumes delivered but also in terms of human life and security. ***** About the author: Philipp Reinhold is a Product Owner in the UK field services industry with over 10 years of experience in Logistics and Supply Chain. He holds a Masters’ Degree in Economics and is a Lean Six Sigma practitioner.

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IMAGE BY PIXABAY

HOW TO FIX THE GAPS IN OUR FOOD SYSTEM

BY PIERRE FERRARI

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A

s the global pandemic hit the United States, food stores saw a huge increase in demand. Panic buying took over, goods were rationed, and shelves lay empty. Food banks across the country struggled to keep up with demand and issued their own warnings of having to ration. Yet at the same time, farmers were throwing away milk and fresh produce, as demand from restaurants and hotels vanished overnight.

In a few short days, COVID-19 brutally exposed the gaps in the United States’ food and farming system. The highly centralized system we see today has its roots in the ‘Great American Farm Revolution’ of the 1970s, when then Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, warned farmers to “get big or get out.” The decades that followed saw the prioritization of large-scale plantationstyle farming over local, small-scale farms—highly centralized and highly vulnerable to a crisis like COVID-19.

The U.S. meat industry is a case in point. Approximately 50 plants account for as much as 98% of the slaughtering and processing of cattle for beef. Mega plants dominate the market, processing animals easily and cheaply. But these plants still rely on people to run their conveyor belts, and as the closure of the Smithfield Foods plant in South Dakota showed, when one person gets sick, the whole plant soon has a problem.

While the drop in meat supply in the United States may be temporary, for many people around the world the legacy of COVID-19 is likely to be one of food shortages. Although we produce enough food to feed everyone, the United Nations is projecting 265 million people will be experiencing acute food insecurity by the end of the year. Post-pandemic, the solution to feeding the world is not just to produce more, but to produce better—and doing so requires investing in the infrastructure farmers need to get their products to market.

Globally, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates there are 500 million small-scale farmers.

These are the people that produce the majority of the world’s food. Small-scale farmers tend to rotate crops more regularly and make investments in improving the health of the soil, delivering nutritious products in a way that protects the environment. But same as here in the United States, in much of the world, these farmers are limited to servicing local markets, because they do not have access to transport, finance, and other infrastructure needed to grow their businesses.

114 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

In the United States and around the world, Heifer International, supports local farmer cooperatives to provide the infrastructure farmers need to get their goods to markets. In Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, we have worked with dairy farmers to set up hubs, where dairy farmers can bring their milk for it to be checked, chilled, and sold directly to some of the continentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biggest dairies. Selling through the hub benefits farmers, because they are guaranteed a certain income and the companies that buy their products know they can purchase a large amount of milk that has passed quality tests.

Investments like this are not only important in supporting farmers to boost their incomes, but they have a vital role to play in ensuring the food we eat is both nutritious and safe. Milk has to pass certain quality tests before it can be accepted, chilled, and sent on to the dairies. The same standards need to be in place for other food productsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;especially meat.

From what we know now, the COVID-19 outbreak started in a wet market in Wuhan, China. Wet markets are not unique to China and have long been criticized as breeding grounds for infectious diseases. As the global demand for meat continues to grow, the quality controls for how animals are slaughtered and processed need to improve with it. Nepal, for example, has strict laws for how meat should be processed, but not a single slaughterhouse in the country meets those standards. Today, small-scale meat processors across the United States are struggling to keep up with demand. The flexibility of smaller plants enables them to introduce new measures to protect workers, while still getting the job done. And if workers should fall sick and the plant is forced to close, the whole supply change will not crumble.

COVID-19 has shown us the value of the food we eat and the people that produce it. Doubling down on our highly centralized food and farming system would make us much more vulnerable when the next crisis hits. With two billion people relying on farming for their source of livelihood and all of us relying on it for our food, investing in farmer-focused infrastructure at the local level is the path to a stronger, more diversified, food system. ***** About the author: Pierre Ferrari is the President and CEO of global development organization Heifer International. He joined Heifer International in 2010 with more than 40 years of business experience.

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IMAGE BY ABHISHEK KHANNA VIA UNSPLASH

REFUGEE CAMPS FIGHT FAKE NEWS ALONGSIDE PANDEMIC

BY ALLYSON BERRI

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 117

D

ecades after doctors stopped making house calls, he was carrying his work out door-to-door. Instead of carrying the classic black physiciansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; bag, he donned rubber boots. Acting as part of an outreach drive sponsored by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), former Ivorian refugee Jocelyn Konet was one of 52 healthcare workers sent to respond to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia.

Konet, however, was not just sent to fight a deadly virus. He had also been sent to face a more ubiquitous foe: fake news.

Disinformation was a large problem in the refugee communities which fought against Ebola. Healthcare workers such as Konet had to establish themselves as trusted sources of information in order to halt the spread of the 2014 outbreak. People had heard rumors that the hospital was the source of Ebola. As a result, at the beginning of the outbreak, people slammed the door in Konetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face when he tried to spread tips about how to contain the deadly disease.

Disinformation has always accompanied infectious outbreaks.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, misinformation in American newspapers and government censors helped spread the virus. The American AIDS epidemic was accompanied by a Soviet disinformation campaign which claimed that the virus was the result of American experimentation with biological weapons.

And today, in light of the novel coronavirus pandemic, social media rumors have run rampant, attributing the respiratory infection to a Chinese bioweapon and claiming it can be cured with garlic.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, refugee communities might be particularly vulnerable to disinformation. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, refugee communities were kept in the dark with little access to accurate information. In many of these communities, people do not trust the government or may even be in conflict with the government. David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), notes that in these areas, humanitarian aid organizations like the IRC can be instrumental in stopping the spread of false information. As part of their preparation for the fight against coronavirus, IRC staff is hoping to establish trust in order to spread accurate information about the coronavirus in communities which are often in conflict with governments they do not trust.

Fake news fears aside, refugees may already be more vulnerable to certain pandemic illnesses than other groups. With the highly contagious coronavirus in particular, the refugee popula118 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

tion faces unique risks. Crowded refugee camps cannot comply with the social distancing requirements that have been implemented as part of many countries’ COVID-19 defense plans. A lack of running water might make it impossible to wash hands several times a day. And even as the current number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide reaches a record high 70.8 billion, most countries pandemic response plans do not explicitly recognize refugee needs.

Further, even though refugee camps have experienced outbreaks of other more deadly diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Ebola, COVID-19 poses unique risks to refugees living in cramped camp quarters with little access to healthcare. COVID-19 is more contagious than Ebola. Experts use a disease’s R0 (pronounced “R-naught”) to determine how infectious a disease is. The R0 value indicates the average number of people from a group with no immunity who one sick person can infect with a certain disease. The common flu has an average R0 of 1.3. Ebola’s R0 ranges from 1.6-2.0, depending on the population which hosts it. Covid-19’s R0 ranges from 2.0-2.5 and could potentially be higher in refugee populations which are not adequately prepared to halt its transmission.

COVID-19’s resilience in human populations also sets it apart from other, more fatal respiratory infections. Even though SARS exhibited an R0 which ranged between 2-4 and a mortality rate of 15%, it lacked the resilience needed to stay in human populations. Additionally, since the symptoms associated with SARS were more severe than those associated with Covid-19, it was easier to identify patients and contain the virus. In contrast, the symptoms associated with Covid-19 (fever and dry cough) are initially mild and can easily be mistaken for those belonging to a less dangerous respiratory illness, like influenza.

Additionally, high population density in refugee camps could contribute to coronavirus dangers. New York City, one of the American hotspots for coronavirus, is home to 10,000 people per square kilometer across its five boroughs. In certain refugee camps in Bangladesh, population density ranges between 40,000 and 70,000 people per square mile. In addition to the novel coronavirus’s resilience in human populations, as well as its relatively high R0 value, the high population density within refugee campus make the disease a potentially deadly threat.

Faced with other deadlier fears as a result of the novel coronavirus, vulnerable refugee camps experience an additional threat as a result of misinformation that has been spread about the DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 119

virus. In Bangladeshi camps where the government has limited internet access for Rohingya refugees, people have been told to consume pennywort to protect themselves. Other rumors insist that prayer and exposure to heat can ward off the coronavirus.

The humanitarian response to coronavirus in refugee camps has been shaped by the explosion of misinformation, which always accompanies infectious outbreaks. For the IRC, the first step in its coronavirus response plan is not sanitation stations or fever testing, but rather fighting disinformation. David Miliband notes that Ebola taught the IRC the importance of establishing trust within the communities where it works. He argues that health facilities become overwhelmed when communities don’t believe healthcare messaging about how to stay well.

When people know how to stay well, they can avoid contracting infectious diseases like coronavirus, improving healthcare workers’ ability to respond to the people who need medical attention the most.

Experience with Ebola has also shaped the fight against misinformation for other humanitarian organizations working to stop the coronavirus spread in refugee communities. During the 2014 Ebola epidemic, UNHCR healthcare worker Jocelyn Konet went door-to-door in Liberian refugee camps to share practical information about how to stay safe during the pandemic, dispelling rumors that the virus was in water or being spread by health clinics. In refugee camps across the African continent, lessons learned in Liberia are helping those trying to stop the coronavirus from coming to Tanzania. After responding to the Liberian Ebola outbreak in 2014, healthcare worker Miata Tubee Johnson is using her experience to guide her response to Covid-19. “My experience in Liberia actually prepared me for where I am today,” Johnson told UNHCR News. “I feel a sense of déjà vu.”

Large refugee aid organizations like the UNHCR aren’t the only ones working to combat the spread of disinformation about the coronavirus. In early April, The Atlantic spoke with a man named Robbi who was going “block to block, door to door, and shack to shack” across his refugee camp in Bangladesh to transmit accurate information about coronavirus. Robbi, a Rohingya refugee, had been working for weeks to spread the word about coronavirus to families in the camp. Robbi’s work isn’t sanctioned by an international organization, and he’s been assisted by only a handful of others. He has been working to educate his community despite the communication restrictions inflected on Rohingya refugee camps by the Bangladeshi government. He 120 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

uses a megaphone to make announcements about hygiene and social distancing measures as he hands out masks, soap, and gloves to people living in the camp.

Just as it has with every other large-scale infectious outbreak, disinformation will continue to spread as the coronavirus infects multiple areas of the globe. Refugee camps, often in areas where there is already little government trust and rampant anxiety, are particularly vulnerable, both to the virus itself as well as the fake news it brings in its wake. Governments and humanitarian aid organizations must be aware of the threat of disinformation in refugee communities as they work to respond to the coronavirus. The efficacy of the pandemic response in refugee communities likely depends on it. ***** About the author: Allyson Berri is a Diplomatic Courier Correspondent who is pursuing degrees in Political Science and Economics.

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CLEAR, CONSISTENT COMMUNICATION IS CRUCIAL DURING A PANDEMIC

BY IRIS SHAFFER & LAUREN Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;LEARY

122 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

T

he past several months have been a case study in successful and failed communications from government leaders as the novel coronavirus turned into a global pandemic. To be sure, the lessons learned today will become instructive tools for our leaders of the future— particularly if pandemics and global crises increase in frequency and reach. So, nearly four months into this pandemic, what have we learned about good communication from our leaders?

Some heads of state—such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong—have been praised for their clear, early, calm and consistent communication. In contrast, other leaders have been reluctant to acknowledge the risks and the scope of the virus early on, which led to confusion and back-peddling.

While each country’s approach has differed and taken elements of others’ strategies, nearly all have faltered and had to adjust their policies and communications approach over the past few months. Thus far, early acknowledgement of the virus’s potential spread and deadly effects, coupled with stringent lockdown policies and stimulus funding to support economies— communicated early, consistently and alongside scientific and medical experts using all available forms of communication to reach as many demographics as possible—have led to the most clear and well-followed, life-saving directions.

Early Acknowledgement and Steady Response Many countries, particularly China and Italy, were caught offguard by the initial spread while others, including the United States and the United Kingdom, refused to acknowledge the rapid proliferation and effects of the virus. In Italy, the government initially lost control of the narrative as its draft plans for initial limits on personal movements were leaked to the media, sowing confusion, uncertainty and fear in the public. These failures demonstrate the importance of early acknowledgement of a fast-moving virus, control of plans to prevent leaks, confusion and the spread of disease, and establishment of credible authority with the public.

Interestingly, one of the smallest countries—Singapore—has had one of the most rapid responses and clear communications to prevent spread of the virus and limit the number of deaths.

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Implementing learnings from the SARS outbreak and the swine flu pandemic, Singapore established a multi-ministry task force based on a “whole of government” approach early on. Clear, consistent communication across ministries and a government delivery of masks to each household limited panic buying and hoarding. Prime Minister Loong also made three national addresses, each time speaking in three of the four official languages to maximize reach of his message and establish trust with citizens.

State vs. Federal Competing Narratives In certain places, a crowded communications field developed based on the countries’ unique political systems. In the United States, President Trump defaulted to the states to the point that they had to compete against one another and other countries for supplies, while differing lockdown rules sowed confusion and spread of the virus across state lines. Despite the chaos, governors and mayors have stepped up. According to a Monmouth University poll, more than 70 percent of Americans say their respective state’s governor has “done a good job” in responding to the pandemic—while only half support the federal response.

In Italy, the information given in daily press conferences weren’t always coordinated between mayors, regional authorities and the national government, and some mayors have taken to social media or patrolling their city streets to admonish citizens. In Germany, despite initial differences in response and communication between the federal states, once a national lockdown was enacted, state leaders began working closely together with Chancellor Merkel’s government. In both countries, people eventually grasped the reality of the dire situation with increased and more clearly coordinated government communications.

Reliance on Medical and Scientific Expertise Germany, the U.K., and the United States decided early to rely on scientific expertise for decision-making and public communications. The inclusion of medical and epidemic experts in daily press briefings allows more clear, straightforward and scientific facts to be shared directly with the media and public, lessening the view that decisions are politically motivated. However, the 124 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

approach has not gone without criticism. For example, in Germany some have pushed back on the idea that the country be “run” by scientists rather than politicians.

Beloved, Trusted Spokespeople Unique to the U.K., while there had been some initial criticism that Her Majesty the Queen waited until early April to address the country, her well-drafted speech and the timing of the address—following a fortnight of lockdown, and immediately before news of Prime Minister Johnson’s move to the ICU—lifted spirits and provided a sense of continuity and reassurance. While many other countries do not have this non-partisan option, the royal family has stood out in its efforts to support the country’s healthcare workers and provide comfort to their loyal followers.

While the global media must continue fact-checking in real time to prevent the spread of disinformation, everyone—from government officials to the media to citizens—can now look back at the initial government responses to see which countries best responded and where and how true leaders emerged in this global crisis. Overall, early acknowledgement, a clear and coordinated plan between cities, states and the federal government, paired with scientific and medical expertise creates the most successful response to a global pandemic. ***** About the authors: Iris Shaffer, a senior director in APCO Worldwide’s Chicago office and North America media relations practice lead, brings more than two decades of health care communications and media relations expertise. Lauren O’Leary, a director in APCO Worldwide’s New York office, works with a range of national and international public and private corporate, consumer and NGO clients, specializing in strategic media relations campaigns, with more than a decade of expertise.

Editorial Note: The authors would like to thank Paolo Compostella, Maximilian Knoth, James McGregor, and Dan Tan for their contributions.

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A NEW AGE FOR MULTIPLIER PARTNERSHIPS

BY ANNA TUNKEL & ELIZABETH COHAN

126 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

O

ur world will be divided into BC and AC—before COVID-19 and after COVID-19. The global pandemic has touched every country around the globe, putting healthcare infrastructure under unprecedented strains, and locking nearly half of the world’s population in their homes. In a few short weeks, the world has found itself in a global economic crisis of entirely new proportions: U.S. unemployment rate has soared to nearly 3 million in a week, and G20 economies are projected to contract over the course of 2020 by more than 2 percent, completely revising the global growth trajectory.

In the BC era, public private partnerships were a “nice to have”— hatched around specific sustainable development goals and celebrated around the UN General Assembly or annual Davos meetings. These BC partnerships adopted a long-term outlook in addressing global challenges from ending food insecurity to increasing financial inclusion.

In the midst and in the aftermath of COVID-19, we have no other solution but to join forces and multiply our collective impact to address critical, immediate needs including strengthening national systems for public health preparedness, disease containment, diagnosis and treatment, and protecting and supporting people’s lives and livelihoods during a spiraling global disruption and economic downturn.

Multiplier partnerships are not just acts of generosity, but strategic moves to protect the employees, customers, and communities that make up the fabric of our society. Businesses, governments, NGOS and international organizations alike know that now more than ever, there is an operational and moral imperative to act, and in partnering with others, they can multiply their positive impact.

Multiplier partnerships take many forms and there are opportunities for organizations of any size to meaningfully join a broader effort. The private sector can approach and maximize these opportunities by considering few key questions: What is our comparative advantage and what unique resources, expertise, or access do we bring to help our employees and stakeholders? What is the biggest unmet need in the communities that our business touches? In what geographies can we catalyze the most impact? Who are the most important stakeholders we are trying to impact?

How do these efforts align with our overall business strategy and corporate purpose? And ultimately, who are the best partners that can help our organizations achieve these objectives?

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There are a number of inspiring initiatives focused on multiplying positive impact—locally, regionally and globally—around a few common themes:

Joining Resources and Organizational Strengths Organizations have partnered to combine their financial resources, topical expertise, and ability to reach communities around the world. The Gates Foundation, Mastercard, and Wellcome Trust launched the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, combining $125M in resources to accelerate the response by “identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling-up treatments.” The COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund was founded by the UN Foundation, the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, and the World Health Organization as a major platform to leverage large and small donors alike to track the virus and support front line workers.

Sharing Knowledge and Data Institutions with critical data, subject matter expertise, and sharing technologies are uniting to speed up data-driven medical therapies or policy approaches. The World Economic Forum launched the COVID Action Platform, galvanizing the data and tools of diverse private sector actors, including Salesforce, JP Morgan, Deloitte and many others. In China, Alibaba and Tencent are working with regional authorities to roll out mobile apps that aggregate data to evaluate individual risk of catching and transmitting COVID-19. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University, Microsoft, and the NIH launched the Open Research Data-Set—an AI and data-mining initiative to identify and bring together worldwide scientific efforts to accelerate the path to solutions on COVID-19.

Critical Tools Beyond Cash Some philanthropic organizations that already provided resources to address societal challenges are now targeting their funds to tackle issues related to the pandemic. Bloomberg Philanthropies and Vital Strategies committed $40 million to support vulnerable low- and middle-income countries in preventing and controlling the COVID-19 outbreak. In parallel, companies that provide 128 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

essential products or services, mobilized quickly to help global communities. Zoom Communications offered its platform for free to K-12 students and educators, Unilever partnered with the UK Department for International Development to commit €100 million worth of free sanitizer, soap, and food, utilizing their manufacturing teams to distribute among communities most in need around the world. Additionally, Ventec Life Systems and GM just announced a partnership to produce critical care ventilators.

There is an impetus, urgency, and abundant opportunity to build and shape partnerships that can multiply impact and help us all emerge stronger from this crisis. Societal expectations of the private sector have never been higher and what companies do during the COVID-19 will have direct implications on their global reputation and license to operate—both locally and globally.

What will your legacy be following the COVID-19 pandemic? ***** About the authors: Anna Tunkel is the head of global strategic initiatives and partnerships at APCO Worldwide. She advises global leaders from Fortune 50 companies to rapidly growing emerging multinationals on innovation, agility and cross-border public-private partnerships. Elizabeth Cohan is a senior director at APCO Worldwide, in her previous roles at the White House and USAID, she launched partnerships including the Administration’s Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative and Power Africa.

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ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TIME FOR A NEW APPROACH TO SOLVING COMPLEX GLOBAL CRISES

BY NIC LABUSCHAGNE

130 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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e are only a third of the way in, but 2020 has already been an extraordinary year for humanity.

We unexpectedly find ourselves at a socioeconomic crossroads, and before we decide which way to turn, we must collectively find a radical new approach to managing complex global problems.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) sweeping the globe has caused countries to take the unprecedented but necessary step of shutting down their economies to protect the health of their people.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Anyone paying attention in 2019 would’ve seen the writing being written on the walls of 24/7 newsrooms and social media feeds.

From climate change disasters to the World Health Organization’s concerns of a “Disease X”—the signs were there for all to see.

So, we must ask: why are we not prepared?

It turns out that the real issue behind our general unpreparedness is as fundamental as the way we think about the world and the problems we meet.

For the past three centuries, our civilization has been blessed by a handful of incredibly influential polymaths. Intellectual giants from Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein have pervaded most fields of academic study, to the extent that the predominant worldview of those with a formal education tends to be characterized by a mechanistic and reductionist perspective—the scientific method.

We have become hardwired to believe that things work in a structured, linear way—like machines. And that the best way to understand and fix something is to break it down into smaller parts and reassemble it in a more efficient manner. To date, this has served us exceptionally well and brought great prosperity to our world.

But we are at a tipping point. Not all problems can be understood and addressed using a mechanistic and reductionist approach: if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Treating every problem with the same approach that we always have can have unexpected and potentially disastrous consequences.

When humans think, our brains are doing four different things: making distinctions between things, organizing things into sysDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 131

tems of parts and wholes, identifying relationships between cause and effect, and assimilating perspectives from our worldviews.

There are two critical parts of this process that need elaboration.

First, our worldviews regulate how we understand phenomena around us. They comprise a set of imbibed values and assumptions based on the aggregate of what we have experienced and learned, and for most of us, we are completely unaware that these culturally nurtured biases even exist.

Second, the conceptual systems that our brains create can be divided into four broad types: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. Complex systems are characterized by unexpected emergent properties: they are unpredictable and with many possible outcomes. Most of the global challenges we face are called “wicked” problems, which are characteristic of complex systems and are impossible to solve.

It is important to make the distinction between complicated and complex systems. Simple and complicated systems can be managed by using what is called convergent thinking: we gather data, analyze it and develop solutions. Mechanistic and reductionist thinking—the scientific approach—is perfectly suited for this. Complex systems need an entirely different approach.

They can only be managed in a dynamic, incremental way that requires empathy, abductive reasoning and rapid prototyping.

This is where “systems thinking” becomes critical. It allows us to adopt a more holistic approach to problem solving, which complements the scientific approach.

Most of us, and the institutions we work for, have been trained in the scientific approach. We use analysis to try and reduce complex systems to complicated or simple systems, to a point where we can force a solution. This may work temporarily under certain conditions. But it inevitably breaks down and produces unpredictable outcomes. This year, the results of this one-size-fits-all approach are everywhere around us to see.

So, how can we manage complex systems? A “systems thinking” approach shows us that we need to build into our organizations ways of dealing with uncertainty and crisis. We need to get used to expecting outcomes that are both/and, rather than either/or. Most importantly, we need to be able to approach these systems from multiple perspectives, while being aware of our own embedded biases.

This is starkly different to the way we currently work and requires repeated cycles of objective setting, active interventions, 132 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

observation, and reflection. It requires elevated levels of selfawareness, empathy, and the ability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. It requires people who can work on equal terms with scientifically trained subject matter experts who are skilled problem solvers.

In the eye of the COVID-19 storm, the exceptional actions taken by governments around the world have demonstrated that the unthinkable is possible. We should take this hiatus in existential normality to try a different approach to managing complex problems, or risk future crises as severe or worse than the present one. ***** About the author: Nic Labuschagne is senior director of strategy in APCO Worldwideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dubai office. He is a corporate and government strategist with more than 25 years of experience in emerging markets (Middle East and Africa), helping organizations to successfully and sustainably manage reputational risk.

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COVID-19 AND THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

BY STAVROS YIANNOUKA

134 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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t the end of April 2020, the world finds itself some three months into a global pandemic, that is likely to constitute an epoch-shaping event, particularly if—as most epidemiologists expect—COVID-19 remains active for another 12 to 18 months, until such time as an effective vaccine is developed and distributed. All aspects of society have been seriously disrupted, both by the disease itself but also by the unprecedented global lockdown and its socioeconomic consequences. Not surprisingly, education has not been immune, with most school and university campuses around the world shut and learning taking place remotely.

Although we are still in the early stages of an unprecedented event—at least in our lifetimes—there are a number of observations that we can make with some degree of confidence as to their accuracy.

First, while people all around the world are experiencing the pandemic, how they experience it varies dramatically. In history, pandemics are often presented as great social levelers. They are said to affect paupers and princes alike. While there may very well be some truth to this—particularly if one takes a multi-generational perspective—at the moment and in the near-term aftermath, this pandemic will amplify socio-economic inequalities both within and between nations.

We are already seeing this play out in education. Countries, institutions, and individuals that are well-resourced with widespread internet connectivity, are minimizing disruption by shifting classes online. It took one private University group in Spain and Portugal just three days to shift its entire portfolio of classes online.

In contrast, in less well-resourced settings, governments, institutions, and individuals are having to rely on lower-tech solutions such as radio and the mail to convey lessons and distribute worksheets. And of course, in the least well-resourced settings, many children and young adults are simply going without.

Second, in the midst of a global crisis like this, there is an understandable hankering for things to return to normal, to go back to the way they were. Unfortunately, the physics of entropy strongly suggests that our experience of time is unidirectional and hence there will be no going back to the status quo ante. Indeed, in the case of education, it may not even be desirable to return to a state of affairs that many thinkers were arguing was no longer fit for purpose. In other words, if there is a sliver of a silver lining to this crisis, it is to be found in the opportunity to think anew about what we want from our education both at the individual DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 135

and the societal level, and about how we want to achieve those objectives.

Finally, while we will need dialogue and time to develop more detailed answers to both the what and the how of education, the following timeless design principles can help us to think through what’s next for education. They are resilience, innovation, and social cohesion, conveniently forming the acronym RISC.

1. Resilience The future of education must incorporate resilience both at the level of the system itself and of the individuals within it. Resilient systems tend to be simpler and more focused, with fewer moving parts. In the context of the what of education, this may translate into a greater focus on ensuring that core foundational skills such as literacy (including scientific literacy) and numeracy are given priority alongside the development core character traits encapsulated in the term “grit” (popularized by the likes of Paul Tough and Angela Duckworth). In terms of the how, this crisis has highlighted beyond a shadow of a doubt that the internet is a utility—not unlike electricity and running water—in terms of its importance. A resilient education system must incorporate a strong online component but that will only work if there is universal internet access.

2. Innovation Even the best designed systems and the best prepared individuals cannot anticipate every crisis. The future of education must therefore incorporate as a design feature, the capacity to continuously innovate both at the level of the system and within its constituent parts. This would require education systems to incorporate principles of agile leadership, and provide education leaders with the training and autonomy to utilize a broad suite of pedagogical approaches in order to achieve learning outcomes.

3. Social Cohesion Finally, the future of education must seek to amplify humanity’s greatest evolutionary advantage: its ability to collaborate flexibly in very large numbers across time and place. Both biology and history teach us that we cannot solve problems and flourish alone and in isolation. Enhancing social cohesion both at the local and 136 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

global levels must become a core objective of education particularly if, as seems likely, internationalism and global collaboration end up as casualties of the current crisis. Our education future must include active steps to bring the world together across all forms of divideâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;political, cultural, social, and economic. This will require us to once again put ethics and values at the core of the education enterprise.

Humanity will eventually emerge from the COVID-19 crisis. That much is clear. What is less clear is the structure and nature of the world that we will find ourselves in post-crisis. Crises create plastic moments in history where the decisions that we take today are likely to shape the future for generations to come. It is incumbent on us to ensure that this crisis does not go to waste and that however unfortunate the circumstances, we use this opportunity to continue improving the human condition. ***** About the author: Stavros Yiannouka is the CEO of World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE), an initiative of Qatar Foundation.

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A TALE OF TWO UNIVERSITIES

BY BEN NELSON

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n October 18, 2019 and on November 14, 2019 respectively, Lebanon and Hong Kong closed all their schools for safety reasons. This was more than two months before they reported their first coronavirus case. In both cases, the reason for school closures was the escalating violence of anti-government protests. Not coincidentally, both countries, despite the gap in their digital readiness, were relatively efficient in transitioning to remote teaching come February 2020 when they had to re-close their academic institutions for entirely different reasons.

As worldwide school closures impact over 91% of all students (as of April 17) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a disparate range of remote teachingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and to a lesser extent, learningâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;occurred all over the globe. Academic institutions, even those most reluctant, were jolted into finding solutions for delivering instruction. The disruption was so rapid and pervasive that the general wisdom seems to be that there is no turning back; that education has been changed forever, maybe even despite the efforts of institutional leaders.

Having had many discussions with various academic institutions locally and globally, I know that while many are well-intentioned, they have moved their lecture from the lecture hall to a video conferencing hall. They are basically teaching in the same way they have taught for centuries, only using a more modern and digital venue. For many teachers and learners, the experience has been disastrous and they will likely vow never to return to these impoverished, virtual rooms, once they can go back to their well-lit, spacious lecture halls.

A small minority of universities, however, will not waste the opening this crisis provides. They will use it to intrinsically transform the education they are delivering, not being satisfied with recreating an ineffective offline system in an online context. Instead, they will reform their institutions to become more student-centric with a crystallized focus on learning outcomes. They will revise their curricula and their pedagogical approach. They will take a keen look at which skills they intend to impart to their students based on how these will help them become good decisionmakers for an unpredictable, and evidently unprepared, world.

This reform may be driven by university presidents who always had the intention to transform their institutions but could not garner enough support, or by deans who were already working to evolve their divisions, but never had the political capital to influence their entire organizations.

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Let us be clear: this moment calls for complete institutional reform. Now is the time to redesign curricula, eliminating superfluous courses that have been added organically over the years.

Now is the time to build intentional scaffolds, which combine the richness of interdisciplinary breadth with field-specific mastery and individual choice. Now is the time to establish sustained partnerships with the public, private, and social sectors to ensure we are able to graduate more informed, more engaged, more productive citizens in ways that are accessible to all citizens.

Turning back to the majority, most institutions will re-open and attempt to operate as they were. Many will suffer from dire financial challenges, only to be propped up by stimulus packages. They will be burdened by tuition refunds and lower enrollment numbers.

They will struggle to attract international students, whose tuition is an important revenue generator. They will survive, holding on until the next crisis hits. Whether it is civil unrest, another pandemic, or some other calamity. Then the cycle will repeat, until this unstable economic model can no longer be supported.

Meanwhile, those that chose to adapt, to focus on students and their outcomes, will have graduated a different breed of learners, whose skills and mindsets enable them to contribute meaningfully to society. They will produce graduates who have been intentionally trained to make decisions of consequences, whose employers are impressed, not disappointed, by the value they add. Those that embraced this challenge, that invested the time, effort, and capital to truly reform, will have made themselves more sustainable and equitable, and their learners more resilient and engaged.

This crisis is shining a light on the nature of universities and which of two camps they fall into. The majority, unfortunately, will be focused on institutional preservation and through that focus continue to retreat from their educational mission and from longterm sustainability. Yet others will demonstrate a commitment to reinvigorating their educational mission. The latter choose to reformâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;whether that means an online, campus-based, or hybrid delivery modelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and will see that putting their students first will ultimately preserve their institutions in the long run. ***** About the author: Ben Nelson is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Minerva, which he founded in 2011 with the goal of nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world through a systematic and evidence-based approach to learning.

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MOURNING THE GRASSROOTS OF EDUCATION

BY MELISSA METOS

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he COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated numerous societal issues—both related and unrelated to health—previously ignored within the United States. Low-income students are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of an ill-prepared education system as the closure of schools have forced most of the 50 million K-12 students to an online system with no warning. This unprecedented upheaval of day-to-day life for families and their children is exacerbated for those with no access to a computer or internet connection. Even families that are well-equipped to handle these challenges can’t help but wonder what the future of education has in store.

The most recent data from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) claims that there are 3.1 million households who have school-aged children and no wired broadband connection at home. This issue of digital equity, known as the “homework gap,” was previously concealed by public Wi-Fi during the rise of digital learning. According to the FCC, 70% of teachers assign homework that requires internet access. Under the current circumstances the most likely suspects—public libraries, cafes, a friend’s living room—are closed for business.

Perhaps the solution to digital equity in grades K-12 is purely economic and could be fixed by finding funding to ensure every K-12 student has access to a computer and internet connection for inevitable online work. Senior writer Mark Wilson of Fast Company argues how the three most valuable technology companies in the world—Apple, Google, and Microsoft— would be the appropriate suppliers for such an initiative as significant portions of their profits come from the educational platform market. Collectively, the three have enough money to supply eight $1,000 laptops for each K-12 student in America, but of course we don’t need these companies to donate 400 million laptops. Rather, the priority should be ensuring that the 10 million students (21%) who are below the poverty line have the technology they need to be on level playing fields with their classmates—not just during this pandemic but every day.

Unfortunately, none of the big three have spoken out about any plans or intentions of contributing to the current educational crisis that COVID has aggravated.

Furthermore, cable and cell providers need to do their part to grant Wi-Fi access in all American homes with school aged children—even in rural areas. If companies are ultimately able to provide such services during this difficult time, it raises questions of why they haven’t before or whether they will con144 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

tinue post-pandemic. Is it unrealistic for cable and cellular network providers to come together and be a source for permanently bridging the digital divide?

Even though closing the homework gap has become a priority for some state decision-makers since COVID-19 reached the US, there is a compelling discussion to be had about a new era of learning post-pandemic. Is online learning, or even the widespread incorporation of devices in the classroom, as effective as in person learning? The weight of this question is often masked by the “ooo’s and ahh’s” of a distant classroom full of tablet-bearing students.

Any discussion of expanding agenda towards the expansion of digital learning should be postponed until the issue of digital equity is resolved. If this proves too difficult, school officials should use this pandemic as a welcome excuse to reassess and improve the future of learning by virtue of inclusivity and tradition. Having to quickly adapt to e-learning has given a glimpse to students, teachers, and parents of how different everyday life could be if the grassroots of our education system continue to erode.

At this time, it is unclear whether or not the national government is doing anything to lessen the burden that COVID-19 has placed upon vulnerable K-12 students—a lack of clarity reminiscent of how the issue of digital equity has been treated in the past. However, Executive Director Peggy Schafer of ConnectME, a program aimed at educating the community about the importance of broadband availability and accessibility, claims that she has “certainly heard from more people at all levels of governments wanting to get digital inclusion projects done…this emergency stripped the cover off of this issue.”’

Hopefully these projects are permanent solutions and not merely band aids to get us through the COVID-19 crisis. While most teachers have fortunately had sympathy to their students who haven’t been able to get their work in during this time, seemingly because of this time, it is likely that the technological divide that vulnerable students will continue to face will be widely forgotten along with the virus.

About the author: Melissa Metos is a Diplomatic Courier Correspondent. She graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in Sociology and a minor in Writing and Rhetoric.

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3 PATH FORWARD

LIFE AFTER THE PANDEMIC: FUTURE SCENARIOS

BY TYL VAN TOORN

148 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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onsider the following scenario: It’s June of 2050, and the planet is sustaining a thriving global community that is healthier than any other point in human history. Leaders and investors across sectors and nations brought about a new type of prosperity that aims for shared outcomes, driven by the view that human health is a prerequisite for human wealth. Broad alignment and integration between industries, governments, and nations have enabled the world to tackle persistent multi-generational problems once thought too big to solve. Climate change mitigation measures have succeeded and the smog that went away temporarily during the Great Pandemic of 2020 has now faded permanently.

Those coming of age in 2050 can scarcely believe that “unilateralism” had at one point been a dominant political theory, or that Lake Eerie once had toxic algal blooms. Is this Pax Mundi?

This possible future state is not so far-fetched. COVID-19 is refocusing global attention on how health is central to our economic well-being. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that we need species-level cooperation in order to find the right balance to maintain both. Such an approach will likely realign our priorities and our capital to privilege health for years to come.

Getting there requires that we adopt two significant paradigm shifts: the first is that we enable new patterns of working to solve complex problems together, and the second is that we acknowledge that the health of the economy is contingent and should be measured on the health of the people that comprise it and the environment in which we all exist. Both paradigm shifts are mutually reinforcing. Collaboration produces net-positive outcomes that create a viable path towards our collective wellbeing, and our collective wellbeing requires collaboration. Arguably, these paradigms build from old standards in the human toolkit and there’s a rare opportunity to revisit them now.

The world’s economies are facing new realities as a result of COVID-19 comparable to other similarly paradigm-shifting global events like the World Wars, whose jolting effects renewed multilateral efforts, with varying degrees of efficacy. Golden ages often occur in the shadow of a crisis, but they’re not a given.

In 1957, psychiatrist and cybernetics pioneer W. Ross Ashby proposed the law of requisite variety, which posits that complex problems require complexity of an equal order in their address.

This concept was taken up by transformation designers who applied its fundamental underlying principle to solving problems at the pentagon, NASA and World Economic Forum over the DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 149

last four decades. The collaborative design principle at the heart “requisite variety” is that problems that involve many can only be solved by the insights and perspectives of those same many, or else run the strong risk of generating inadequate solutions.

Stakeholders in the system accelerate their respective success when furthering shared values and shared intentions. This leads to resilient alignments enabling people to collaboratively work their way out of quagmires towards outcomes they equally own and desire. By making the “back room bigger,” the application of the law of requisite variety can be a powerful way to keep systems accountable to the people they are meant to serve.

COVID-19 is a complex species-level crisis that can only be addressed through species-level cooperation. For the first time in human history, everyone in the world is sharing the experience of a pandemic while observing each other respond in real-time.

Governments across the globe are making seemingly difficult trade-offs between human and financial health. The crisis is a shared experience, and, hopefully, a shared opportunity to learn that human and financial health go hand-in-hand.

COVID-19 is a reminder for politicians, policymakers, and investors that disease and the outcomes of illness are tied to environmental health. A recent study from Harvard University has shown that exposure to poor air quality, which is known to worsen chronic conditions like asthma, also correlates to a higher risk of death from COVID-19. If reminders like this are taken seriously, the environment—as a critical determinant of human health—will be universally adopted onto the “high priority” list for collaborative action. Adopting a paradigm which posits that health is the economy and environment is health makes it possible for coalitions of governments, industry, investors, and voters to prioritize addressing climate change as the species-level crisis that it is.

Unfortunately, the current crisis has also exposed limitations in our current international capacity for building shared intent, even in situations where we share outcomes. The current fault line is the re-emergence of nationalism, the historic harbinger of global conflict and political balkanization. Nationalism forces its proponents to play a finite, zero-sum game. Sadly, this has narrowed the global political paradigm into two primary types of players: supporters of globalization that believe in open, free global trade and international cooperation; and supporters of nationalism that believe in domestic-centric economies and “goit-alone-ism”.

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Establishing principles of human health as a measure of wealth can create new international alignments on how trade and collaboration ought to work in a post-COVID world. And these views might be attractive to both autarkists and globalists. For example, there may be merits in stronger local and regional economies that rely less on trading goods across large distances trade while continuing to rely heavily on multilateral cooperation—particularly with respect to shared policy intentions, research, and the economic power-trio of intellectual property, data, and technology. Collaboration and knowledge sharing in the near-term will help us decouple old international frameworks from our future.

Fostering shared intent around the environment has proven difficult, particularly along the left-right divide. Understanding the environment’s relationality to human health and social wealth will not suddenly solve the lack of consensus, but it opens new pathways forward.

Forecasting the future is a risky business and may feel like the trouble of tomorrow. But setting course toward the future we want demands a relative bearing—and this might be the safest thing we can do as we navigate the unknown. ***** About the author: Tyl van Toorn is the Co-Founder and CEO of Watershed Partners, a strategic advisory focused on multi-stakeholder alignment and systemic transformation. He has worked with and across public and private sectors in Europe, Asia, and North America

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THE NEED FOR NEW CODES OF CONDUCT

BY DANIEL WAGNER

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mong the many lessons that will have been learned following the COVID-19 pandemic is the need for some new codes of conduct for what to do in the event of a pandemic, how to better marshal resources, and how to achieve better collaboration internationally. There are, of course, numerous examples of global collaboration following calamities, such as the creation of the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund, and World Bank following World War II. Many other multilateral organizations were created in the decades that followed, all in response to enduring global needs.

One area in which the COVID-19 pandemic has amply demonstrated an increased need for collaboration is in biological weapon defense. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) has 147 member states and prohibits them from developing, producing, stockpiling, or otherwise acquiring equipment to deliver biological agents. But that has not prevented some of the world’s most weapons-capable nations of doing just that.

Approximately 50 nations remain outside the scope of the Convention, but in addition, the BWC has no verification measures to ensure compliance. It has been clear for decades now that some member states have either violated the Convention or operated illegal bioweapons programs. The BWC charter should therefore be updated to add compliance and enforcement provisions. The pandemic should incentivize those nations that have not joined to do so, as well as motivate member nations to put some teeth into the Convention.

COVID-19 also served to emphasize how politicized the World Health Organization (WHO) has become and how inadequate its response to the virus was. While he was busy placating the Chinese government, the WHO’s director general did not declare a global pandemic until March, when 114 countries had already recorded cases of the virus. According to the WHO’s 2017 Pandemic Influenza Risk Management guidelines, the director general may make a declaration of a pandemic based on his/her risk assessment—but there are no specific guidelines for what constitutes a pandemic, when it should be declared, or how nations should universally respond. That must change. Going forward, specific guidelines should be established for what constitutes a pandemic, when it should be declared, and how nations should respond.

It is worth noting, also, that there was a marked increase in hacking, phishing attempts, and online threat as the virus progressed around the world, emphasizing how vulnerable many govern154 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

ments, businesses, and individuals remain to hacking and cyber warfare. There is a compelling case to be made for the creation of a World Cybersecurity Organization (WCO) to provide much needed focus on identifying threats, sharing information about the latest hacking techniques, distributing software updates, and sending teams of specialists to address incidents that threaten national economies and their security.

The WCO’s mandate could include crafting a set of universal laws designed to combat cybercrime and hacking. That may be the only way to commence the badly needed effort for a set of globally applicable laws to fight it. Part of what such laws might entail is coming to agreement on what would constitute a crime, as well as having a common agreement on how jurisdiction would be applied and enforced.

These three recommendations are illustrative of the enormous task that awaits the world’s nations once the spread of the virus has been abated and a vaccine is found. The objective is to establish a proactive footing, mindful that it is only a matter of time until another robust response is required of the global community. The world’s nations should never again be caught flat footed. Creating new multilateral organizations, and enhancing the ability of existing organizations to respond to future calamities more meaningfully, should be considered a minimal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. ***** About the author: Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions, the author of 7 books, more than 700 articles on current affairs and risk management, and a regular contributor to a range of platforms. His most recent book is The America-China Divide.

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EDUCATION INEQUITIES: MOVING FROM RHETORIC TO ACTION

BY CHRIS PURIFOY & TAYLOR KENDAL

156 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

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hould access to quality education be a human right?

Not an American right, not a right for those who happen to have resources or the right zip code, but a global human right?

Most students in America suffer needlessly at the mercy of an inadequate and inequitable system, one which has always unfairly distributed. Implicit bias, leaves black students twice as likely to be unprepared for college, and once/if they graduate, African Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts at almost every education level. Beyond bias and opportunity, access to basic education resources is a significant barrier to minority students. Low-income, rural, and minority students are far less likely to have internet access at home than other students, with 14% of these households lacking access to the internet altogether. Global crisis aside, the status quo as we know it today is something we should all be unwilling to accept, much less endorse.

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a harsh and revealing light on the inability of our already strained learning infrastructures to address these equity gaps. 25% of students in LA Unified schools are lacking computer access, leaving nearly 150,000 students unable to receive communications and assignments during these times of social isolation. A third of Michigan’s K-12 public school students have no access to the technology they need—that’s 500,000 students without internet access or a computer at home. Societally, we should be ashamed for having ignored this digital divide for so long. With global economies collapsing, we can no longer afford to sit idle and watch the gaps grow wider.

In a special COVID-19 Crisis Report released by Inside HigherEd, it was reported that 76% of university heads surveyed are concerned about access to online learning and platforms, while 57% expressed concern about technological readiness to conduct online learning. Despite these concerns, 98% of institutions surveyed moved the majority of in-person classes online. With 48% of institutions needing additional support for instructional technology, it’s unequivocal: universities are unable to bridge these divides on their own, let alone be expected to do so equitably.

This crisis demands we do more than make yet another aspirational proclamation. It demands that we unite to address the issues that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to plain sight.

Turning blind eye (or returning to the familiar status quo) would DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 157

hand down an unacceptable, and likely unmanageable, cost to future generations. These circumstances call for rapid, accelerated change, rather than the tired rhetoric and slow, incremental progress of times past. With every crisis comes both opportunity and threat. In this time of fear and uncertainty, an opportunity has emerged to leap-frog systemic inequities and collaboratively build a more resilient and durable future, one which finally favors human potential and public goods over profits.

To meet education equity challenges we face, we must rapidly: •

Connect the most vulnerable learners to the internet;

•

Ensure all learners have a personal, internet-enabled device (smartphone, laptop, tablet, etc.);

•

Allow learners to store credentials in a safe, secure portfolio with total access control (i.e. self-sovereign identities and digital wallets);

•

Provide all learners with equal access to quality education and opportunity.

Previous national-level efforts to these ends have been a game of misguided investments at best, and vapid political pandering at worst. The American elite have always done a good job of signaling focus on equity and inclusion, but as indicated above, the stats tell a different story with regards to how this is truly playing out for many, if not most, students. They deserve better.

We deserve better.

Pandemic-proof Equity Networks Need Not Be Fictions Amidst the pandemic-imposed chaos, we have an opportunity to work together and bridge our shared efforts into one open Internet of Education that can and will benefit everyone. Shared learnings from anonymous learner data will fuel innovation and industry. Skills and achievement data, secured with new techniques to ensure privacy, will allow us to measurably solve skills gaps and enter a new era where we can finally quantify the impact of human capital for human flourishing.

In the end, COVID-19 will pass, but seeding a global Internet of Education to bridge the skills and equity gaps widened by this 158 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

crisis can endure for the benefit of all learners. Every crisis is part opportunity and part threat, and for education, COVID-19 represents a foil showing our generation where we have failed and where we can rise to the challenge to do better. ***** About the authors: Chris Purifoy is a Co-Founder and CEO of the Learning Economy Foundation and a Diplomatic Courier Contributing Editor. Taylor Kendal is the Chief Program Officer of the Learning Economy Foundation and a Diplomatic Courier Education Contributor.

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WE NEED TO RETHINK OUR VALUE SYSTEMS

BY KALIYA YOUNG & KAREN STUDDERS

160 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

S

ome say the economy has collapsed or is collapsing and we must get back to work. Others say, let the economy collapse. COVID-19 has shone a light on how our enormous wealth inequality is killing people but we have an unprecedented opportunity to use this crisis to change fundamental issues within our society.

What if we shifted our thinking to “there is enough, we simply need to distribute resources differently?” Let’s start with the four basic needs and fundamental rights of each and every human being: housing, food, income, and health.

There Is Enough Housing In Housing and Urban Development’s 2019 report to Congress, nearly 568,000 people are homeless in America, with California and New York State having the highest homeless populations. In New York City, authorities report that 114,659 children in New York City public schools are either homeless or living in temporary housing—that means one out of every 10 children is without a home. These numbers are actually low. In 2011, Amnesty International identified approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. as homeless—about 1% of the U.S. population today.

At the same time there were 18.5 million vacant homes in the U.S. Simple math shows we have enough homes to provide all people experiencing homelessness a home.

There are tremendous racial disparities in homelessness. African Americans represent 13% of the general population but account for 40% of people experiencing homelessness, and more than 50% of homeless families with children. Structural racism created and sustains this disproportionality. Homelessness has surged 75% in Los Angeles, California, over the past six years.

There is a disturbing trend evolving with this crisis: if homelessness is disproportionally afflicting African American, so is COVID-19. Moreover, the pandemic is spreading a lot more rapidly amongst homeless populations.

“What the HUD report did not say: homelessness is solvable,” explains NLIHC president and CEO, Diane Yentel. “We have proven solutions to end homelessness and, in the wealthiest nation in the world, we have the resources to solve the problem. We lack only the political will to fund the solutions at the scale necessary.”

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Coupled with unsolved homelessness today, many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and have not had a meaningful increase in income or wages in 40 years. Even if they do receive raises, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re facing a housing market where prices have continued to grow at a steady rate of around 6% annually over that same time frame. In places like the Bay Area, it is growing 14.5% annually.

The situation is worse for renters. Before COVID-19 21 million Americans were considered rent-burdened to the point where they have to cut back on necessities like food and healthcare, or take on extra labor to afford their home. With the COVID-19 pandemic, over 26 million Americans are now unemployed.

Governors in several states have placed moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments, however, the rent and mortgages will be due in the future.

The 2019 The Homes for All Report recommends four policy changes, which need to be carried out concurrently, especially in light of COVID-19: 1. We must provide rental vouchers to renters and cap rent increases to avoid millions being evicted this summer.

2. We must end racist exclusionary zoning and allow multi-unit dwellings in neighborhoods.

3. We must make homes for people, not for capital investments.

4. We must reverse decades of divestment and build millions of homes/apartments that are publicly owned or grounded in affordable housing principles like co-housing to house low- and extremely low-income individuals.

We also need to look to how other countries and cities ensure that all their residents have access to affordable housing.

In Austria, the government owns 75% of the rental housing market. In Singapore, 80% of the people live in developments that are publicly developed and governed. We need to look at healthier designs for our neighborhoods so they are livable, resilient, and sustainable.

Simply put, we must rethink our housing systems with the foundational understanding that housing sits at the crossroads of economic, racial, health, and environmental justice. Safe, secure housing is necessary for every person to thrive. If we have 162 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

a future, it will be a future which we accomplish together as an integrated body of well-cared-for individuals. The right to be and remain housed is a human right.

There Is Enough Food Much of the food harvested is processed and then transferred into global food supply chains that are then distributed to restaurants and cafeterias, etc. In the last four weeks with “Stay at Home” orders, much of that has shut down. This is why we have seen stories emerging of farmers dumping milk, or tilling crops over without picking them from the fields. Farmers are choosing to not harvest because it costs money and they don’t have immigrant workers to pick the crops.

We are seeing industrial meat processing plants become sites of COVID-19 hotspot outbreaks and shut down. Meat processing workers are particularly susceptible to the virus because they typically stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the line and congregate in crowded locker rooms and cafeterias. Neither of these situations bodes well for the resiliency of our food system, which is actually industrialized agriculture dependent upon fossil fuels, based on rapid, mass production, not all rooted in the needs of local economies.

The global food and beverage industry is now worth over USD $ 8 trillion, representing more than 10% of the world’s GDP, according to a report from Plunkett Research. A handful of corporations—Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz Company, Danone, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Unilever, Diageo, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Heineken, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez—control our food, from farm to fork. Their unbridled power grants them increasing political influence over the rules that govern our food system and allows them to manipulate the marketplace—pushing down the prices paid to family farmers and driving them out of business.

In 2008 Michael Pollen wrote an open letter to then President-Elect Obama saying, “agriculture is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is a national security risk, and is built on cheap oil.” It is worth re-reading the letter now and its bottom line: “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” Pollan recommends three policy changes: 1) food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 163

and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume; 2) policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world; and 3) policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

We must rethink our industrial food system and build strong local food-sheds where people are buying food from local farmers within 100 miles of their city. Communities need to finance/sponsor new farmers working on the land and ending the industrial de-localized agriculture. We must support the growth of regenerative agriculture that builds social health, biodiversity, and yields a nutritious and profitable farm product.

We must spend our research dollars on agroecology rather than exploitation of industrial agriculture.

We Must Rethink Our Value Systems To change how we distribute things we must rethink the medium through which we do so much of the distribution. We must rethink money and reinvent money systems that are in alignment with human values and value human life and living systems.

Money is entirely a social construct and contract. We created it and we can change how it works. It is literally all in our collective heads. Consider the case of Brazil. The country ended inflation by creating a virtual currency that was stable. The current rules of money mean that money comes into existence when debt is created. We have created a system where the hoarding of money is rewarded and debt is encouraged. We must rethink this. According to Edward Cahn, the core operating system of a society is family, neighborhood, and community. We are seeing the widespread emergence of mutual aid networks that can be nurtured and supported during and after the COVID-19 crisis has passed. Established mutual aid systems will enable societies to be much more ready to endure the next pandemic but more importantly mutual aid brings human civilization into alignment with nature.

These non-market systems are not in good shape; they have been underutilized and replaced by money. The operating system is no longer reliably performing basic functions such as transmitting values, creating support and consensus, and preserving memories. Money represents that abstract value that 164 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

can be exchanged in a naked market. There is a role for this type of exchange in a complex society with millions of goods to be exchanged and produced through supply chains of raw materials. However, our current economy isn’t built on these types of substantive transactions yet. Much of the consumer spending is on things that aren’t directly related to human needs but instead human wants, to fill emotional voids created by over marketization.

The future society can be rooted in local communities, our connection to each other and our interdependence with the land, water and air for our nurturance. It will require going through a process of letting go of the old way of doing things, and re-thinking our value systems. People are the true wealth of society. Reciprocity is a fundamental principle of human life. This happens when we come together in community to care for one another, to learn from each other, to celebrate and to console one another. ***** About the authors: Kaliya Young was recently featured in WIRED UK for her work leading a global community building a new layer of the internet for people. In 2012 she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She is an instructor at Merritt College in Oakland, California. Karen Studders is a trained scientist and an attorney who worked in environment and public health for CenterPoint Energy. She was appointed Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, held several leadership positions in the Environmental Council of States, served in government before, during, and after 9/11, and subsequently worked for non-profits to influence national food and housing policies. She currently serves as a consultant and policy analyst for organizations in the U.S. Editor’s Note: Kaliya Young and Karen Studders co-created the blog www.LetsHaveAPlan.blog to address the COVID-19 pandemic and bring their knowledge, skills, and abilities together to help transition our society.

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PANDEMICS, BLACK SWANS, AND PREDICTIONS

BY TIM ROEMER

166 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

â&#x20AC;&#x153;T

he Plague,â&#x20AC;? an oft-quoted book by Albert Camus, portrays the epidemic city of Oran as a place where truth and fiction are indistinguishable, the government cannot coordinate an effective response, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. While we are not quite certain about what specific changes are barreling toward us, historians universally agree that nothing creates more widespread and lasting change than epidemics. Here are some of the potential changes across society, culture, business, and power politics that will impact our lives in very significant ways.

Short-Term Priorities vs. Strategic Planning As the COVID-19 virus infects more people around the world, it threatens to further exacerbate inequality and drop millions more into poverty, according to the World Bank. This creates enormous pressure on government stability, health care delivery systems, educational demands, and social safety nets.

In the short term, rather than concentrating on new infrastructure or economic reform initiatives, political leaders are forced to spend their time on limiting direct loss of life and quick economic recovery packages. As growing numbers of countries experience COVID-19 death and displacement along the lines of Italy and Spain, compelling factors such as pandemics and recessions could alter the national dialogue toward political changes requiring more expensive government programs and expanded safety net coverage. This might result in even louder and bolder pressure groups battling it out from the far right and left fringes.

Climate Change The climate change debate will also be radically altered by the COVID-19 economic coma. We have now lived through an extended period of grounded planes, shuttered factories, and a disappearing carbon footprint. Now, a vigorous policy fight might take place to see how we can learn lessons from this period and apply them to future business and government action. World philanthropic foundations are likely to fund larger programs addressing climate solutions with coalitions and private-public partnerships are more prevalent.

Just as societies have been moving toward higher density in cities (for energy and efficiency reasons), now we are told this type of high density dangerously conflicts with transmission and infection of contagious disease. With the prospect of several pandemics imDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 167

pacting us in the decades ahead, resolving this apparent conflict between climate and pandemics is tricky. Governments will need to increase their abilities to advocate for pragmatic solutions and develop younger leaders to reach achievable goals, thus preserving the planet and protecting people from viruses. These proposals will likely emanate from states, governors, mayors, CEOs and locally-based leadership, not multilateral agreements—projecting globally yet practicing locally is the key to this success.

Government and Business Philosophies The influence and scope of government is evolving toward a much bigger role in Western societies as we come out of this crisis. In America, the middle class has been ravaged by globalization, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and now COVID-19’s record unemployment numbers. Senator Bernie Sanders will not be on the ballot, but many of his initial ideas and programs may be more palatable to some voters. While it will be framed as socialism vs. capitalism in election propaganda, it is more likely to translate to louder calls for specifically reforming capitalism, as the Progressive movement did with Theodore Roosevelt as president.

International trade has changed society through globalization and it will continue to be a controversial and divisive issue moving forward.

Business will shift away from “just in time” global supply chains or those solely based in Asia. These old business philosophies lacked resilience and relied on free trade across borders. De-globalization will continue. Populism and nationalism will remain and businesses will need to reorient their philosophy and relocate their supply chains accordingly. CEOs have room and possibilities to propose initiatives in many areas for economic and education innovations.

Society has been moving toward deeper and more toxic divisions, and more angry and impatient citizens. Trade wars, Brexit, and anti-immigration waves do not appear to be going away anytime soon. While viruses have no borders, and thrive on poor global coordination, there is an opportunity for us to learn one lesson about the shared theme of us all being in this together (even if it’s restricted) to climate change and/or pandemic issues. Sometimes, global cooperation and coordination can make all our individual lives safer, better and healthier.

Code War The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is long gone, now replaced by a Code War between the United 168 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

States and China. There are new red lines defining national security. Both are battling intensely over technology, artificial intelligence, cyber security, precious earth materials and propaganda skirmishes. Currently, it’s China blaming America for the virus spreading globally and simultaneously claiming credit for sending medical supplies to Japan, Iran and Spain. China is staking claim to be the world leader now. The balance for geopolitical power will continue, not so much in direct combat but certainly in fierce competition for cutting edge technology, data and information, resilient supply chains, reliable trade partners and loyal coalition builders. Disinformation, psychological warfare and cyber-attacks will increase as virulent weapons and both countries wage global battles to win the 21st century’s definition of the hearts and minds (cryptocurrency and commercial information) of the world.

Attitudes and lifestyles will be altered and changed fundamentally by this epic shift from work to home. It’s been enforced by a government mandated lockdown, not telecommuting by convenience. Words like “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” are not just understood by many Americans, but actually practiced by them. According to surveys (YouGov-Graeme Bruce) 20% of Americans who drink alcohol said they would now drink more than usual during the pandemic Understanding and anticipating what brands will benefit from post-pandemic lifestyles will be key. The trend toward a cashless society will only accelerate, fueled by online shopping. We might experience a push back from the enforced societal isolation and toward a new phase of partial rehabilitation of some creative brick and mortar options as people seek out safe but meaningful interaction.

Black Swan events, world wars and medical innovations have dramatically led to radical changes in many regions around the globe. Pandemics always lead to quick and sometimes unexpected transformational change across all of society worldwide. The more we can peer ahead, proactively understand and analyze emerging trends in these pandemics, the more likely we are to help our businesses, political leaders and civil institutions tackle crucial issues and create space for solutions in the next decade. ***** About the author: Tim Roemer, former U.S. Member of Congress, 9/11 Commissioner, and U.S. Ambassador to India, is Executive Director and Strategic Counselor at APCO Worldwide.

He is also a member of APCO’s International Advisory Council.

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THE POSTPANDEMIC SWEET SPOT

BY NATHAN TONANI

170 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

I

’m sitting on a balcony, physically quarantined from the rest of you, in between sessions of connecting with friends and family through the number of voice chat apps (the likes of which are rejoicing the beginning of an era built for them) when it occurs to me this isn’t the future I want.

No, not a future of forced quarantine, but rather something likening itself to a voluntary version; a world where everyone is working, learning, caring, connecting, being, remote.

The first week, sure — I was caught up with having time for friends and family. Since then, well it’s not what I had in mind. I can only take so many virtual happy hours before I want a real one. Sadly, for these apps (and luckily for us) the remote life is not the life for us.

And while I’m thrilled we can stay connected with whoever, wherever, whenever, I’m also thrilled for the day we don’t need to. I’m excited to start connecting, living, in person again.

Tomorrow’s Makeover No doubt, the distant future has burst in view to replace tomorrow. The pandemic has forced us to adopt new ways of living.

To sustain some semblance of normalcy we’ve had to embrace technology in unprecedented ways. Society has gone remote.

We are leaning on Zoom for work and virtual communities; Khan Academy for learning; Twitter for breaking news; Facebook for staying connected; Twitch and YouTube for social engagement; Cloud services and ISPs for keeping everything up (and so many more, but you get the point). All were bordering on essential before, now there’s no question — they’re essential, and there’s no turning back.

The digital age is about to be revolutionized yet again as we all realize we can (or are finally given the opportunity to) work and learn (among others) through our devices. Workspaces and classrooms will be challenged. No more wasting time commuting; no more being forced to live in a city you don’t want to live in; no more meeting time-sinks, or learning through a subpar lecture.

We can take things into our own hands. Not only will these places be challenged, in some cases they’ll be replaced. Digital-first alternatives are finally seeing the light and can no longer be ignored.

But does that mean we will ride the wave of technology into a future of remote life? A future where I’m up on this balcony by choice rather than force? I don’t think so.

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In the Name of Social As I sit here, I also feel this unnerving desire to be closer to others. I miss being with people — everything about it. We are social animals, down to our wiring. And given the whole doing less in the name of more, we’ve been forced to not only think about it, but feel it. So, while the freedoms of an untethered (or rather, tethered?) life are great, I’m unsure what to make of it.

I do know this though — s ocial connection is key to our mental and physical health, our happiness and ability to find meaning, and our community’s ability to prosper. And as of now, it’s difficult to build and sustain through virtual outlets. It’s great we have them (especially now — to minimize the drop in connection), and surely metaverses are coming, but virtually connecting is no match for the real world. In-person will continue to reign supreme.

So, while bets are being placed on virtual technologies, I’m placing mine somewhere in the real world; the dawn of a new era — where technology improves upon the physical world, rather than replaces it.

Freedom-bred Innovation Fast-forward to when life normalizes, the pandemic is no more, and a new war will be waged — war on our previous normal. Between feeling zealous with regaining our long-lost autonomy and being tasked with going back to what once was, we will demand change. At minimum, we will ask for more lenience around being remote. But zoom out and what we’ll really be asking for is more freedom around how and where we spend our time. This helps us ultimately find that sweet spot — the more ways we can spend our time, the more we understand how we want to.

It’s not as if alternatives haven’t existed and weren’t gaining followings, we just weren’t prepared to let them sit shotgun.

Policy and accreditation take time; and in the name of exponential, they are now going to be forced to speed up.

The location of most alternatives? Online (locationless) of course. Something we’re acutely aware of right now. And as we know, that means more than it appears on its surface.

Online is data-driven and curated. It’s the fast lane. It’s where startups exist that invert power structures and shift paradigms; 172 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

where merit and skill hold weight over incumbency (well, some of the time). But with big corporations, universities, traditions clutching to keep their strangleholds, innovation has not always won out; as frictions around “what has worked” slowed progress, we’ve been stuck in yesterday.

All it was going to take for the grip to loosen was for people to feel free to make decisions they felt were best for them, and for those to be recognized. Now that everyone is being forced to see the potential, not only will these alternatives be acceptable, they’ll be reputable, favorable.

Queue spikes in swapping 4-year universities with online vocational schools and 9–5 office gigs with remote-first startups.

And while not every industry is, will ever, or even could ever be prepared, they will be forced to innovate in an attempt to keep talent in their pipelines.

Regardless of how this plays out, there’s a problem: remote work and online education are missing a key element of being human and that’s the social one.

So, while at first sight it seems like we’re preparing to go online, I see it as preparation to bring online off — the heavier demand for alternatives to traditional ways of life will brew innovation, and because real world outlets have an inherent advantage, the physical world, rather than the virtual one, will be the frontier of that innovation.

We can take social technologies as an example.

Social Technologies — F ull Circle We’ve now had a decade of social technologies at strength.

Their impact can’t go unrecognized as they’ve played a large role in shaping the world we live in.

The reason we can use them as an example is they were born with far less regulation and oversight than work and education: they were born online. That allowed them to move fast and for adoption to happen organically. They were our canary, showing us what the impacts of going online were, especially given the nature of the business (how connecting permeates all of what we do in life).

And one thing over the last year or two was becoming abundantly clear — they weren’t making people feel socially conDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 173

nected. The mere fact that we’ve become lonelier while having the most connections is a clear red flag of our misdirection.

And people have been feeling it.

The pandemic interrupted what was becoming a heavy emphasis on physically connecting again. Facebook was leaning into Groups; Meetup was showing promise; Airbnb expanded into Experiences. Social technologies saw that what they built wasn’t sustainable — the attention economy wouldn’t work once the end-user understood the game. A new economy centered around value (in this case, social connection) was beginning to emerge, and that playing field was becoming the real world.

And while the pandemic did interrupt it, it also reinforced its need. We miss being present with one another. No more questioning. Like I said, we’re feeling it.

Synthesizing the Duality In many industries and for many reasons (some I fully support, others I don’t), the online world has been kept separate from the physical world. Slowly, it has built a suite of universes all driven by their own needs. This multiverse is surely to get more crowded and rich following what’s transpired, as people have taken a liking for virtual communities — you‘ll be going from 0–60 soon, in avatar count. Which is great, they have their place, but we mustn’t see them as the end-goal. They supplement our lives. We aren’t uploading our consciousness to the cloud (like Yorkie and Kelly) and until then, the physical world will remain in charge.

In order to do that, it’ll need a makeover.

And sorry to the purists out there, but this makeover’s foundation is made of technology. Personalized for each one of us.

The duality of the data-driven, curated online world and the data-absent, happenstance physical world will synthesize into something greater than either alone (they too are tired of being quarantined from each other).

In some form or another, data and computation will influence our physical experience, even if that means not using data or computation at all. Not “our physical experience” collectively, but individually. What was streamlined and generic (one size fits all), will become personalized and curated (one size fits one).

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Say goodbye to 20th century classrooms and workspaces built for yesterday, where cold hard output made decisions.

Meet tomorrow, where value is in charge. The center of that value? You. Right now. No matter if you’re student or teacher, employee or employer, patient or caregiver, friend, partner, spouse. We all matter. And more than before, we realize how much now matters too.

We have been asked to do less in the name of more. It’s left us with a lot of time to fill. Time we aren’t used to filling. And in trying, we’ve been forced to sit down and confront what’s important to us, some of which we haven’t given time to in a while. Unknowingly, we were leaving things behind. We’ve been heads-down working for a better tomorrow without realizing we could do it with a better today. As unfortunate as this has all been, it’s been a needed reminder.

We don’t want antiquated, nor do we want virtualized. We want that sweet spot. ***** About the author: Nathan Tonani is Co-Founder and CEO of Kopa and lead engineer for the Learning Economy Foundation. He previously built systems at Amazon and supercomputing leader Cray.

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FUTUREPROOFING POST-PANDEMIC GOVERNANCE

BY ANDREA BONIME-BLANC

176 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

T

he tone from the top—whether in a country or a company—affects and suffuses the culture of the place and the wellbeing of its respective stakeholders.

The various tones from the top on pandemic crisis management that we are witnessing both in government and business at every level—global, national, local—reflect the good, the bad, and the ugly in leadership. We are now learning momentous lessons that should become fodder for rebooting and futureproofing ESG or what I like to call ESGT (plus technology) governance post-COVID-19.

Unlike any other global crisis of recent memory, COVID-19 presents a perfect storm of interdependent E (ecological, biological), S (health, safety, supply chain), G (geopolitical, corporate) and T (scientific, cyber, tech) issues intersecting, interconnecting, and impacting one another and of course the overall global economy in unprecedented ways. To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill—let’s not let this unprecedented global pandemic governance and leadership crisis go to waste.

What we are seeing at the core of the COVID-19 management failures is a crisis of governance and leadership on all things ESGT. But there is also hope. It is heartening to see the example of transparent, inclusive, integrated, emotionally intelligent leadership taking place in several countries to the great benefit of their populations – I’m thinking of Germany, Iceland, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa. In stark contrast are the variously opaque, arbitrary, disjointed, negligent, or outright destructive examples other national leaders are setting—I’m thinking of the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, Iran and Turkey— to the great risk and detriment of their populations.

Similar observations can be made about corporate leaders and their crisis management or mismanagement of the pandemic. On the one hand, there are the good guys. They are doing everything they can to protect shareholder value and stakeholder interests by not firing employees, providing health and other benefits, finding innovative ways of still doing business, not taking advantage of government handouts that they don’t need, etc. In this category, I’m thinking of companies like Salesforce, Marriott, Twitter, Uber, and a few others.

Then there are the corporate leaders who are cutting corners, firing people, leaving them without benefits or—if they are “necessary” workers—treating them poorly and forcing them to work in unsafe conditions without proper protective equipment. I’m thinking of DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 177

some of the prominent food/meat processing companies like Smithfield Foods, warehouse-based businesses like Amazon and, quite shockingly, Disney—which is apparently firing 100,000 employees while maintaining $1.5 billion in reserve for executive bonuses due later this year. That doesn’t even count the 100 plus publicly traded companies that claimed Small Business Administration “loans” and now have to return them. To see how companies are treating their stakeholders, check out this ongoing compilation Just Capital has created.

And make no mistake about it—how both national and corporate leaders treat their respective stakeholders in this crisis will have serious and long-lasting implications for the reputation, trust, and survival of these leaders post-COVID19.

Early COVID-19 Governance Lessons: Responsible Versus Irresponsible Leadership In my book, Gloom to Boom: How Leaders Transform Risk into Resilience and Value, I offer a typology of leadership (see Figure 1 below) based on how seriously and effectively a leader considers and/ or incorporates key ESGT risks and opportunities into their mission, vision, values and strategy.

What do the best ESGT leaders do? Whether they are national leaders, governors, mayors or corporate leaders, the enlightened and responsible leaders exhibit the best in crisis governance: Transparency, communication (early and often), accurate information fact and science driven policymaking, the use of true experts and deep expertise, broad stakeholder care, non-partisanship, coordinated strategic planning, coordinated tactical execution.

178 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

On the other hand, what do more ineffective, ESGT irresponsible leaders have in common? They exhibit the opposite of good crisis governance: opacity, miscommunication (infrequent, haphazard, irrelevant), opinion or ideologically based policymaking, the disdain, rejection or manipulation of experts and expertise, serving narrow stakeholder interests, partisanship, uncoordinated or non-existent strategic planning, and disjointed tactical execution. See a comparison of these styles in Table 1 below.

We all should study carefully how responsible leaders are addressing this crisis. We should also examine what irresponsible leaders can teach us about what not do in the face of future crises.

Living in Turbulent Times As I discuss in Chapter 1 of Gloom to Boom, we are living through an unprecedented time of dramatic tectonic change which I synthesize into the â&#x20AC;&#x153;ten megatrends of our turbulent timesâ&#x20AC;? (see Table 2 below).

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Global and local risks and crises are not a matter of “if,” they are absolutely a matter of “when”. We need only consult some of the “bibles” of global risk assessment to understand the deep and broad global risks the world is facing in a wide variety of areas— environmental, social, governance or geopolitical, technological and economic. We need only consult the work of the University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk or the World Economic Forum list of top ten most likely and top ten most impactful global risks (see Table 3 below) to realize that large crises are no longer unusual events—complex global/local crises are the new normal.

Here’s the thing: COVID-19 is but one manifestation of what is to come. The World Economic Forum Global Risks 2020 Report lists “Infectious Diseases” as the tenth most impactful global risk. What about all of the others listed (the top five of which are climatechange related)? What if one or more were to occur simultaneously?

Indeed, more are already underway, just a little slower to manifest themselves than COVID-19. What if we suffered a material cyberattack in the midst of Coronavirus? That wouldn’t manifest itself slowly, that would be an immediate gut punch to the world system.

Futureproofing Corporate Governance Post-COVID-19 Corporate governance (as well as national governance) needs to be rebooted and futureproofed to meet the new normal of our turbulent times.

What does this mean? Below are my immediate prescriptions for corporate boards to think about and adopt as soon as possible. The 180 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

future is today (or maybe even yesterday) and most boards of directors are woefully unprepared—both structurally and substantively— to deal with the new normal of global interconnected material risk.

The recommendations below while mostly geared at businesses can also be applied at other entities beyond business—nonprofits, universities, even government agencies: 1. Practice Lean-in Governance—no more “friends and family” board members, no more rubber stampers—independent highly qualified, diverse members; and, no more imperial CEO’s— consider splitting CEO/Chairman roles 2. Restructure the Board and Reboot—Make changes to your board now—not five years from now. Ask: • Who’s on your board? Only CFO and CEOs? Add a Chief Risk Officer, General Counsel, Chief Ethics/Compliance Officer, Technologist, Sustainability/ESG or Talent expert.

• Does your board reflect your customer base? If not, why not?

• What’s on your board agenda? If ESGT is not on it—make sure it is…regularly.

• If you don’t have a non-traditional committee for risk, ESG, technology issues, create one now to include strategic ESGT issues, risks, opportunities.

3. Hire Only High Integrity Emotionally Intelligent CEOs—hold them accountable through performance management for a holistic and ESGT integrated business strategy.

4. Turbocharge Strategic Risk and ESGT/Sustainability Governance—these are no longer once in a while “nice to haves”—these are critical to your business surviving and thriving in a turbulent world.

5. Incorporate Preparedness into the Permanent Board Agenda— crisis management, business continuity, data protection, must be on the agenda, scenario planning must include the board and a board committee must oversee these topics regularly.

It is sometimes difficult to focus the human mind on risk (especially long-term risk) but it is the urgent job of corporate and government leadership to adapt and change with the times or the times will leave them in the dustbin of history. If the COVID-19 pandemic punch to the global gut doesn’t do it, then all hope is lost. I personally refuse to think that humanity is that stupid. ***** About the author: Dr. Andrea Bonime-Blanc is the Founder and CEO of GEC Risk Advisory, a global ESG and cyber strategist, board member, life-member of the Council on Foreign Relations, international keynote speaker and author of several books and articles.

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CAN WE PREDICT THE NEXT PANDEMIC?

BY ALLYSON BERRI

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edical terminology like “lipid envelope” and “coronavirus” might have just become household terms for most of the world, but for scientists like Kevin Olival, viruses are a more normal part of the workday than an 8 AM coffee. In a typical workweek, Dr. Olival might spend a couple weeks in a country that is a potential virus hotspot, taking samples from animals, which will later be analyzed in a lab. Dr. Olival is partnering with an organization called USAID PREDICT, a nonprofit dedicated to tracking potential sources of zoonotic illness and preventing pandemic outbreaks.

Zoonotic illnesses are diseases spread from animals to humans.

Animal-borne diseases have been behind some of the world’s worst pandemics, from the bubonic plague, which originated in rats, to the Spanish influenza, which originated in birds. A zoonotic illness is even the source of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus which has spread from Wuhan, China into over 150 countries.

Ultimately, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that more than 60% of known infectious human diseases originate in animals.

By tracking potential sources of zoonotic illness, organizations like PREDICT are hoping to keep disease from jumping from animals to humans. Virus hunters have a variety of methods for identifying animal diseases which might someday infect human populations. Some researchers have used a database of emerging infectious diseases to map the global hotspots where pandemic outbreaks are likely to originate. The PREDICT project utilizes this method, identifying central Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America as “hotspots” for zoonotic illness.

Similarly, the Cary Institute’s Dr. Han collected data regarding the geographic distribution of disease-carrying mammals and named South Africa, Eastern Africa, certain parts of Europe, and the subarctic as potential virus hotspots.

After identifying these “hotspots,” researchers can begin investigating species which have the potential to harbor zoonoses. Dr. Han’s research led her to wonder whether artic carnivores, species which already harbor that carried higher numbers of disease than expected. Other organizations are tracking more concrete results. Since the PREDICT project began taking samples from various species to help identify areas where viruses are likely to emerge, the organization has identified over 1,000 new viruses in 20 different countries.

However, whether scientists can actually predict pandemic outbreaks remains the subject of intense scientific debate. Accord184 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

ing to Dr. Robert B. Tesh, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, science doesn’t yet have enough of a handle on zoonotic illnesses to make effective predictive models. Even the Cary Institute’s Dr. Han notes that the data that would allow her and her colleagues to predict the next zoonotic illness is especially lacking, and that when it came to animal-borne illness, “there was no baseline of where these things lived [or] which species carried what.”

Further, even after researchers successfully identify zoonotic illness, myriad of other complications remain. Dr. Tesh argues that certain viruses, like Zika or West Nile weren’t “new” when they led to infectious outbreaks; rather, they were unpredictably transported to new areas before infecting thousands. Viruses can also mutate quickly and unpredictably, dying out or infecting new hosts in a manner that “no amount of discovery can prepare for.” Even after a virus is identified in animals, there is not guarantee that the particular illness will infect humans. This fact has led evolutionary biologist Dr. Stephen Holmes to argue that there are not enough generalities to predict which illnesses will leap into humans, making the mere idea of predicting pandemic illness “foolish.”

And this doesn’t even cover the known zoonoses for which we still cannot accurately identify an animal host. Six years after the West African Ebola outbreak, which claimed over 11,000 lives, researchers still cannot definitely claim bats as the source of the infection. Researchers have thought that the two-year old patient zero had contracted the illness from playing with bats but couldn’t be certain.

The whereabouts of the animal which has caused the current coronavirus pandemic are similarly ambiguous. Some researchers at the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou used genetic analysis to trace the coronavirus to a similar illness found in smuggled pangolins that was a 99% genetic match to the virus that has infected thousands of people. Other researchers suggest that bats, operating through an intermediate species, were the ultimate source of the disease. If Ebola is any lesson, we might be debating the question—as well as other questions related to the prediction of pandemic illnesses—for years to come. ***** About the author: Allyson Berri is a Diplomatic Courier Correspondent who is pursuing degrees in Political Science and Economics.

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USE OUR COVID-19 RESPONSE TO DRIVE FINANCIAL INCLUSION

BY MATTHEW DAVIE

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s COVID-19 continues to spread globally, we are witnessing the largest non-wartime mobilization of government resources in history. On March 27, the CARES Act was signed into law, providing the U.S. economy with over $2 trillion in response to the economic distress caused by the pandemic. Discussions are already underway in Washington for additional economic relief and recovery support in the coming months. And while we have yet to comprehend the long-term impact of this pandemic on individuals, communities, and our national economy, the current large-scale response efforts provide a nearterm opportunity to enable inclusive finance in ways unlike never before.

For example, Division B of the CARES Act provides for $1,200 direct payments to Americans making $75,000 or less annually. The Act notes that this relief is to be paid “as rapidly as possible,” which is absolutely essential to the 39% of U.S. adults that recently reported difficulty in covering an unexpected $400 expense. But our ability to reach those who need economic relief most—and fastest—is hindered by their lack of access to even basic checking accounts. According to a recent FDIC report, 25% of U.S. households are unbanked or underbanked, and their banking options are decreasing: between 2014 and 2018, there was a net loss of almost 2,000 branches in lower-income areas, creating a vast patchwork of “banking deserts” across the nation. Individuals in these areas are outside of the system, and it is retreating further from them every day.

Without immediate, innovative solutions, we will not be able to deliver rapid economic relief to our fellow Americans who are most in need, and the economic fallout of COVID-19 will be much worse.

This is where I remain optimistic: America can innovate.

In addition to being the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history, the CARES Act provides an opportunity for public-private partnerships to not only deliver government payments, but also to provide on-ramps for unbanked customers to establish basic checking accounts. There is precedence for this type of effort: in 2012, the U.S. Treasury Department ran a pilot to test linking tax refunds to low cost account opening. Implementing a 2020 version of this program to fulfill the mandate of the CARES Act is too big an opportunity to ignore.

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Consider three potential outcomes of delivering $1,200 payments to the unbanked: (1) the government fails to deliver payments; (2) the government mails paper checks or prepaid cards; or (3) the government delivers electronic payments via newly-opened checking accounts at private sector financial institutions. Avoiding the first scenario is paramount: we must get relief payments to those who need them most. And while the second scenario is feasible, it leaves underbanked customers in need of alternative financial institutions such as check cashing or expensive payday loan services in order to cash the check or withdraw the funds, potentially breaking social distancing requirements. The need to reach every individual, and quickly, is an opportunity to realize the third scenario, bringing private-sector banking solutions to those currently excluded.

In deploying $1,200 payments to many underbanked Americans, we can simultaneously address a primary hurdle to opening a bank account: cost.

The average customer acquisition cost for retail banking products in the U.S. is $350-$1,500. Even at the bottom of this range, banks do not earn enough revenue on low balance accounts to recoup even their account opening costs. With direct government payments, we have the opportunity to not only help banks to identify and reach these customers, but can provide an opening account balance of $1,200. Allowing banks to “piggy-back” on the government’s customer due diligence process, it becomes much cheaper for banks to open accounts. And given this market size—up to 25% of U.S. households—banks can benefit from economies of scale as they onboard these customers.

The leverage of this type of federated public-private approach is difficult to understate. In the immediate-term, it enables faster, cheaper, and more secure delivery of economic relief to those most in need. In the medium term, it extends the coverage of existing private-sector infrastructure to readily handle additional economic subsidies should they be necessary during this pandemic. And in the long term, it onboards millions of Americans to the financial sector, increasing their economic mobility and enabling them to better participate in our shared prosperity as we recover from COVID-19 and restart our economy.

This opportunity is only available because of the rapid response necessary to abate the economic distress created by the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not act on this now, we will 188 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

not have another opportunity until the next national emergency. And at that point, wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we rather have this solution implemented so that it requires no additional mobilization during a future crisis?

I hope we do not miss this opportunity. It is a rare silver lining in a time of such overwhelming difficulty and could help our response and recovery efforts benefit those most in need. ***** About the author: Matthew Davie is chief strategy officer at Kiva, a global non-profit organization that has facilitated over $1.5 billion in micro-lending in more than 80 countries. He is also a board member of the Libra Association.

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HOW WILL WE KNOW WHEN ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S OVER?

BY GREG LEBEDEV

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he ongoing global pandemic is an experience that dominates almost every aspect of American daily life. And, for the ordinary citizen it is an emotional duel between fear and hope.

The consequences of Covid-19 are not only disruptive—stay-athome quarantines, everything remote and six-feet from this and that—but also a source of great distress. And our fears may be more significant than our inconvenience. Because of the tsunami of public conversation—much of which is speculation, hyperventilation, misinformation, and repetition—our minds are centrifuges of unspoken anxiety. Who and what are we to believe? Can I get into a hospital if I’m really sick; what about granny with diabetes; will there be food at the store; why can’t we get paper towels; what if they close McDonald’s; can my kid really graduate if school is closed; what about my job and the overtime that I count on; and is this really the “end of days” and they’re just not telling us the truth?

These are real fears—some spoken, most buried—which are compounded by the fact that the people we look to for answers are not in one location, or speaking with one voice. For many good reasons our Constitution gives great authority to the individual states, so decisions about the road ahead—whatever it might be—could come from many directions. The federal government is a powerful facilitator, but it’s the states and municipalities that have direct authority over how we’re to act on a day-to-day basis. It’s a team effort, which should be comforting but is also anxiety creating because we know there are hundreds of different teams and medical experts doing and saying slightly different things—and who knows who’s right. And mounting fear inevitably leads to only one question: When will this be over?

Psychologists say that fear is best confronted by confident leadership armed with consistent facts, with the result that people begin to imagine a light at the end of the tunnel, and contrary to the cliché, it’s not a train . . . it’s hope. People start to believe that “things will get back to normal,” and understandably (but mistakenly) define “normal” as the way it was. They can gather with their friends, buy any amount of hand sanitizer, go out to dinner, and return to their job in America’s most robust economic moment in half a century.

It’s as if Covid-19 was simply a bad breeze that came and went and didn’t disturb a thing. That’s what hope is all about. This is perfectly natural thinking, which helps people survive a frightening moment, but in this case masks the second real dilemma for the country’s leadership at all levels.

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The first dilemma, of course, is that which we are living through right now: finding the most effective way to combat this highly contagious virus. But, it’s the second dilemma that holds even greater risk than the disease itself and may prove most vexing: deciding when it’s over. Arriving at this decision is arguably the most critical stage in this saga because it will determine the real condition of the economy when we return to “normal.” This question is already raising a false choice between “saving lives” and “saving businesses” because it presupposes that Covid-19 is a more serious threat to our society than the potential long-term damage of locking-down the entire economy.

Economies, no matter how robust, are not like electric lights, which can simply be turned off and on. Economic systems—that matrix of arrangements, which creates jobs and paychecks, provides goods and services, and sustains itself through investment and innovation—are as fragile as human beings themselves and will fail or be severally damaged if injured or otherwise disrupted for extended periods of time. As economists are already pointing out, there is a direct correlation between the length of time the economy is switched off and the extent of systemic damage (failed businesses, broken supply chains, dislocated workers) that will be incurred and, therefore, the time it will take to return to “normal.” In short, the longer the lock-down the longer it will take to rebuild a damaged economy, and the wished-for “V-shaped” recovery will turn into a “U,” or worse still, an “L.” The difference between the impact of the current virus and the potential legacy effect upon the economy and the American public is enormous. NIH Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci estimates that Covid-19 fatalities could reach 200,000, but it’s also reported that the vast majority of those who get infected will recover in a reasonably short period of time. However, economists from the global financial services company Allianz recently observed that each month of a lockdown could cause a fall of 7 to 10 percent in real gross domestic product (GDP), and thus an extended economic shutdown will cause that many more businesses to fail, job losses to occur, and a recovery period measured in years not months. In other words, the lives of millions of Americans of all ages will be severely harmed—some irreparably—if the economy is not raised from its “self-induced coma” sooner rather than later. Not surprisingly, economists argue every side of the “length of lockdown” question, but an extensive examination by economics professor Emanuel Ornelas suggests that “the optimal level of lockdown is dynamic, changing over time, and eventually becoming more lenient,” but that “the marginal health benefit of a lockdown decreases with its duration.”

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We should also be careful to not misunderstand the purpose of the various forms of federal economic assistance as we consider the eventual recovery. It is essential to confront the immediate economic impact of the pandemic in the United States, and the President and Congress are to be applauded for these initiatives.

However, these packages are palliative in nature and are intended to “tide everyone over” until we reach the end of the tunnel. These financial injections are in no way a substitute for real economic activity; they are a blunt instrument, which the U.S. is fortunate to be able to wield.

So, the double dilemma for policy makers and government executives at all levels is complex: how to defeat the epidemic in a fashion that eliminates fear and instills hope, and do so in as short a period of time as possible so as to limit economic damage and allow the business community to re-start its engines and create a “new normal” going forward. None of this is easy and some solutions are not yet known, but the ultimate resolution of this double dilemma must be considered simultaneously. While we’re attacking the pandemic on a multiple of fronts—spread control, quarantines, expedited research, regulatory relaxation, and temporary financial assistance— we must also be deciding “how we will know when it’s over.” This will prove to be the hardest question to answer because there may be more than one answer and first-movers risk being accused of “heartless decision making” by those who do not appreciate that saving segments of the economy—be it a state, a region, or a sector—will provide the greatest near-term and long-term benefits to the greatest number of people.

The President has suggested that in parallel with the White House medical task force the federal government should immediately establish an “Economic Recovery Task Force” of talented men and women from business, finance, academia, and government to consider (and ultimately recommend to the President, governors, and others) when, where, and how the economy could be most quickly and effectively put back into operation. It will likely be on a rolling basis, when some combination of antibody testing and infectious spread data support a determination that a state or a region is “well enough” to go back to work. But the “well enough” decision will likely be the hardest and should be immediately followed by the implementation of a range of sophisticated solutions, probably region-specific and designed to jump-start those sectors with extended supply chains so that the broadest economic momentum can be initiated and achieved.

Some will argue that now is not the time to think about the economy as we have not yet won the battle against Covid-19. But, now is 194 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

the perfect time for one simple reason: readiness. It may be difficult to anticipate a pandemic, but is certainly feasible to prepare for an economic recovery. We must not only be positioned to swiftly move smart solutions into place once the disease is on the decline, but also understand the economic consequences of the medical decisions we are taking right now. We cannot inadvertently adopt the flawed Vietnam War logic that “We must destroy the village to save it.” This is not a struggle between medicine and money. Fighting the virus and saving the economy—although very different in nature—are inseparable activities . . . because they are both about saving lives. In fact, there is a body of pre-pandemic research which shows that employment—the existence of jobs—correlates to the health outcomes of entire communities.

We cannot beat the virus but lose the economy any more than we can save the economy but lose too many lives. Now is the time to move from blunt instruments to surgical techniques, and the challenge facing America today cries out for the public-private partnership to which the President often refers. When put to a task the U.S. business community is unrivaled for its innovation, agility, market creativity, and speed—and the amazing research work of the pharmaceutical industry is front and center today. It’s time to bring the private sector into the game to team with our most talented federal and state officials so together they can help answer the question “How will we know when it’s over?” and be ready to stimulate and facilitate our economic recovery when it is. ***** About the author: Greg Lebedev is Chairman of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and a member of Diplomatic Courier’s Editorial Advisory Board.

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SIX ESSENTIAL THEMES FOR AN ECONOMIC RECOVERY ROADMAP

BY ANDREW WILSON

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eports related to the COVID-19 crisis are still largely focused on the toll of the virus and short-term responses to alleviate the human and economic suffering. Given the many unknowns about the pandemic, opinions vary wildly about the long-term medical implications, related solutions, and what will be needed to restore economies slowly and safely. COVID-19 is changing the business environment in practically every country, with most sectors in some form of crisis amid widespread fears of a protracted economic downturn.

History tells us that countries with established democratic institutions and more market-based economies are better positioned to address and withstand such crises. Many less-developed economies are already beset with serious challenges: major debt, governance issues, rampant corruption, high unemployment, large informal sectors, and few reliable systems for social support. They face a much more uncertain future.

Worldwide, small and medium-sized businesses and their employees are among the hardest hit. However, many governments are looking to the private sector for potential solutions and partnership in addressing human needs, in addition to preserving economic stability and national security. In early dialogues among them and leaders of civil society, six key challenges or essential themes for COVID-19 response, work and recovery planning are frequently identified. Explained below, these themes may form the basis for an economic recovery roadmap that the public and private sectors may follow to restore economies to make them more resilient.

Restarting Economies The goal and overarching theme is restarting economies. The logistics of shutting down economies will soon be dwarfed by the challenges associated with recovery efforts in post-pandemic environments. Ultimately, the private sector plays one of the most vital roles of all: creating jobs. This will be one of the biggest indicators that countries are restoring prosperity. However, there is much more the private sector, business associations, and chambers can do to show leadership and contribute to faster problem solving. Efforts to balance the needs of production, transportation, and service provisions with requirements for social distancing will introduce a host of new challenges for everyone, from entrepreneurs to employees and customers. All of these issues represent untested policy challenges that must be communicated to governments to ensure they help create a business enabling environment.

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Additionally, as the economic engines start back up, supply chains will be broken, the needs of industry will vary, and new challenges will accompany the demands for accelerated hiring or re-hiring.

All will surely be factors in determining the allocation of limited government resources. Thus, businesses have multiple responsibilities to advise governments on measures that are most conducive to economic recovery efforts, both immediate and long-term.

Companies can also connect stakeholders with other experts and organizations with necessary resources or better capacity and positioned to move quickly. Some of these opportunities may fall into the realm of corporate social responsibility.

Diversifying Supply Chains Foremost, is a necessary reorientation of global supply chains.

The past several weeks have demonstrated how easily these can be thrown off-kilter: Over-reliance by many countries on a single source for manufacturingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as with the U.S. and Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;becomes increasingly hazardous when black swan events like the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. Experts far and wide have been warning about such business risks for years and pushing for global supply chain diversification. The calls have continued to grow louder in the U.S. due to ongoing trade disputes and concerns about Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s increasingly assertive foreign policy. COVID-19 halted favorite U.S. exports on everything from cell phones to hockey sticks for a time, in addition to medical supplies and other necessities.

New reports indicate the COVID-19 economy is hastening the reshoring of numerous U.S. manufacturing elements in China, already rattled by the ongoing U.S. trade war with their host country. Other companies are signaling they will shift production to a wider net of global suppliers, most likely in neighboring Southeast Asian countries, as well as emerging economies in East Africa and Latin America. This presents an opportunity for the private sector and U.S. based policymakers to encourage improved rule of law and governance in countries where they plan to initiate more trade and business relationships. This will drive healthier growth and recovery results that may benefit all citizens and thus drive greater stability.

Obvious and early efforts include leveraging technology, including fast moves by trade organizations to modernize border clearance processes and reduce red tape, especially for essentials such as food and medical supplies. Another priority of many organizations will be facilitating the growth of inclusive digital economies to help more businesses get their products to market and enDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 199

sure they can access reliable electronic means of moving capital.

Meanwhile, experts, including the Center for International Media Assistance, assert that digital freedoms will become more important than they ever have been. The internet is increasingly viewed as a right, not just a delivery method. For most people, it is now the top tool to be informed, stay alive, and do their jobs.

Combating Corruption Of all the obstacles to restoring a thriving global economy, the task of combatting corruption may be the most complex and daunting.

A recent World Bank study indicates that, in some cases, injections of foreign assistance in high aid countries may exacerbate conditions that lead to corruption. With billions pledged worldwide for coronavirus support, it is feared a significant amount of the money will be lost through various channels due to corruption, if additional measures are not taken to mitigate that risk. This makes it imperative that the international development community increase the collective push to curb fraud and graft and help ensure the aid gets to people who need it most. Without transparency measures already in place, there is a greater likelihood that incoming support funds will be misdirected, stolen, or used for crony capitalism rather than supporting market-based systems.

The business community shares in the responsibility to prevent these dominos from falling.

Anti-money laundering experts have pinpointed many activities that should be red flags to governments and watchdog groups.

For example, we know that some types of insurance and real estate transactions may indicate illegal activity or improper use of funds. Such information can help governments anticipate and preempt the misuse of funds. Effective counters to the most common forms of corruption include diligent monitoring of government procurement contracts, public budgeting, and state-owned industry activity. Additional actions include support for NGOs that work to shine a light on situations where corrupt actors may seek to exploit the COVID-19 crisis.

Authoritarianism and Challenges to Democracies At this time, even the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most open economies acknowledge the need for additional government controls. However, there is very real concern that market freedoms and other rights surrendered in authoritarian states will not be returned. The COVID-19 crisis has been used by autocrats in numerous countries, includ200 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

ing Russia, The Philippines, and Hungary, to consolidate power. In addition to edicts controlling the economy, laws, and limitations framed as medical and security safeguards have led to increased surveillance on citizens, opposition figure arrests, bans on some political parties, and censorship. In Pakistan, military leaders have largely taken control of the COVID-19 health response, working directly with provincial governments.

Disinformation and cyberattacks are also a major concern. In addition to other activities, China has accelerated a major disinformation campaign about COVID-19, including far-flung conspiracy theories that must be debunked. Fact-checking and time limits or â&#x20AC;&#x153;sunset provisionsâ&#x20AC;? for some COVID-19 related laws are among the controls and accountability measures that the private sector in these economies should be doing or demanding in concert with civil society allies. We know that once autocrats take control of parts of their economies, they are not likely to give control back.

Economic Challenges for Women and Marginalized Groups Social distancing and isolation policies have resulted in a larger economic burden for women, youth, and other marginalized groups and their path to economic recovery is expected to be more difficult. For women especially, there are also increasing concerns about victimization. Many countries with mandatory stay at home orders, including Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea, are reporting surges in domestic and gender-based violence.

The fact that women in many societies still lack basic civil rights and political representation compounds their inability to be heard and involved in potential solutions. In addition to working in service-oriented and fashion-related industries, traditional areas of economic activity for women in developing countries are based on their ability to trade or sell items for cash in open markets.

Some travel with their goods. Many do not have bank accounts.

Thousands of these women entrepreneurs are in countries currently observing Ramadan, and they expect to miss out on their biggest business days of the year, as shoppers spend more on special meals, new clothing, and gifts for the upcoming Eid-al-Fitr.

The business community must ensure that the interests of women and other groups that are often socially, politically, and economically excluded are adequately addressed in recovery policy debates. The Afghanistan Women Chamber of Commerce and InDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 201

dustry is among the most active: doing surveys, benchmarking with brother organizations, submitting proposals to cabinet ministers for interest-free loans, and requesting delayed rent payments for government space on behalf of women entrepreneurs. Other organizations are very focused on technology training, personal finance, and even virtual offerings for yoga or counseling to assist with personal health and stress management.

Chamber and Association Responses and Strategies Finally, chambers of commerce and business associations are among the private sector leaders that must assume a larger role in getting their collective economies on track. This includes delivering the latest resources, information, and advice to members and governments that can be folded into COVID-19 response and recovery strategies. There are many great examples worldwide of private sector innovation in this vein.

Chambers of commerce and business associations in the United States, Kenya, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Venezuela are among those that quickly submitted COVID-19 response policy recommendations and proposals to administrations. These have included specifics on possible stimulus packages, tax breaks, and better banking access for citizens, to name a few. Groups are using a variety of mediums and platforms to get their message across: videos and podcast interviews in Egypt, surveys in Slovakia, articles in Ethiopia, and position papers in Yemen.

The voice of think tanks is also getting louder. Many are helping to collect valuable information and data. For example, Vérité in Sri Lanka recently hosted a forum with leaders of Parliament. Meanwhile, organizations in Burma are surveying small businesses to gauge their access to the country’s COVID-19 Fund and learn how they will use the money. The Center for Indonesian Policy Studies is focusing on food security and other key areas. Think tank México Evalúa provides analysis to local media on the COVID-19 impact on state owned enterprises in the energy sector.

Meeting the Moment The impending global economic downturn threatens to dwarf the 2007 financial crisis that hit emerging markets particularly hard.

In this extremely fast-moving and crowded information landscape, all populations are looking for trusted sources that can cut 202 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

through the clutter and share relevant and timely facts, insight, and solution-oriented ideas for economic recovery. Many are looking to the private sector, with leadership from business associations and chambers, to step up and meet the moment. The six economic restoration themes outlined above may serve as an immediate checklist of areas to focus on, both to mitigate current risk and initiate long-term planning from an informed position. ***** About the author: Andrew Wilson is the Executive Director of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) in Washington, DC. Wilson has extensive experience working with the private sector on development issues in conflict and post-conflict settings, crafting successful business strategies to reduce corruption, encouraging entrepreneurship development, strengthening business advocacy, improving corporate governance standards, and promoting economic reform.

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GLOBAL TRAVEL: THE WAY TO RECOVERY

BY IDO AHARONI

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t may come as a surprise that refugee camps, along with other remote locations, have not been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic evolved, it has become clear that global travel is its main agent. Places that were not exposed to travelers experienced it less intensely. This is also the reason why New York City, the main gateway to America, quickly became the epicenter of the pandemic. The improbable happened: the global machine, the same machine we were led to believe by economists could never be stopped, came to a swift and hard halt, destroying entire economies and sectors.

The global tourism industry has been hit in an unprecedented fashion, far and wide. What should local and national decision-makers do to help their tourism industries recover?

I have come up with nine principles, which I believe should be considered by businesses and governments alike.

1. General Reputation Matters For destinations that have suffered from chronic reputational underperformance, this is going to be an uphill battle, which may take years to recover from. USC’s historian Nick Cull coined the term “Reputational Security.” It refers to the strong correlation between a place’s reputation and its ability to overcome geopolitical challenges. “There is only one superpower left in the world,” said Prof. Cull, “global public opinion.” The list of victims of weak reputational security is long: The Ukraine (Russia); Kazakhstan (Borat); Czechoslovakia (USSR); etc. A place’s reputation could be impacted by general traits such as national character, or by very specific experience-based perceptions, such as: lack of service awareness; untidy appearance; rampant corruption and crime; public disobedience; lack of sufficient tourism infrastructure; etc. The COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity for places to improve their reputation by engaging in efforts previously viewed as “too expensive” or even “experimental.”

2. Time Is of the Essence Make no mistake; global competition will resume sooner or later. The competition will be between nations, cities ,and regions.

It will be fierce and tough, internationally and domestically. This is the time for decision-makers to prepare their contingency plans. A golden rule in crisis management is proactiveness. This is the time for decision-makers to invest in the design of proactive public efforts to bring to the fore the qualities and the 206 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

unique offerings of their destinations. This has to be done authentically and expediently.

3. Go Below the Line Months of isolation have created an unprecedented digital reality of human hyper-connectivity. Humans have never been so digitally connected as they are now. COVID-19 has brought about connectivity that is intense, frequent, and all encompassing. Undoubtedly, this will allow marketing specialists to achieve a much higher degree of accuracy in predictive segmentation. For decision-makers, this means that they can achieve more engagement for less money.

Going below the line means investing in the more efficient and affordable micro-targeting, rather than the costly and largely inefficient blanket advertising.

4. Invest in Domestic Travel First The recovery of global travel depends upon the ability of the scientific community to develop an effective vaccine. As long as such vaccine is unavailable, forms of mass travel (such as air travel or cruise ships) will continue to suffer significantly. Decision-makers’ response should focus on the opening of their local travel markets to their own people first. They have to plan for distances allowed by car travel, probably in the format of the nuclear family. This is the time to promote travel to the countryside, to help owners of B&B establishments attract customers, and to market entire regions and not just specific cities. This will do two things: gradually open the local economy and diffuse the understandable “fear factor.”

5. Work Counter-Intuitively In times of severe international crisis, when levels of uncertainty are at an all-time high, decision-makers tend to cut spending. Their immediate instinct is to avoid “debt.” The first victim of budgetary cuts is usually marketing. Big mistake. For travel industries to recover from the COVID-19 crisis, national governments will have to massively subsidize travel and incentivize large tour-operators, airlines, and ultimately even cruise lines. Places will have to compete for every tourist. This was done successfully before. Israel, for example, is a country with a chronic reputational weakness due to its geo-political conflict with its neighbors. Yet, pre-crisis, the country experienced seven consecutive record-breaking years in incoming tourism. This was a direct result of robust marketing efforts and DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 207

generous subsidies offered by its Ministry of Tourism. A lot can be learned from the Israeli experience vis-à-vis the current crisis.

6. Prioritize Hygiene and Cleanliness We do not have enough information about travelers’ precise travel considerations post-crisis and during the “new abnormal,” but it would be safe to assume that the ability of destinations to maintain high levels of hygiene will be critical. Travelers know that we are all in this together. Our individual health and wellbeing are dependent upon the other’s behavior, no less than our own. Therefore, decision-makers must invest in the cleanliness and hygiene of their facilities, using cutting-edge solutions and creating a visible and user-friendly system. This is the time to double and triple the size of local sanitation departments, invest in destination embellishment efforts, and announce national hygiene and cleanliness competitions.

7. Improve Disaster Preparedness and Structural Resilience The ability of a certain destination to effectively cope with a natural disaster is linked to the speed of its recovery. Decision makers can learn a great deal from analyzing disaster recovery such as the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, the 2004 Indian Sea Tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Post-crisis, it will be incumbent upon leaders to make their overall plans, to cope with uncertainties, and accommodate hazards known to their public. This will create a new level of comfort on the part of citizens and stakeholders, the very comfort that in some places was severely damaged.

8. Strengthen Transparency Imagine how this global crisis could have evolved if only more transparency was demonstrated on the part of governments and NGO’s.

Transparency is a pillar of trust, which is the defining factor of customer relations. Trust is achieved when decision-makers are able to be transparent, accountable, true to their purpose, reliable, and genuine. Take New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as an example.

During the crisis, he implemented the utmost levels of transparency and authenticity and, subsequently, elevated his political brand in an unprecedented fashion. Andrew Cuomo’s conduct should be the new leadership standard.

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9. Adopt Flexibility in the Workforce The “future of work” has been studied and analyzed for years. COVID-19 has turned these futuristic ideas into a reality. Decision-makers will have to respond quickly to the rapidly changing workforce needs and engage in flex-economy: reliance on freelancers, scale up new-skills training programs, maneuver workforces between sectors as needed, and embrace the strong move to the digital economy. This very ability to redeploy employees across sectors will become increasingly critical in destinations’ recovery efforts.

Decision-makers cannot count on oil prices to remain in the current level for the long run, but as long as prices remain low, many of the actions mentioned above will remain doable. The hurdles in global travel recovery are known—chronic internal and external lack of coordination, mismatched regulatory environment, physical limitations, and the impairment of long-term planning due to high levels of uncertainty.

Just as in past historical recoveries, this is the time for decisionmakers to rise to the occasion, think big and long-term and, most importantly, learn to operate against their own instincts and “conventional wisdom.” ***** About the author: Ambassador Ido Aharoni, a member of APCO Worldwide’s International Advisory Council, is a Global Distinguished Professor for International Relations at New York University and Chairman of the Charney Forum on New Diplomacy. He was Israel’s longest serving consul-general in New York (2010-2016) and the founder of the Brand Israel Program.

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LESS MOBILITY, MORE FLEXIBILITY

BY JAN PFLUEGER

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D

uring the COVID-19 crisis, a large portion of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population has been ordered to stay at home. Nothing in the past 50 years has been as disruptive as this pandemic will be for the way we work.

Before companies were forced to close their physical sites, only a limited part of the workforce was working remotely. Now, wherever it seems to be possible the employees and management are keeping the business up and running from home. During this forced experimentation period, we will gain valuable experience on how to deal with the limitations and the negative consequences, such as accessibility to infrastructure and data, security, and bandwidth issues.

Being forced to physically separate is helping us innovate and collaborate in myriad new ways because we are seeing the limitations: teleconferencing and video sessions are simply not enough. We still need to be present.

This sense of presence is the gate opener and a reason why XR (known as Cross Reality) technology can be a driver for change in remote working environments. Sharing spatial experience and interacting in the same space enhances communication and effectiveness of meetings, supported by integrated tools such as document and data sharing, sketching, annotation, whiteboards, and information search.

Creating persistent virtual working spaces is another element to enable asynchronous working for worldwide distributed teams, and give them a common space to connect. Creating a personalized environment where you feel convenient to work and it is easy to share knowledge and get in contact with colleagues and friends whenever it is necessary and the glue between the paradox of a working environment and well-beingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;of being separated and still feeling connected to other human beings. Even if the technology is not yet perfect and accessible for everyone, it will substantially grow over the next months and years and play an important role in enabling social connections whilst under physical distance.

No Physical Space, No Boundaries More and more productive tools are equipped with remote access capability and can be used with low-cost hardware. There is no longer a need for a dedicated physical space to fulfil the given tasks. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inevitable: former workspaces are going to be virtualized and eventually so will the companies.

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We have known for a while now (as research from the likes of Deloitte Millennial survey show) that the gig economy is prevalent and defining both Millennials and Gen Z. What COVID-19 is accelerating is also the employment period cycle, which is becoming ever shorter. This will pose new challenged to existing HR approaches.

To take advantage of the crisis it is not enough to transfer the common working behaviors online. A good leader knows how to steer remote teams, but the future workforce striving for a meaningful task needs a different type of leadership and a change in mindset towards purpose-setting and not micro-managing.

In a nutshell, we face different requirements. The future workforce is equipped with a technological understanding and already lives online. Their inclination toward entrepreneurship is well balanced with social interaction and their wish for collaboration.

Being enabled to work remotely adds more flexibility but also fueling transnational collaboration on a new level. Already, people are working together worldwide to hack the pandemic—a great example how a common goal and connectivity that knows no borders can mobilize talent.

According to Accenture Technology Vision 2019, it is one of the biggest wins from the era of digital transformation: organizations can draw on a workforce with a constantly evolving set of capabilities, comprised of employees who can more readily adapt to new roles and needs.

Some Welcome Side Effects As employees are no longer forced to commute every day to their workplace destinations, we will have a big side effect of this change of the current working model.

Less mobility is reducing the need for physical mobility space. By 2020, 50% of the world’s population will live in cities and it will grow to > 60% by 2030 (UN Cities Report)—decreasing the need for commuting. Reducing peak times will help to master the challenge of urban mobility we are currently faced with.

More people in cities, more space to live, and increased quality of urban life: these can be possible if we increase the flexibility to work from wherever it is possible.

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A New Business Ecosystem Technology is a great enabler for this new freedom and flexibility.

The precondition is to avoid a war of tech giants and providers, and not hinder the success of a seamless exchange (interoperability) between the different tools and platformsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the new normal ecosystem.

It is on us to foster responsibility for this emerging connected ecosystem and create adaptable governance mechanisms between businesses, the public, and governments. This is critical, not only because contained areas such as education and healthcare are critical, but because the entire economy depends on safe, secured and trusted systems to function in the future.

In times where physical distancing is mandatory, we have been lucky to explore new possibilities to stay in touch with each other, work, teach, and entertain. Improvement of technology and platforms will help us to continue this positive aspect and bring it to others in remote parts of the world that may not be able to experience quite the same yet.

If ecosystem challenges and regulations do not hamper progress, we will move further into a world where future talent finds their space to create value and deliver meaningful input to society whilst we prepare to respond better in an expectable next future lockdown scenario. ***** About the author: Jan Pflueger is Founder of advisXR, specializing in the area of extended reality. He is a startup mentor, advisory board member of XR Bootcamp, and the VR/AR Association Germany, as well as editorial board member of VR WorldTech.

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CHRONICLING COVID-19 What the COVID-19 pandemic has done— as most crises do—is magnify socio-economic inequities. It’s no news that we live in an age of paradoxes: we produce enough food to feed the entire world, but people still go to bed hungry. Healthcare innovators are extending our lifespan, but people still die from preventable diseases. Online education has never been more robust and abundant, but it remains inaccessible to those without a device or data plan. At all levels, this pandemic is testing what kind of a society we want to be. “Life After the Pandemic” is an anthology of essays that chronicle our society’s response to the challenges exposed so that we don’t just go “back to normal” but back to better.

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