Speech at the Annual Foreign Policy Lecture on conflict and development
Original source: NZIIA
Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator
“Conflict and Development: Breaking the Cycle of Fragility, Violence, and Poverty”
Annual Foreign Policy Lecture
New Zealand International Institute for International Affairs
Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Campus, Wellington, New Zealand
Monday, 12 August 2013, 5.30pm
My thanks go to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs for inviting me to give this annual foreign policy lecture.
The last time I spoke at the Institute was as Prime Minister in 2004. That seems a lifetime ago. My theme then was the importance of New Zealand’s multilateral engagement on major global challenges. Since then I have had the opportunity to become rather more directly engaged in many of those challenges myself, through my role as UNDP Administrator and Chair of the UN Development Group.
From its foundation in 1945 as the world’s premier multilateral institution, the UN has been a driving force for development. Indeed development features as one of the three interlinked pillars of the UN’s mandate, alongside human rights and peace and security. It is hard to make sustained progress on any one of those “pillars” without advances on the others.