Helen Clark
Boards now make decisions inside a multilateral system that no longer behaves predictably. Sanctions regimes, trade rules, climate commitments and global health architecture all sit on institutions whose authority is contested in real time. Leaders need a read on how that system actually works from people who have run parts of it.
Helen Clark is a former Prime Minister of New Zealand and former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme who helps boards and governments read the politics of a fragmenting multilateral order.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Helen Clark
- Eight years running a 17,000-staff UN agency across 170 countries gives her a working view of how multilateral institutions actually function under pressure, not a commentator’s view from outside.
- She co-chaired the WHO Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the most authoritative post-mortem of the COVID response, presented directly to the World Health Assembly.
- As President of Chatham House and incoming Chair of the Gavi Board, she sits inside the live debates on global governance, vaccine financing and rules-based order that boards are now exposed to.
- She brings a head-of-government perspective on climate, gender equality and sustainable development that translates into how governments will actually behave on those files, not how they say they will.
Biography highlights
- Prime Minister of New Zealand, 1999 to 2008, three successive terms; first woman elected to the office.
- Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and Chair of the UN Development Group, 2009 to 2017.
- Co-Chair, WHO Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, 2020 to 2021.
- President, Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), since 2021.
- Chair of the Gavi Board, the Vaccine Alliance, from January 2026.
- Member of The Elders and the Global Commission on Drug Policy; author of “Women, Equality, Power” (2018).
Biography
The institutions that govern the global system, the UN, the WHO, the WTO, the climate negotiations, the development banks, were built for a different world. They are now under pressure from great-power competition, populist politics, and constrained public finances at the same time. Helen Clark has run two of them from the inside.
She served three terms as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, the first woman elected to the office, then eight years as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, where she also chaired the UN Development Group. UNDP under her leadership operated in around 170 countries with a budget of roughly five billion dollars and was repeatedly assessed as one of the better-performing parts of the UN system on transparency and reform.
In 2020 the WHO Director-General asked her to co-chair the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The panel’s report, “COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic”, went to the World Health Assembly in May 2021 and remains the central reference document on what the global health system got wrong and what would need to change. She is now President of Chatham House and, from January 2026, Chair of the Gavi Board.
Her current portfolio of roles, Chatham House, Gavi, The Elders, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, sits at the operational core of the rules-based order that boards now treat as a risk variable. That is what she brings into a leadership room: not a commentary on geopolitics, but a working sense of how the institutions inside it actually move.
Key speaking topics
- Geopolitical risk and the multilateral system
- Sustainable Development Goals and the post-2015 agenda
- Pandemic preparedness and global health governance
- Climate action and the politics of energy transition
- Women, equality and leadership in public life
- Open government and anti-corruption
- The Asia-Pacific in a contested global order
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees pricing geopolitical and multilateral risk into strategy
- CEOs and CSOs leading on climate, ESG and sustainable development commitments
- Heads of public affairs, government relations and global policy
- Leadership programmes for senior women and emerging public-interest leaders
Audience outcomes
- A grounded read on where the multilateral system retains authority and where it has lost it
- A clearer view of how pandemic preparedness, climate and development files will move at the UN, WHO and G20 levels
- A working sense of what executive leadership inside a UN agency or a national government actually requires
- A serious frame for the politics of gender, equality and inclusion in senior leadership