President Petro, an economist by training who specializes in environmental and population development, said, “We have an economic system that links cheap labor, carbon-based fuels, and profits” and “we’re facing a very serious global political problem — the problems of World War II, the Cold War are nothing compared to what we’re facing now.”

Humankind, Petro said, must “join together in a revolution against capital.” He called for more “power to the people” and that all states around the world operate in a multilateral approach to address ways to alleviate the climate crisis.

“The markets will not fix the climate crisis and save humanity,” and a new type of economy, one that’s not driven by carbon-based profits but by the general welfare of all people, must emerge to ensure the survival of future generations.

He said the origins of the crisis began with the current Anthropocene Era, which describes the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems. The “greedy and never-ending consumption of products related to fossil fuel energy” has landed humanity in its current predicament.

“We, the consumers, are the guilty and the ones to blame,” Petro said.

The Colombian president said that fossil fuels are used to maximize profits and that the climate crisis is the logical result of the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few.

And on top of this, he added, the political and economic establishments haven’t historically listened to the science about what happens when carbon is issued into the atmosphere and the social imbalance that follows. He expressed doubt that the current system of capitalism can achieve environmental progress based on the current data he observes.

“To leave markets with free reign will not lead to the maximum well-being of all, but virtually to extinction,” he said.

He concluded, “We are running out of time.”

On April 20, President Joe Biden will host President Petro for a bilateral meeting at the White House to discuss topics such as climate change, and economic and security cooperation.

Petro won Colombia’s presidential election in June 2022 with the support of voters frustrated by rising poverty and violence. He has vowed to bring peace to his nation of 50 million after decades of conflict. Time magazine recently named him one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2023.”

Under Petro, Colombia earlier this year announced that it will not approve any new oil and gas exploration projects as it seeks to shift away from fossil fuels and toward a new sustainable economy.

Student-driven event

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), affiliated faculty at CDDRL, and director of Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies, participated in a questions-and-answers session with the audience and Petro after the president’s address. Michael McFaul, director of FSI, and Kathyrn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, both introduced Petro before his remarks.

In an email interview, Díaz-Cayeros explained that Colombia has weathered a four-decades-long civil war. Now, Petro will manage various high-stakes issues in his country, including an ambitious overhaul of the health system, a restart of the peace process, and the role of the mining and oil industries, among others.

“This visit is important as Stanford considers its engagement with Latin America and our hemisphere,” said Díaz-Cayeros, adding that it can refocus attention to a region of the world that is fundamentally important for California, the U.S.,  Stanford, and even Silicon Valley.

Héctor Hoyos, Professor and Director of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and Professor of Comparative Literature (by courtesy), added that “it was great to see Stanford students come together to engage with an influential figure for hemispheric politics." Hoyos went on to note that civility and openness to different points of view were hallmarks of the event, which also included Bay Area community members.

Tara Hein, ‘23, CDDRL honors student and co-founder & co-president of the Stanford Society for Latin American Politics, led the student-driven effort to host the Colombian president.

Born and raised in Costa Rica, Hein was inspired to host Petro due to her goals of strengthening democracy, realizing the promise of political equality in Latin America, and connecting Stanford's expertise to the world beyond campus. “This can make life better for millions,” she said.

Highlighting the need to bridge academia and policy, Hein explained, “At Stanford, we’re tremendously privileged to have leading scholars and abundant resources to tackle the world’s most pressing issues. But if these learnings stay here on campus, or within intellectual circles, the impact will remain limited. We must not forget that there are real people being affected by the very events that we research and study.”

By inviting Colombia’s president to Stanford, her student community hopes to spark a larger dialogue between academic spaces such as CDDRL and democratic world leaders like Petro, she said.

There’s a great deal of support for community policing, but not a lot of concrete data on whether it works. What makes this a challenging issue to study?

Christia: Building trust between police and the citizens they are tasked to protect is at the core of community policing. As such, an important challenge lies with identifying the right measures to capture this often-complex police-citizen interaction. This was even more of a pronounced challenge in our study as we conducted six coordinated experiments across a diverse set of sites in the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda.

To make progress in understanding the impacts of community policing, we needed to develop a set of common strategies for the police to implement that made sense in each national context, which we call locally appropriate community policing interventions. We also needed to agree upon a shared research design across countries and to introduce common outcome measures to ensure that we were looking at the impacts of these programs in similar ways. This approach to launching coordinated, multi-site, randomized controlled trials across contexts has been pioneered by the organization that sponsored this work, Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).

Your team partnered with six communities across the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda. Based on your research, what evidence did you find for or against the use of community policing practices?

Blair: We find that community policing doesn’t live up to its promise when implemented in the Global South. Community policing doesn’t build trust between citizens and police, it doesn’t lead to citizens to share the kinds of tips and information with police that might improve police efficiency, and, perhaps not surprisingly then, it does not lead to lower crime. This disappointing result was apparent across all six contexts and for all of the primary outcomes we measured.

Is there an alternative to community policing, or ways to reform these systems, that would make them more efficacious at creating the desired outcomes?

Weinstein: We carefully examined each of the six contexts, including through interviews with the police agencies and the research teams, to make sense of this null result. We identified three primary constraints that may have impeded the implementation of community policing: (a) a lack of prioritization of these new practices by police leadership (b) the rotation to new posts of police officers who had championed the effort and were trained to implement it and (c) limited resources to follow up on the concerns raised by citizens.

The bottom line is that community policing isn’t positioned to deliver increased trust and collaboration in environments with limited incentives and resources to enable police to change their behavior. Our conclusion is that community policing should be seen as an incremental reform that can make a difference in well-resourced police departments with strong incentives to be responsive to citizen concerns. But when those conditions are absent, an incremental approach can’t deliver. More systemic reforms are required.

How does the data from your work fit into broader issues of equity, just representation, and racism that communities across the world continue to grapple with?

Blair: In many ways community policing appears to be the ideal policy for this moment, where so many are demanding that police abuse be reduced while also reducing crime victimization. Community policing is meant to do both, constructing a virtuous cycle between citizen-police cooperation, trust, and crime reduction. Our null results sound a note of caution: it may not be so simple. We observed big barriers to implementing this shift in policing, and barriers that likely affect other incremental policies. To address equity in the way governments enforce the law, we may need more systematic changes to how we organize the police and hold them accountable.