Carlos Alvarado implores students to 'Become the Hope of the World'

When Carlos Alvarado Quesada took the stage at Sanford, he opened with three stories.

Introduced by Anna Gassman-Pines, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Sanford, the former president of Costa Rica framed his remarks around a question many students quietly carry: in a world shaped by power, money, and global forces, how can one person make a difference?

“Sometimes… people feel some degree of smallness,” Alvarado said. “How can my contribution make a difference?” His answer, drawn from his own path through politics, crisis, and global leadership, was clear: change begins with action, not certainty.

From 4 percent to the presidency

Alvarado’s first story began in 2016, when Costa Rica faced political uncertainty and rising populist sentiment. At the time, he served as the youngest minister in the cabinet. As his party searched for a presidential candidate, support hovered around 15 percent and falling.

No one wanted to run.

Frustrated, Alvarado recalled a framework he had studied as a graduate student: exit, voice, or loyalty. Faced with a difficult situation, one can leave, speak up, or accept it.

He chose a fourth option: run. The decision did not immediately inspire confidence. Polling dropped to 4 percent. At one point, he overheard a family member say, “Let him do this. Let him get it out of his system.” But for Alvarado, the campaign was never about probability.

“When the cause is good and your principles are aligned with what you’re doing, there is no losing,” he said. He ran on positions that were, at the time, deeply unpopular, including support for same-sex marriage and a fiscal reform to prevent national default. Against expectations, he won the presidency. The outcome, he told students, reinforced a lesson that would shape his leadership: acting on principle matters, even when success seems unlikely.

A bicycle among container trucks

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That same mindset carried into one of the defining initiatives of his presidency: Costa Rica’s national decarbonization plan, the first of its kind following the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Developed across government agencies, the private sector, and civil society, the plan aimed to decouple economic growth from emissions while strengthening the country’s long-standing environmental commitments.

Still, after its launch in 2019, Alvarado admitted he had doubts.

“We are crazy,” he recalled thinking. “How are we going to do this?” 

In that moment, he turned to Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who helped lead the Paris Agreement negotiations. Her response reframed the challenge.

“Picture it this way,” she told him. “You’re in a traffic jam full of container trucks. Nothing is moving. But you don’t have a truck. You have a bicycle. You can move. You can show the way.”

Costa Rica did just that.

Under Alvarado’s leadership, the country expanded protected ocean areas from 3 percent to 30 percent, safeguarding a marine territory roughly the size of West Virginia. The policy became part of a broader global push, with nearly 190 countries eventually committing to protect 30 percent of land and ocean by 2030.

For Alvarado, the lesson extended beyond environmental policy. Even small actors, he argued, can lead when they move first.

Leadership, doubt, and endurance

If the first two stories illustrated conviction, the third revealed something else: doubt.

After leaving office and moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Alvarado set out for a winter run along the Charles River. Within minutes, he considered turning back. Instead, he kept going, extending his run in small increments. At one point, he stopped himself as a comparison entered his mind. From 2020 to 2022, Costa Rica had faced the Covid-19 pandemic with limited resources, including fewer than 100 intensive care beds nationwide. Despite those constraints, the country achieved one of the lowest excess mortality rates globally.

“So how come you cannot run five more minutes in the winter?” he asked himself. The moment, he said, reflected a broader truth about leadership.

“Sometimes we doubt our capacity to confront the challenges we have ahead,” Alvarado said. “But confronting them with endurance, with dignity, with empathy, we can create better pathways.”

Policy, humility, and listening

Throughout the lecture and a moderated discussion led by Sanford professor Alex Pfaff, Alvarado emphasized that leadership is not only about vision, but also about humility. He shared an early policy failure from his time as a minister overseeing education support programs. His team redesigned a scholarship system to make it more efficient, consolidating multiple payments into a single transfer.

On paper, the policy worked.

In practice, it created a new problem. Because of how the payment amounts were structured, families were left with small balances they could not withdraw in full. Many began waiting in long lines at banks to access the equivalent of about one dollar.

“That’s the level of necessity,” Alvarado said. “People were queuing for one dollar.” The experience forced him to reconsider his approach. “I was confronted with my own arrogance,” he said. “Maybe if you talk to people, they might have better solutions.”

The lesson, he told students, is that effective public policy must be grounded not only in technical expertise, but also in lived experience.For Alvarado, that work is inherently creative. “Public policy is the art of creating future and crafting change,” he said.

Democracy, the environment, and difficult tradeoffs

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In conversation with Pfaff, Alvarado also addressed the tension between democratic governance and environmental policy, particularly when costs and benefits are unevenly distributed. He challenged the idea that economic growth and environmental protection are inherently at odds.

“There are no humans without environment,” he said. “That separation is conceptually faulty.” 

Costa Rica’s experience, he argued, shows that environmental policy can align with economic opportunity, particularly through models like ecotourism and renewable energy. The country has reversed decades of deforestation while maintaining steady growth. 

Still, he acknowledged that policy decisions often require difficult tradeoffs, especially in a democratic system where leaders must balance long-term goals with immediate public needs. His approach, he said, was to prioritize the most vulnerable and make decisions he could stand behind.

“If you can sleep well at night knowing what you have done, that’s very important,” he said.

“Hope is within ourselves”

As the lecture closed, Alvarado returned to the question that framed his remarks. In moments of uncertainty, many people look outward for hope, whether in institutions, leaders, or global movements. But that instinct, he argued, can be limiting.

“We cannot look for hope outside of ourselves,” he said. “That’s giving away our power.”

He urged students to recognize their own capacity to act, regardless of circumstance or scale.

“We never choose the context in which we operate,” he said. “What we choose is what we do.” For Alvarado, the leaders who have shaped history, from Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King Jr., did not rely on wealth, force, or technology. Their power came from ideas, persistence, and a willingness to act. “We have to become the hope of the world,” he said, “and stop looking for it outside of ourselves.”

For the students gathered in Fleishman Commons, the message was both a challenge and an invitation. Hope, he suggested, is not something to wait for. It is something to practice.