LocationsDiana leads UNDP's Governance team for Asia and the Pacific, working across democratic institutions, anti-corruption, and local governance to help build public systems people can trust. Fifteen years in, her focus remains the same: governance that actually delivers for people.
Integrity Is Not an Abstraction. It Is the Foundation of Public Trust
September 18, 2026
Diana (third from left) with colleagues from the Governance team at UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
Photo: UNDP RBAP
I was around ten years old when I watched war arrive in my living room.
It was 1985 in Bogotá. On the television, a guerrilla group had stormed the Palace of Justice, Colombia’s Supreme Court, in the heart of the capital. The building was on fire. Judges and civilians were held hostage. I remember the conversation at the dinner table going quiet in a particular way: not the silence of people with nothing to say, but the silence of people trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense.
That moment planted a question that has driven decades of my life: how does power work, who controls it, and what does it take to build peaceful political transitions?
Growing Up Inside the Question
I didn’t have a word for governance then. I just had a question.
Colombia in the 1980s and 90s was not a place where politics was an abstract subject you studied in school. It was the conversation at the dinner table, the news on every channel, the thing that shaped whether your day went normally or didn’t. Guerrillas, paramilitary groups, narco-trafficking: these weren’t distant headlines. They were the weather that could change a bus ride to school.
That context did something to me. It made me want to understand, really understand, how a society tears itself apart in violence, and more importantly, how it puts itself back together with such resilience. How do you build trust between people who have every reason not to trust each other? How do you create institutions that work for everyone, not just for whoever happens to hold power?
My first answers came from Bogotá itself. I started working in the mayor’s office, helping local government learn how to be accountable: how to explain its decisions to citizens, how to actually listen to them, how to build the kind of relationship between a government and its people where both sides felt they had something to gain from being honest. I also spent time researching armed conflict alongside people trying to understand how peace becomes possible after violence.
Neither of those jobs had a glamorous title. But they taught me something that no policy paper ever has: that change in governance starts small, at the local level, in the interaction between governments and people around housing, citizen security, transport, education, health and overall access to public services of dignity with equality.
Diana with Antanas Mockus former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia.
Photo: Diana Torres
More than Thirty Diverse Countries across Asia and the Pacific
The path from that mayor’s office in Bogotá to where I sit now ran through New York and a decade of country-level work. Today, I co-lead UNDP’s governance team for Asia and the Pacific, based in Bangkok, supporting more than 30 country offices in one of the most diverse regions in terms of political systems, ethnicities, languages and size of population.
That scale forces a particular humility about what my job actually is. I hold the regional overview, but the real expertise, how a political system genuinely works and where the openings for reform are, lives with colleagues in the country offices. My value is not to have the answers. It is to connect: to take a good practice emerging in one country and carry it to another, to distil what we are learning across the region, and to build a network of people who trust each other enough to share honestly.
The region does not make that simple. Across those countries I work with parliamentary systems and presidential ones, single-party states and deeply decentralised ones. No single template travels. The work spans public goods and services, democratic institutions, inclusive public spheres, and the anti-corruption and local-governance agenda closest to my heart. The common thread is the question I started with: are these institutions delivering for people and enabling sustainable development, or serving only whoever holds power?
Leave No One behind team at UNDP Viet Nam
Photo: UNDP Viet Nam
What Public Integrity Looks Like in Practice
One of the success stories is in our region: is in Singapore. After independence, Lee Kuan Yew made a single defining bet: that public integrity would be the foundation of everything his country built. He made public service genuinely respected and set a standard that spread through every layer of the state.
The results speak for themselves. Singapore’s transformation is one of the most remarkable in modern development history, not because of geography or natural resources, but because of a decision that sustainable development in small island with scarce resource would only be possible through public sector excellence .
When I talk about integrity as a public asset, this is what I mean: it is the difference between a state that works for its people and one that quietly works against them.
Korea has shown a similar development path over the last decade: the steady, cumulative change that comes through open government and overall democratic governance. By putting government contracts and budgets online for anyone to read, Korea made it harder for everyday corruption to hide. Transparency, anti-corruption and citizen’s participation turned out to be one of the most powerful tools available.
And then there are the cities, which is where I find the most energy. When a city leader genuinely commits to serving citizens rather than private interests, you can feel it. People feel it. Bangkok’s city leadership has shown what that commitment looks like in practice. And the remarkable thing about change at the local level is how it spreads. A city that gets governance right becomes a model that others want to follow.
At a reception with the Ministry of Decentralization of Maldives, 2025.
Photo: UNDP Maldives
Technology Opens Doors. It Doesn’t Walk Through Them.
There is real and justified excitement right now about what digital tools can do for governance. And I share it. When a farmer in a remote district can access a government service on a phone, without travelling for days to reach a city office, that changes a life. When citizens can see exactly where public money goes, that rebuilds trust. These are not small things.
What I have learned, though, is that technology opens doors. It does not walk through them for you. The most powerful digital governance systems are the ones designed from the start with the hardest-to-reach people in mind: the ones that ask, who are we building this for, and does it actually reach them?
Asia Pacific is one of the most diverse regions in the world: some countries racing ahead on digital transformation, others still building the foundations. The opportunity in that diversity is real. Countries at different stages can learn from and support each other. And UNDP’s role is to make sure that as this transformation accelerates, it carries everyone forward, not just those already closest to the front.
What Keeps Me Going
People sometimes ask how I stay motivated in a field where progress can feel slow and where the stakes are always high. My honest answer is that I go back to the people.
Every time I visit a country and sit with a community, with young people who believe that institutions can work better, with civil servants giving everything to do their jobs with integrity, something in me recharges. The belief that government should serve people, that public money should reach those it was meant for, that leaders should be answerable: that belief never disappears. Even where it has been tested. Even where it has been disappointing. It keeps showing up, in new generations, in new places, in new forms.
That stubbornness is, I think, the most powerful force in democratic life. And being close to it, being part of the work of making it real, is a privilege I do not take lightly.
In an interview with Viet Nam media.
Photo: UNDP Viet Nam
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out
If I could sit with myself at the beginning, the student in Bogotá trying to make sense of a country at war with itself, I would say three things.
Go to the field. Read everything, study hard, get your qualifications, and then go somewhere that challenges everything you think you know, and learn how governance actually feels from the inside. The understanding you gain from that experience will stay with you longer than anything else.
Stay curious and stay broad. There is a time for going deep in one area, a time for leading people, and a time for running operations. You need all of it. The professionals who will make the biggest difference in the next decade are the ones who can hold complexity without being paralysed by it.
And trust that your impact is real, even when you cannot see it. Some of the most important work you do will be invisible to you: a conversation that shifts someone’s thinking, a system that keeps running long after you have moved on. That is not a limitation. It is the nature of this work, and it is something to be proud of.
The antidote to cynicism is proximity. Stay close to the people whose lives depend on whether governance works. It becomes very hard to give up when you do.
Still the Same Question
I still think about the ten-year-old watching television in Bogotá. The smoke above the Palace of Justice. The silence at the table.
She wanted to understand how power works. She wanted to know how to make it fairer. Years later, I am still working on the answer, now across more than 30 country offices in Asia and the Pacific, with colleagues from every political and cultural tradition imaginable, on problems that did not exist when I started.
But the question is the same. And I still believe it is worth asking.
Integrity is not a concept you explain in a report. It is what shows up, or does not show up, in every policy that advances transparency and open data, every budget that gets spent as planned, every contract that gets awarded, every service that reaches or misses the person who needed it most.
Building it is slow, unglamorous, endlessly difficult work. And it is the most impactful work I know.
Mayor's session panel at the World Cities Summit in Singapore, 2024.
Photo: UNDP RBAP
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