A Bold Idea for UN Reform

I spent the last weekend of May at a conference in Stockholm called the New Shape Forum. This was an ideas festival and prize competition and workshop all around new ideas for better organizing the world to confront catastrophic global risks.   The Global Challenges Foundation, which convened this, solicited new ideas for global governance and received several thousand ideas from all over the world. Of these submissions, 14 finalists were selected to present their ideas at the New Shape Forum.   And then those of us invited to the conference all got down to work. We identified the ideas we thought we could help refine and spent two days building upon them. At the end of the conference, three of those 14 ideas were selected as winners, and the winning ideas got $600,000 each.    My guest today, Natalie Samarsinghe is one of those winners. She is the executive director of the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom--though she wants to stress that this episode was recorded in her personal capacity, as was the idea she submitted.    She came up with a proposal for a novel kind of UN Reform --  not a reform of the Security Council, or the General Assembly. Rather, it is a proposal for how UN agencies can better design and implement programs and projects around the world.    You can find the other two winning ideas and other finalists at Global Challenges.org    This episode is presented by the Global Challenges Foundation, which recently convened the New Shape Forum in Stockholm. This was a platform where over 200 leading thinkers and experts discussed fresh ideas for improving global governance to tackle the world's most pressing problems. Next, the Global Challenges Foundation is partnering with the Paris Peace Forum in November to present further developed and more holistic ideas for confronting global catastrophic risks.  Visit GlobalChallenges.org to learn more.