Global Dispatches -- Conversations On Foreign Policy And World Affairs

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