United Nations Foundation

When the bureaucracy overtakes the capacity to achieve progress, then you lose the audience and you lose relevance.

I'm Jasmine Bayomi, and this is World's Toughest Job, a co-production of Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation.

In our previous eight episodes, we asked how the next Secretary General might make a difference on issues like complex wars, climate change, and AI.

But today, we're doing something a little bit different.

The session was recorded at the UN's General Assembly High Level Week in September of 2026.

And it features Comfort Arrow, analyst, policymaker and president and CEO of the International Crisis Group.

And we've got Thant Mintoo, historian, author and senior fellow at the UN Foundation.

The session is moderated by Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

While the world still trusts the U.N., the global public is eager for change, said former U.N. Deputy Secretary Mark Malik Browne.

a United Nations Foundation board member.

The future of artificial intelligence is pushed to the forefront of global concerns with its speeding advances and dawning recognition that there are no industry controls, let alone any global guardrails, for a technology that has many advantages, but also many disadvantages and unknowns.

The UN Security Council added a meeting on AI to its agenda this afternoon, a sign of the growing apprehension and need to address the issue.

I am your host, Mark Leon Goldberg.

I'm joined today by Elizabeth Cousins, the president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation.

Welcome, Elizabeth.

Great to see you, Mark.

You can tune in wherever you watch Al Jazeera.

I am really pleased to announce a new partnership between Global Dispatches and Regroup Playbook, which is a new substack from the United Nations Foundation.

Global Dispatches is partnering with Regroup Playbook to offer live updates and analysis throughout UNGA.

This partnership will kick off on Thursday, September 17th, with a Substack Live featuring Elizabeth Cousins, President and CEO of the UN Foundation.

I'm the director of Nature Centric Approaches at the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment.

We're a nonprofit independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Foundation.

Got a global network of system risk experts and practitioners trying to advance the theory, method, and practice of solving some of the most intractable global risks that we face at the moment.

Um, I'm also a visiting research fellow at the University of Reading.

How to create an action plan that turns your vision into movement.

And insights from Scott's decades of work with organizations and leaders doing better good, including Starbucks, Giovanni, uh, the United Nations Foundation, uh, former presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, and public figures like Sean Penn, MacKenzie Scott and Will Smith.

So better good is both the micro and the macro, the local and the global, and it doesn't stop when we go to work.

We perform better and we have a deeper level of engagement with our careers when we believe in what we're doing.

Well, that had real success.

We created this alliance with the United Nations Foundation with a number of corporations.

We probably had a hundred different corporations.

I think we brought in 30 countries at the time from around the globe and created a series of indices to start measuring clean air around clean cooking.