 Don't wait for the translation, yes or no? There's one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. This protocol to the conference by unanimity. The resolution was to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Action from everyone everywhere. 17 sustainable development goals. Welcome to the wider annual lecture 24, be provided by Lord Mark Malauk Brown. 2020 has proved to be a more significant year than we anticipated. As we geared up to commemorate UN75, United Nations University's 45th anniversary, and UNI wider turning 35, celebrations have taken a back seat in the global pandemic. The situation in those serves also as a timely reminder of the need for international cooperation, both in regards of research and policymaking and supporting efforts to respond to crisis that don't respect borders. On that, I look forward to hearing what Mark Malauk Brown has to say in today's wider annual lecture. Before we commence, I would also like to take a minute to introduce those of you who might be new to UNU wider and to the UNU. The United Nations University was established in 1975 to act as a research arm of the United Nations. There are now 14 institutes located in 12 countries around the world. But as UNU wider, the World Institute for Development Economics Research is the first research institute of the university back in 1985. Today, UNU wider serves as the unique blend of a think tank research institute and UN agency based in Helsinki, Finland. This event is a 24th annual lecture. The lectures have been delivered by prestigious line of scholars and policymakers, four of whom are Nobel laureates. It's a pleasure to welcome Mark Malauk Brown to that lineup. This is the first time we're doing the event online. I'm pleased that even under the circumstances, we've been able to facilitate this important discussion despite the challenges. Over the past six months, UNU Widers were responding and adapting to the coronavirus pandemic. This has meant reorienting our research focus and changing how we facilitate knowledge exchange. However, we hope that this new way of doing things might also help us reach a new audience who connect with like-minded people all over the world. Today's lecture will run for approximately half an hour, or by discussion of Natalia Samarasinghe before strategy UN-75. Afterwards, I will return to chair the Q&A for approximately 45 minutes. Joining us in Zoom, your microphone was muted throughout the event. However, you can send questions using the Q&A button. If you are watching on the YouTube stream, you can submit questions directly on YouTube or Twitter at UNU Wider with the hashtag AL24. I would also like to inform you that this webinar will be recorded. The recording will be added on UNU Widers' YouTube channel in the coming days. I would like to invite the Rector of the United Nations University and Undersecretary General of the United Nations, David Malone, to introduce the annual lecture. Thank you. Hello, my name is David Malone. I'm Rector of the UN University and Undersecretary General of the United Nations System. I'm delighted to introduce my friend of several decades standing, Mark Malik Brown. Wider could not have selected a better speaker for this annual lecture. Mark has been heavily engaged and in very diverse capacities with the developing world throughout his career. He started out at the Economist, worked there twice, and in between worked for UNHCR in Thailand with Cambodian refugees. Later, he headed up a US-based consultancy that, amongst other things, advised on economic policy in emerging and developing economies. And also provided advice on election campaigns in developing countries and elsewhere in the world. In 1994, he moved to be Vice President for External Relations at the World Bank. And with his team, hugely improved the profile of the bank, which had taken some knocks due to the period when it championed structural adjustment along with the IMF. And he was able to emphasize quite truthfully the many, many positive things the World Bank continues to achieve today around the world. From there, he moved on to become the Administrator of the UN Development Program, which publishes the Human Development Report and is spread across the developing world. He played an outstanding role there and also subsequently in coming to the rescue of Kofi Annan's leadership of the UN when it was under vicious attack. It has to be set by right-wing parties in the United States over the Oil for Food program in Iraq. He became Deputy Secretary General to the delight of nearly all of the staff in 2006. And from there, departed to become a Minister in the British Cabinet. He now sits in the House of Lords and co-chairs the UN Foundation, highly relevant all over the world. I'm truly honored to be briefly on the same platform as Mark today. David Canal, thank you both very much. Friends, it's a pleasure to join you, even if in this rather disembodied way. As I prepared this lecture, I kept on bringing to mind Kofi Annan's favorite African proverb. You cannot change the wind, but you can bend the sail. And the lecturers it developed really falls into two halves. The first half is the headwinds that the UN battles today, but arguably has battled in different forms for most of its life. The second part is what is the strategy for bending the sail? How do you tack through these difficult winds and waters to make the UN effective? So let me begin with an appeal to our venerable friend on its 75th birthday, the United Nations. Get down on the ground with the grandchildren. Just having celebrated that birthday, we can hear your knees creak. The UN, for as long as I've known it up close than that since its 30s, has often frankly seemed rather prematurely old. But today, a youth challenge has been mounted to the way we live, organize and govern ourselves. That is much bigger than the UN alone. The social restrictions of COVID may disguise the safe scale of the gathering social protests. But COVID has also accelerated it. I would wager that my generation will have the keys seized from us. A digital revolution on the one hand and rising social and economic inequality on the other will unseat a ruling establishment that has failed to navigate these tides. The UN has to be part of that future or pushed aside by it. And for the UN, there's also a second older vector that blows with equal force. The organization has been in the grip of a transition from its founding Anglo-Saxon and Western DNA to a more globally distributed state influence almost since its beginnings from the 48 founding members of 1945 to 1903 today. The expansion reflects the big 20th century power shifts. Decolonization, the collapse of the former Soviet Empire and the pursuit of self-determination by those overlooked by history's cartographers. An adaptation to those new members and their aspirations has been vital to the UN's legitimacy and universality. Most notably, it's allowed it to build an extraordinary staff that for the most part is a proud mirror of the world it serves. There is a price, however, for this changing agenda. The UN Charter imbued with the wisdom and sacrifice of the survivors of a world war is one of the world's most eloquent and uplifting constitutional documents. It is also thoroughly Western, borrowing from America's founding fathers and assuming a world order managed by the Allied victors of 1945. This is reflected in a Western rights-based agenda that to this day has stressed human rights in terms of individual civil and political rights, refugee protection, gender and reproductive health, over collective economic rights. There was an early opposition to Western dominance, notably in the General Assembly centered on the championing of the new international economic order. Through the non-aligned movement and the G77, new member states sought to correct what they saw as the historical and structural imbalances in the global political economy. At the time, despite the passion brought to the debate by its champions, it seemed likely to remain a permanent backbench cause. Now, however, it's no longer a simple division of East and West or North and South. Many of us, as individuals and of countries, have added collective social and economic rights to our own agendas, climate change, structural inequality and exclusion, injustices in the global economic system. A Western human rights NGO today or a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, is as likely to be heard championing climate justice as the cause of political prisoners. China, with President Xi's remarkable pledge at September's General Assembly to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, has put itself and him in a leadership role on this latter issue. But we have to weigh that this is the same regime that has employed mass incarceration and extensive discrimination to suppress the political rights of its 12 million Uighur minority. The Economist editorialized earlier this month on the desperate plight of the Uighurs, observing, quote, China's ruling party has no truck with this concept of individual rights. It claims a legitimacy from its record of providing stability and economic growth to the many. And today, China has flexed its muscles in the UN, whereas now at 12%, the second largest contributor to the assessed budget, strengthening its representation across the secretariat agencies, funds and programs. It has become a more active voice in critical policy debates from regulation of the internet to peacekeeping. And in the wider world, a more authoritarian model of government is the new majority. It's not China alone. This new majority embraces leaders who come to power by the ballot box and those who didn't, but who all share a preference for a nationalist foreign policy, the weakening of domestic institutions and the rule of law, including the political rights of its citizens, and a casual disregard in many cases for minority and even in some cases, majority rights. That's the world today. For now, at least, they are the new majority in global share of population terms. Between them, China, India, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Hungary and the United States represent a demographic majority. And many others are borrowing from their playbook. The widespread rejection of middle-class liberalism reflects very real shifts in global public opinion that are not likely to dissolve anytime soon. The uneven impact of economic change now accelerated by COVID has produced across much of the world's politics similar divisions of city versus town and country, young versus old, university education versus high school or less. Those employed in new services sectors versus those in failing industrial sectors. From Trump to Brexit or Bolsonaro to Modi, we have seen the rise of economic security, cultural identity and anti-immigration as the flagship issues of a new populist politics that reaches those who feel they're being left behind by unsettling change. Freedom House in its 2020 Democracy Report notes that last year was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. 64 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights from the pressure in India on Muslims to a steady less-noticed restriction of freedoms elsewhere. Its lead author observed, quote, the unchecked brutality of autocratic regimes and the ethical decay of democratic powers are combining to make the world increasingly hostile to fresh demands for better governance. End of quote. The closing space for open inclusive debate that does not stop at the border of these countries but rather seeps into the UN itself. This month's election for the membership at the UN Human Rights Council gave seats to China, Cuba and Russia, although Saudi Arabia, another candidate, fell short. Each has served before, but it marks the steady capture of this institution by those opposed to that founding Western individual rights-based agenda. Inevitably, perhaps as a consequence, this is an age of UN caution. My colleague at the International Crisis Group, Richard Gao, asked in a recent paper, what is the purpose of the Security Council in an era of worsening great power tensions? Divisions amongst its five permanent members, or P5, repeatedly undermined the United Nations in recent years, he declared. In a way, it was ever thus. I remember in my very first UN year, 1976, an older generation and indeed in a few cases the original generation, the self-named last of the Mohicans, a group founded by those who joined the UN secretariat before the 15th of August, 1946, when the original secretariat camped out in temporary space based on Mohawk, complaining in not dissimilar terms. The place already in 1976 seemed a little stiff, cautiously bureaucratic and a bit run down. Then is now the UN has sought to make up for that black hole at the centre of its political authority. Then, because of the Cold War, stand off by swarming the humanitarian and development space with compensating activity to make up for its lack of progress on the political front. It was in the 1960s to 80s that its direct operational capacities to address the refugee flows of the Cold War and post-colonisation grew rapidly for UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. It saw the transition from a small staff of lawyers to a large staff of logisticians. It was the years of early growth for this year's Nobel Prize winner WFP, which was spun out of FAO in 1961. It was when the technical assistance activities of the specialised agencies, marshaled by UNDP, were a critical prop to newly independent governments. In 1980, the then Secretary-General visited a huge UNHCR supported refugee camp on the Thai Cambodian border where I was the field officer in charge. He turned to me in bewilderment as we toured the huge encampment with its heavy UN and NGO presence and asked how this huge UN operation could have been set up without him knowing almost anything about it. I tell this story and I do frequently to illustrate a simple truth. The political and security UN in New York was gridlocked, but there was still ample space for activism and innovation as long as you stayed away, well away from that graveyard, the Security Council. Operations like mine were run in the field and from Geneva based on a mandate derived from international law, not the permission of the Security Council. A few remarkable holdouts in New York, such as Sir Brian Erkut, ingeniously shoehorned the UN into political and peacekeeping roles in the Middle East, despite big power deadlock, but this was the exception. As I criss-crossed the world for UNHCR from refugee health spots in Southeast Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Central America and the Horn of Africa, I saw that an extraordinarily committed and creative group of UNHCR leaders had managed to prise apart the Cold War gridlock and make sufficient space for an imaginative operational activism that saved countless lives and relieved huge suffering. The politics of getting into these situations was never easy, the compromises often disappointing, and the motives of major interested powers and donors only rarely altruistic, but the space was carved out and generally held. When I arrived at UNDP as administrator, I found a similar legacy of programs established by my independent-minded American predecessors against the prevailing political grain of the time. The first UN assistance program in Red China, PAP, a program began in 1980 to support the Palestinians, or an office in North Korea whose establishment was still being contested by the U.S. State Department years later when I was administrator. And indeed, the UN of today has similarly found space, notably around the sustainable development goals, which play to the UN's convening and standard-setting strengths and roles. Climate change too, where three Secretary-General's in turn have driven this as a priority, and a tragically expanded humanitarian function, as grim conflicts in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere stubbornly run on. A UN having to find space where it won't be bullied by its stronger members and ignored at key moments by many others isn't new though. In fact, it's been the condition to which it has been condemned for most of its 75 years on Earth, I would argue. There was a brief glorious period of conception and birth from the San Francisco Conference in 1945 to Churchill's Ann Curtin speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 when he warned of the coming conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which would undermine Security Council cohesion. Krofianan's Secretary-Generalship was a second honeymoon for the UN. Coming six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was a moment of hope and alignment between major powers of which he took ample advantage. He saw a moment of opportunity that was largely denied to those who came before and after him to get the UN's way on political security and human rights matters. Yet in the aftermath of a Security Council broken again, this time on the anvil of the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq, a gale turned on him too. So for most perhaps 10% of the UN's 75 years has the wind blown strongly in the right direction. For the rest, success has come despite not because of member state unanimity. I want to suggest, therefore, a manifesto for a repurposed UN that is both true to its charter but recognises the direction the winds are blowing, does not cling to the masks of a failing Western liberalism alone, but understands and responds to the dynamics that have left that liberalism and it seems at the moment multilateralism on the rocks. This is a comeback strategy for the world as it is in order to allow us later to make the world as we want it to be. It's no surprise that I don't imagine the vehicle for it being our grandparents' UN. The world needs to believe the UN matters that it's relevant. The UN still enjoys at one level quite high levels of support and Pew and other surveys, yet that support seems heavily aspirational around what it ought to do, not what it does. Support falls when pollsters ask about its specific performance. Churchill would see this in a term he used in a warning fashion in Fulton in that speech as, quote, foundations built on sand. Without a more public embrace, it's hard to overcome the interstate fault lines. An UN was possibly unique among Secretary-General's in being able to appeal directly to people, citing the opening words of the charter in justification, we the peoples of the United Nations. Those before and since him have been largely captives of governments and their disagreements. I often wish the UN's supporters would accept a more pragmatic rather than aspirational UN. The Save the World aspiration that lights up the top-line polling findings is always likely to disappoint those who hope for it. It is of the world, our United Nations, not above it. The legendary Doug Hammershull's words still probably best capture this point, quote, the UN wasn't created to take mankind into paradise, but rather to save humanity from hell. For its 75th, as you will hear shortly from Natalie, the UN undertook a survey of a million respondents supplemented by independent polling by Pew and Edelman Intelligence, as well as the latter's analysis of social and traditional media coverage in 70 countries. What comes through clearly is that across different national economies and circumstances, there is a demand for the better delivery of those basic services, notably at the moment health, together with protection of the environment and containing climate change, and for honest, accountable government that delivers and protects its citizens. And this is already the UN's agenda. Its difficulty is it's not cutting through with it, and it's got to find a way to be heard, and these reports show how poorly referenced it is in much of that media coverage. The UN is not going to replace government as an agent of service delivery. It doesn't command the resources or the authority for that. But the UN must deploy its convening, campaigning, and normative roles to double down on its Sustainable Development Goals SDG agenda. COVID has attacked that agenda, as Bill and Melinda Gates have observed, setting the world back 25 years in 20 weeks, 5 weeks, driving 115 million people back into extreme poverty this year, and raising fears for economic security in almost every family in every country, everywhere. The current Secretary-General Antonio Guterres dedicated most of his early period in office in trying to pick off some early wins in conflict resolution, if you like the traditional UN, including Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, and Cyprus. His efforts were, I think I'm being generous when I say this, and not unfair, were not blessed with any major breakthroughs. He then embraced the SDGs and climate. He was photographed for the cover of Time magazine with his trousers rolled up, standing in the shallow water on a beach in Fiji to illustrate the consequence of climate change, rising ocean levels. It illustrates his pivot from conflict to climate. Probably his most-noticed speech as Secretary-General was his powerful Mandela lecture delivered in July. He called for a new social contract for a new era, and spoke eloquently of how the pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of our world. It has laid bare risks we have ignored for decades. Inadequate health systems, gaps in social protection, structural inequalities, environmental degradation at the climate crisis. He went on, inequality defines our time. More than 70% of the world's people are living with rising inequality. Secretary-General's have always been elected to be the world's chief diplomat. Today's successful ones quickly learn they have to be the world's chief campaigner. The UN has a unique platform to measure a country's progress, lead table it, and name and shame those whose social and economic indicators fall behind. This began with the legendary Jim Garant at UNICEF, moved through the UNDP human development agenda to being picked up by Kofi Annan and those of us around him in how we established and campaigned for the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs, the precursors to the SDGs. Like any campaigns, we started by understanding our base constituency, those we the peoples. And today, the Bennett Institute at Cambridge University has just released a study of the state of global democracy that draws on three and a half thousand country surveys over a time run of some 25 years. It finds support for democracy is at a low ebb. Since the data series was established, a 10% swing across all countries in the set, developed and developing, has produced a clear majority who are dissatisfied with democracy. The deficit was worst in almost all regions amongst 18 to 34 year olds. The Millennials. Dr. Robert Furre, the study leader said, quote, this is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their 20s and 30s. But what the report is anxious to stress is a little evidence that this is a rejection of the theory of democracy. Rather, it demonstrates disappointment with its results. And indeed, where governments do deliver results, notably in, for example, summation countries, the researchers found that the disenchantment is much less. So this is not a protest against democracy so much as against poorly performing incumbents. That was Democrats, but now it will be populists with even fewer answers to the structural insecurity that is blowing up politics. People don't feel protected, particularly in the developed world. There's actually more optimism remaining in developing countries. Too often they don't see a better future. They see wave after wave of threatening, change driven, not just by pandemics, but by technology, trade, environmental degradation, and consequent steepening inequality. Youth protests in Nigeria have caught our attention in recent days. Perhaps one Nigerian statistic speaks volumes. 35% youth unemployment. COVID has reinforced economic exclusion. The protests of a generation cannot be brushed under the COVID carpet much longer. The world is an unhappy place and made more so by COVID. At the core is a growing crisis of youth structural unemployment and exclusion and the skewed intergenerational distribution of wealth and government benefits. There's worse to come to pluck just one random headline from the week's news. McKinsey released a survey of more than 2,000 SMEs in Europe, small and medium enterprises. More than half don't expect to be in business this time next year. SMEs have been estimated by the ILO to account for up to 70% of global employment. Here, then, is the UN's great cause. Throw caution to the winds and lay out, Guterres' new social contract for the world to see. Deploy campaigning and convening to build a new global bargain and put governments on the spot by indexing and spotlighting performance to expose those which are delivering and which aren't. For the MDGs, I set up UN project offices outside the normal UN intergovernmental constraints to measure and create lead tables and scorecards of national performance that allowed citizens to hold their own government to account. Then under Jeff Sachs, we cost out what it would take to achieve the goals and finally built a team to liaise and communicate and campaign with civil society activists. There was more jeans and t-shirts than the typical UN Brooks Brothers uniform. Build on that precedent. Push bravely on the door. If I have a mild complaint about the SDGs, it is that they've lost something of the edgy outsider status of the early MDGs. The UN is too much the incumbent and not enough the insurgent and it shows in the difficulty the current UN has in breaking through in communications terms. On such a campaign's coattails, remake the argument for multilateralism. Argued too many of these problems cannot be fixed at the country level alone. Local results on, say, climate change require global collaboration and action. Once the UN is reconnected to grassroots concerns, it's not a hard argument to make. If a campaign that mobilizes younger citizens around this global and personal security agenda is to have legs, it must find allies where it can and not be constrained by the foot-dragging back-end of the General Assembly. When the UN has touched the stars, that lift has come from civil society, not government. Civil society was active in San Francisco in 1945, pushing the level of ambition of the official conference, as it was later when Eleanor Roosevelt led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And today, first around the MDGs, now around the SDGs, clusters a network of champions in many corporates show greater ambition than governments. In all, the most innovative thinking comes from the many corners of the civil society mosaic. Local and international NGOs, mayors and their cities, governors and CEOs, activists and academics that harness the energy. The UN Foundation, which I co-chair, interfaces with many of these groups. Their commitment is bracing. Building variegated coalitions of state and non-state actors willing to be first movers on different parts of this agenda is not a new path to action in the UN. Now it needs to be turbocharged. The world won't wait for the most plodding and resistant nations to sign up to action. This same variegated approach needs to be applied to the more difficult area of human rights. The official inter-governmental body, the Human Rights Council, is not fit for purpose, but as one of the authors of the reform that raised it from commission to council, I doubt there's an easy institutional fix. The UN, in the person of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, needs to choose her ground and pick her fights, determine a mix of individual and collective rights on which she wishes to particularly stand and marshal the UN's allies, that variegated coalition if there ever was one, which involves states, yes, but also NGOs to champion rights of which it can build support. And where the High Commissioner, because of her inter-governmental character of her office, cannot and the council won't raise its voice, she must still find ways of ensuring that her office reports, abuses and that they are documented and allies found in civil society and government to raise their voices instead. The UN needs to be part of a rights ecosystem where different partners can each step up where their comparative advantage lies. The current High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has to stature to thread this difficult needle. Another human rights point, there are resident coordinators that I've spoken to in recent months and indeed I think the UN's own 75th research suggests that there's closing space in many countries around debating or criticizing the performance of government service delivery or corruption and accountabilities. Resident coordinators in the UN system must be critical protectors and promoters of local civil society voices. This may seem a more unsung aspect of human rights work, but it's a vital front in the UN's wider comeback. Too many governments see the current political climate as a license to step on their home critics. The UN needs to step in and protect its civil society partners. A global social contract will be stillborn without them and the final step to restore defectiveness is in time of course to recover authority in the political and security space. If there is silver lining it is that the character of conflict continues to change. Opening grim, I'm afraid, new opportunity. Not only is peacekeeping less than ever the thin blue line between states. It's not even in many cases policing full-blown internal conflicts a democratic republic of the Congo or Syria as it was in the past. The more likely future of conflict at least where the UN will have a role is low-level but persistent political violence around exclusion, suppression of minority rights and intergenerational conflict in a context of deteriorating state institutions such as policing justice and social service delivery. The way into these situations may not be via anymore the Security Council but rather via the humanitarian development and human rights arms of the system. These will be development and rights breakdowns where the UN is already present. The UN won't have to wait for the permission of the Security Council. It's there already. The World Bank has estimated that by 2032 thirds of the world's extreme poor will be living in areas of conflict and violence. What I've sought to lay out today is not a manifesto to change the world rather overnight. Rather it is a call for the UN to seize the moment and take advantage of these grim opportunities to recover at a time of global crisis to recover its relevance and to drive a new global consensus on tackling our collective weakness that COVID is so cruelly exposed and reinforced. There is a majority out there for a better governed and prepared, more caring and inclusive world but that same majority has grown terminally impatient with existing institutions. The UN can be part of that failed past or attach itself to an emerging future. Let the campaign begin. Thank you. Thank you Mark for a wide ranging and thought-provoking lecture. We have an excellent discussion for the underway lecture, Natalie Somersinghe, the chief of strategy UN75. Natalie is a sabbatical from her role as the executive director of the United Nations Association UK where she's worked since 2006. The first movement to hold this post Natalie had overall responsibility for the UN UK's program with particular focus on advocacy, strategy communications, human rights, peace and security and UN reform including the together first campaign on the organization's 25th anniversary in 2020. I would now like to invite Natalie Somersinghe to make remarks and observations on the annual lecture. Over to you Natalie. Thank you so much Kunal and thank you Mark for such a thought-provoking and at times very provocative lecture. There were certainly points at which my UN instincts kicked in and I found myself wanting to defend the organization's achievements including the Human Rights Council. But I think you asked me to be here because I don't really do Brooks Brothers and I would certainly want to join the sort of campaign that you set out. So let me start these short reflections by saying a little bit more about the UN75 anniversary project you mentioned. Even before COVID-19, the world was facing huge challenges and much of humanity was already living in a sort of hell. Those left behind by progress those who face violence and abuse every day. All of us who fear for our future. We cannot hope to reach these people by saying that statistically speaking people are better off today than 75 years ago. So the Secretary General was adamant that we don't spend this anniversary talking about our achievements treating it as a celebration but that we use this as a moment of reflection of reconnecting and understanding our base as you put it Mark. So we launched what I believe is our most ambitious exercise to date to crowd source priorities and solutions for the future through surveys, through dialogues, through independent polling to ensure we weren't just hearing from the converted and we managed to cover all countries reaching well over a million people and crucially people from all social groups and all ages. And I want to put four quick points to you based on our findings. First, as you said the idea of the UN does still have a strong appeal. It seems that global cooperation is still a lot more popular than populism. But what exactly is it that people are supporting? The UN's vision of peace and progress for all, I mean it's that, isn't it? Because quite frankly what's not to like? The problem is the method of delivery. A state-centric system that is predicated on keeping the powerful on side that doesn't seem credible or legitimate anymore. People want a UN more inclusive, more innovative accountable and effective and they see all those things as interlinked. Which brings me to the second point. My own complaint about the SDGs and for any colleagues watching I do support them I have a little badge right here to prove it is that we've made the SDGs the world's responsibilities. They belong to everyone. That's fantastic in terms of encouraging local ownership and we know from our polling and previous polls less than 2% of the public even knows what they are and even the most engaged companies and NGOs and cities aren't really sure always what are they supposed to do how do they go about building this global partnership the UN is asking them to lead. So I hope that as you say the sector generals call for a new social contract and global new deal can be used to develop a stronger vision for their roles and for our roles. Third leadership you mentioned the wonderful Sir Brian Erkan and of the many inspirational and wise things that he said I always take this away with me that no amount of reform no institutional fixes will make up for good leadership or for bad leadership and this is the one area where I might perhaps like to qualify your comment that the UN reflects the people it serves because it doesn't in terms of its leadership nearly 50% of its leaders across the world in senior posts still come from the so called Western European and others group the average age for entry level jobs is mid 30s actually skewing high most people in senior professional I'm not talking about directors are in their 50s and while there's been huge progress on gender parity at the highest levels there's still an issue at the levels below. I don't want to imply that older white men can't be radical you are testament to the fact that they can be marked but I don't think in general it sets the stage for the sort of transformation we need and in this vein my final point if we are to create change that is transformative evolutionary rather than just imposing some new static structure that may work for a little bit the only way to do it is to work more intensively and creatively with others and I don't just mean this buzzword partnerships I mean looking together at what is it that needs to be done and who is the best place to do it and we have to recognize that the answer to that question may not always be the UN it could be cities foundations civil society business regional organizations often a combination of them for how long now has the UN been overstretched and underfunded we should be actively trying to do ourselves out of many of the jobs we do so that we can focus on the areas where we really do make a unique contribution less saving the world as you said Mark and more working with it and what could this role be it could be the locus of verified knowledge which is something we really do need right now it could be a global rubber stamp for laws and norms a platform for bringing partners together for ensuring they are accountable probably some elements of the traditional mediation conflict resolution role that the UN has played that could actually be more feasible if the other steps that tackle violence that you outline are also taken and if we get these things right we could maintain and regain the moral authority to be the campaigner that you set out so I'm just going to end with a question I think the future of the UN has to be seen in the context of a new global system that is less states centric and much more like a truly global partnership I think that outcome is inevitable in many sectors the UN even governments are not the key players but my worry is that the UN will simply drift into that situation and therefore be less relevant and less able to lead in the areas where it should than if we make this change proactively but can we do that Mark can we get there Thank you and by the way I should also say on behalf of both Natalie and myself thanks for giving an opportunity to two very close friends to debate each other and this is wider at its best I hope in all ways and we're both privileged to be on your platform today and thank you Natalie I mean I think your research for the 75th showed this very low level of media reference to the UN around the kinds of issues we've been talking about today and that's a great handicap to the kind of leadership we both want to see how does it recover it and I think it's partly this moment versus insurgent point the UN is just seen as too much the establishment and part of that again is what you say about too much of a white leadership I was careful to add in the qualifying phrase that the UN staff sort of were a mirror to the world for the most part quote unquote because I kind of anticipated and respected that comeback because it is the case that the P5 absurdly still insist on controlling certain high positions and actually the western P5 members are the worst sinners in that regard so I'm with you that we have to continue this making a UN that looks more like the people it works for and probably even more important than getting rid of a few old white guys you know is actually this point about lowering the age of the staff making it more reflective of a young world which is what today's world is and so I think we have to do that and then we have to find these points to campaign on that really really resonate with people and you know so it's challenging can we do it your question if we can overcome all those impediments that you and I have both described I hope so will we otherwise be kind of pushed into it in a sort of fellowship role rather than a leadership role I think there's a risk that will happen to the UN I I mean I think there's no voice out there for closing the UN down I don't think it faces that kind of death sentence ultimatum but what it does risk is this drift to irrelevance Thanks Mark I think that from what you said I saw three takeaways and we can come back to the discussion the first takeaway from me was that the need for a social contract which has a commitment to human rights as was envisioned in the human charter 10 years back how do we see the social contract which is absolutely centering on human rights when we see a world that's moving away from the commitment to human rights and increasing closing down on public space and debates and so on the second issue that you raised which I think is very important because we have a very state centric approach how can the UN be a critical protector and promoter of local civil society voices that's absolutely important what how the UN should be the next 75 years and the third point that you also discussed is how can we double down on this SDG agenda in the midst of this pandemic how can we absolutely make sure we don't lose the momentum on the 2030 agenda so we can come back to this and I see several questions here and I'm going to ask this question one by one if that's okay and let me get to the first question that I see in front of me the first question is what chance of expanding the UN Security Council beyond 15 including provinces for India and reforming the better basis that we have so do you see any options or any possibilities of reforming Security Council at all I do I do see an opportunity and I've seen it really since Kofi and I were in office as Secretary General and his deputy when we tried to encourage a governmental process which would lead to that outcome it didn't work and it's been sort of pushed the discussions continue but it's essentially on a back burner and I think this is partly structural that you know probably it wasn't smart to add more permanent members you should instead move towards a longer term revolving membership where people can be on for 10 years and get re-elected for 10 years so you know India might in that sense enjoy uninterrupted tenure but you know it might leave Pakistan with the hope that one day it might get a shot a hand at the ring and you know similar disputes in Latin America between Brazil, Mexico, Argentina might similarly be resolved by that kind of formula and I think then you'd need to move the current permanent members reduce their rights and put them on as close to the same basis as possible and you'd also have to tackle a whole issue slew of UN procedures for example India has been terrible when it's been on the council trying to stop discussion of the wider South Asian backyard issues in Nepal or Sri Lanka for example that would need to stop we couldn't have an expanded council between it putting three quarters of the world out of bounds for security council discussion and I think you'd need an improvement of the voting to prevent certain countries exercising views but to be honest I mean why I didn't talk about the council in the speech is you know the only way you're going to get these entrenched members to embark on this is to make them largely irrelevant in the current environment we have to work around the security council and you know it's only when it's current membership permanent membership you know recognize the redundancy that they face that they might finally grip reform now there will be UK and French diplomats listening who will be blowing their whistles and saying that's unfair but the truth is you know in general the simply has not been the grip and the will by the current members to allow the kind of reform needed to make the council representative of the world absolutely the question that is essentially about the question about whether we should think of regional solutions by solving problems by continent so for example should the UN be working more with ASEAN African Union, European Union so on so do global problems need regional solutions and is that a way forward well and Natalie do jump in when you wish but I mean yes in the sense that there's already a huge amount of that you know current UN peacekeeping in Africa is very much in partnership with the African Union and that I think is the most developed and most promising partnership of this kind you know if you take ASEAN for example it has a more limited mandate you know it doesn't have the same peace and security arms essentially that say the African Union does or if you go to Latin America the OAS you know has had a bad few years and it's sort of divided in its own home continent in terms of support and opposition so you know selectively yes the UN should work with regional organizations and I think it is very much the way forward but particularly if it's successful in encouraging those regional organizations to improve their own capacity legitimacy, effectiveness then I think they become critical partners for both development and peacemaking activities in the future I have a question I think that's more for Natalie Natalie the question is that how can the UN do more for civil society and what exactly as and I think as Mark mentioned as you also mentioned that's something that the UN can perhaps do more of how exactly can the UN lead to a stronger engagement in civil society voice especially local civil society do you have a sense of how that is possible I think there's many ways to look at that I mean you have on the one hand I think who is civil society in terms of engagement with the UN and I think by and large despite a lot of effort it is still those who are closest to the you know the headquarters locations it is those who are most able to join it tends to be the bigger NGOs the more western NGOs who have that sustained engagement and the relationships you need so I think the first way to do it is to really diversify the voices that the UN hears from and then also really look at the field level what more can be done there to improve how NGOs work with country officers in both development and humanitarian settings and I think there you find particularly the smaller NGOs again you find it quite burdensome even to get involved with the UN how do you even find out about it how do you write the kind of application how do you fill the kind of form how do you jump through all the hoops that are rightly required in terms of accountability but nonetheless make it very difficult I think one really interesting answer to emerge from our global consultation which I have to say the solutions disproportionately focused on how we can better include other actors who have having civil society champion at the UN who could be a visible voice and a representative and interlocutor for civil society who could do a good audit of the best practices and what isn't working well in the system make some recommendations and really just serve as someone who stands up for civil society not just in the sort of sometimes antagonistic conversation because civil society is not just a human rights issue or peace and security or sustainable development civil society cuts across so everything the UN does so I think it's an interesting idea but one that would need to be seen in a wider context of a mind shift in the UN that it's not sort of allowing civil society in but rather saying how do we work together and I think despite the very positive messaging on partnerships we're still more in the former and the latter mindset Thank you Natalie I had a question I think for both of you and this is not surprising this question is obviously about the pandemic so how does the UN reorient its policies and agenda in terms of tackling the global pandemic and the SDGs in the long run I mean this is a really big question isn't it I mean we have 10 more years to go before the end of the 2030 agenda we are now obviously will be off track is it a time to reorient ourselves think about prioritizing some SDGs and not all 17 or is there still possibilities that we can still think about achieving all 17 SDGs in some shape or form Shall I go first I mean look it's a very good question and as I said in my lecture I mean Bill and Melinda Gates say 25 years of progress undone in 25 weeks 115 million people driven back into extreme poverty you know for those of us who have been working in development most of our lives that is a terrible, terrible thing to hear that such painstaking progress has fallen back but and so yes I mean I think Natalie's survey shows that you know everybody wants a particular focus at the moment on the health issues and around that also the climate and environmental issues but you know the whole point really about the SDGs and their interrelationship you're not going to be able to sustain improvements in health if you don't sustain people's improvement in incomes equally you're not going to be able to sustain improvements in health unless you continue to insecure they have cheap water, clean water that their families and kids have access to education etc etc so you know yes you can prioritize to some extent and maybe donors can prioritize but you know successful governments are going to have to try and continue to move forward on a wide front now we'd always from the MDGs onwards assumed that governments shouldn't try and do all things at once that they should establish their own priorities and their civil society partners as well you know and build their own sequence of how progress is going to happen what are the critical issues and factors to tackle first which will then trigger progress in other areas as well so you know I think that kind of dynamic approach of planning around immediate crises but recognizing the interconnectedness is the way forward I mean let me jump in in here as well if I if I may I think you know one of the challenges is that people in our consultation talked about really big transformations and I think if you look at you know the things that we're talking about rethinking the global economy universal basic income universal affordable access to health care technology I mean you can map almost everything to a sustainable development goal but I think the issue is you know how do you effectively say that the solution to one of the biggest crises and a precedent crisis is something that we came up five years ago so I think it's a how do you reinvigorate a discussion around something that we all feel is quite old but actually most don't yet know about that's one challenge and then the second challenge is you know around everyone feeling squeezed everyone feeling that you know there's crises you know right in front of them I think one of the most interesting findings from our survey is that even in the poorest communities or even amongst constituencies that you might not think are so supportive of aid there was a strong call to support those hardest hit both within their countries and in other parts of the world and I think really capitalizing you know on that sense and making it easy than it is already with 17 goals 169 targets and now COVID recovery and goodness knows what else to really guide people on how to find and prioritize those enabling actions recognizing that everything is interlinked but at some point this needs to be turned into a compelling agenda that people, governments, stakeholders can act on and hopefully this you know the sector journals call for a new social contract and global new deal can help refine some of that You don't advocate a policy of focusing only on three or four SDGs for the next 10 years obviously each country will decide which ones they would like to focus on but you don't think that's a good idea as it aren't related would that be your sense of importance of keeping all 17 SDGs in play Well, I'm not sure if that was to me, I mean I was starting off where Natalie finished, she's completely right you know the SDGs can't be this sort of esoteric document for planning officials, they've got to be a living, breathing, political agenda in countries which means they almost certainly do have to be updated and launched, rebooted and above all prioritized to what a country's citizens believe are its priorities and I think that almost certainly will mean that you know while those planning types will want to see progress across all 17 dynamic effective SDG strategies at the country level will you know, emphasize a few of the goals and find a very kind of contemporary, authentic sort of political voice to express them as particular governments own transformation strategies Natalie, what would be your view time to focus on only three or four SDGs which country or not I think no, I mean I think there's also a danger in some extent we need to keep in mind the global total, it has to be what's relevant nationally but also what is the sum impact, the total impact of all of that I think the key will be focusing on and I think the UN is going in this way enabling actions, what are the things that actually help boost lots of the goals at once and whether that's an element of inequalities empowering women and girls, so when we know there are some things that will have knock-on effects the other thing that I do think is really important is if you look at all the money that's been spent on COVID recovery right now, I think I read somewhere 11.5 trillion on what terms is that money being spent so if we look at can that be aligned to some extent with the sustainable development goals can that be aligned with the Paris agreement whatever, I think that would be helpful because then again you're having a discussion with donors, recipients and others on what all those conditions should be and I think that would be really helpful again because it's not just saying do this, do that or country saying we want to do this, do that it becomes part of that conversation part of that negotiation and crucially you have some money behind it and I think it's actually very very small proportion of these huge sums at the moment that's being directed to the least developed countries that's being directed at the people most in need so that conversation needs to happen I know the Secretary General has been really keen to push that there's been some progress but there's a lot more that we can do Thank you Natalie there is also a question here it's a very sensitive question on the United States and its role so we've seen a disengagement of the United States particularly around the removal support to the WHO so how can the UN bend its sail to this type of strong winds when you can see opposition and sometimes disengagement from very important international actors Mark first Yeah look it's an incredibly important point and maybe for me as an ex-UN official a less sensitive one than it is for Natalie as a current UN official but look let me say immediately on the WHO point you know yes, WHO was a little bit slow to react in the case of China but it was trying to charm critical public health current data out of Wuhan which it needed to be able to work out what was going on in terms of that pandemic and its lack of a strong mandate its lack of being properly resourced or contributed to that weak start but you know honestly if you were really saying you know whereas the WHO has shown sort of political buzolanity you might say it's in failing to condemn arguably the worst performer in terms of its public health to contain the virus which is Donald Trump's United States of America and you know that is classic the UN always pulls its punches when it comes to the US and I know it look I was brought over as David said at the beginning to support the Secretary General after the whole sort of Iraq war and the oil for food scandal that surrounded it and you know I know how difficult it is for the UN to be kind of in conflict with what is still the world you know the leading member state the largest budget contributor the home to the UN a huge part of that founding DNA I discussed and you know I do think that the UN in the last few years has been terribly cautious of ending up on President Trump's Twitter feed and that has been at the expense of being more of a voice on critical issues around the world and I really regret that obviously things may change in a week's time there's an election in the US that may lead to a different outcome but I don't think we should assume that you know things flip back to some golden state of the past in truth the relationship with the US has often been a difficult one it's impatience with multilateralism a reluctance to concede to other smaller countries points of view to find a consensus way forward on something and you know I would say there have been some great multilateralist presidents starting with President Roosevelt who understood the UN as a vehicle for sharing the responsibilities of global peacekeeping and development and not having them all land on the US's shoulders but we've now moved to a US which pushes them away and doesn't accept them but you know at times to create the sort of burden sharing collaborative arrangement but actually make the US's job in the world a lot easier so you know I think we're at a low point now I hope one way or another things are going to come back but it's likely to continue to be a thorn on both sides and I suspect not going to be an easy relationship going forward Thank you Mark. Natty would you have any observations? I might take a pass on this one I think it's probably wiser for me to say what he said Absolutely Mark I actually this is my own question mentioned the importance of human rights in the UN Charter the many developing countries will argue that the importance right now is for them to raise the living standards on their own citizens and human rights is a secondary concern especially when they see the great success of many countries which have followed authoritarian regimes China, South Korea early and so on what would you say to the leaders of these countries? Well I sort of try to half concede the point I think that you know we have moved from you know a focus on just civil and political rights and in fact a position where there were many who argued that civil and social aren't really rights they're the products of development and growth and shouldn't be weighed in the same scales as civil and political rights we've moved to a much more balanced position whereas I said you know a lot of us would absolutely accept that somebody who's hungry or whose livelihood is undermined by climate change or somebody whose family can't get access to health or a job or education you know is every bit as much is having their freedoms impinged and removed every bit as much as around the equally critical importance of the right to vote and free speech etc so you know in a way I think there is emerging global consensus the problem is there are bad actors at both ends and you know I cited China which is fantastic or beginning to be fantastic on climate change but horrible on the rights of the Uighurs or indeed on Hong Kong for example and you know arguably you've had some at the other end who you know are all political and individual rights and you know dismissive of the social and economic rights so you know I think the UN can play a useful role in trying to get balanced but in the end what it's going to find is you know balance can be a typical UN fudge where there's nothing left and therefore this point that I make about variegated coalitions where you get countries and civil society actors who believe in particular sets of rights to champion those and other groups to champion other rights and to be the sort of if you like conductor for that sort of motley orchestra that you will have to construct because I don't think you're going to get to a place where everybody believes in every right this one I would I would like to come in on I think you know these debates about whose rights are they anyway and what rights should be focusing on they go right back to the charter itself when actually the UK, France and the US which was segregated still at that time weren't so keen on racial equality equality of all men etc you had debates about political and civil rights versus economic social culture rights in the context of the USSR and the US so it's an old debate and I think what's really interesting is who really emerges as the champion of rights at that time it was many of the smaller states from the developing world it was the Latin Americans countries like the Philippines and Asia you know late in the especially 50s and 60s you have newly independent African countries really joining forces and often it was through the prism of say a situation such as apartheid where you know it didn't become the sort of traditional west wants these rights you know east wants these rights north south divisions it was much more mixed and I think today it's even more mixed than that you know if you look at an organization like the Human Rights Council and you know Mark you touched on this I mean it's sometimes it's not that easy to actually think who are the states that are deserving you know to be members and what would that kind of club actually achieve if they were all elected so I think the solution you know would lie on taking the wins where they come I think trying to foster conversations at the UN that are across regional groups across these traditional divisions which I think are already breaking down making sure that you know you call out countries that are very happy to hide behind some of the bigger countries when they say well we shouldn't be attention to this or that and crucially point out that you know it is the public in most countries who really do stand behind all these rights they get it they don't think in terms of civil and economic and political rights they see this is what people need to live a good life and that really in our survey does not change from country to country so if you have that support for civil society if you can make the case to countries that it is ultimately a long you know risk to your security and internal stability if you don't get that balance right and maybe you prioritize something before one thing etc. but the key is to be going in that direction absolutely thank you I have a very big question for both of you the question is what is the most critical shift that needs to take place in view of the current pandemic the one critical shift you think Mark first well look I think you know almost certainly the first shift will be around the public health area I think people recognize it's been underfunded and neglected I think people are learning extraordinary lessons that you know it's not the most expensive health system in the world the US is which has combated this most effectively but some much poorer systems but which nevertheless have you know public health outreach at the community level able to do track and trace and community level protection and prevention with a long experience of infectious disease so you know the example I love to give is a horrible one but you know whereas deaths in the US are now above 65 per 100,000 in Vietnam they're 0.04 per 100,000 because you know Vietnam has for a very long time had a decentralized community based health system and even in developed countries ones like Germany which again have a lot of localism in their health service have out performed the much more centralized models so I think you're going to see you know the lessons learned and a very different looking public health going forward much less focus on high-end surgery much more focus on a sort of preventive development community based approach across all our health systems but I think going beyond that you know this issue of how COVID impacts have fallen particularly on the young who seem to have lost their jobs at greater rates than other age groups you know is just reinforcing the issue of this massive structural youth exclusion that we're coming to where not just a continent like Africa with a very young population and a not great record of job creation but more globally you know the changes coming from AI and big data the digital revolution if you like you know all of these things are coming together to mean that we're going to need at the heart of any new social contract and you if you like employment contract to work out how people can have fulfilling careers and find ways to keep their families appropriately and properly so you know short-term public health but long-term I think it leads in an accelerated way into this much more fundamental transformation of what we expect from our governments and societies are a more protective more secure kind of society versus the sort of if you like sort of market competition efficiency over resilience formula that has driven us so many of our political lives in recent decades Natalie? I think for my side it's again it's a mindset shift and I think it's a mindset shift in three ways the first is a recognition that the aspiration cannot be to get back to normal because normal wasn't working for most people and we say that we like to say oh normal business we've been saying it for a very long time I think we need to show that we're going to take that seriously this time the second is a real honest recognition that this is a tiny amount of disruption and I don't say that lightly because the suffering is huge compared to what we will get if we don't deal with the climate crisis and we've already seen the links between say biodiversity loss and pandemics that's been really highlighted so that's the second mindset shift that this could become the new normal if we're not careful and the third is something that the Secretary General I think a point he made very well and it's a point that goes back to the founding of the UN is that you have to recognize that at this stage we're so interconnected that there is no national and global interest you know really almost everything we care about is impacted by other countries solidarity is self-interest right now and you can make that case in hard no security terms if that's what works for you but you need to recognize that that's the way to go great I have a really another really big question and it's quite a challenging question really but we should ask this question on the UN Center of the anniversary what would a world without the UN look like? Can it draw a scenario? Would there be a power vacuum and who would fill it? Who wants to go first? Park? Well thank you Natalie Look the UN as supporters for decades lived behind this sort of maximum of if we didn't have the UN we'd invented truth is I don't think we'd be able to invent it I think 1945 was a unique moment of rare visionary statesmanship which produced the UN and we need to kind of hold on to that it's difficult to create it and therefore a world without the UN would be much more bilateralised it would have arrived much sooner at the sort of America first or Brazil first or India first kind of politics that we have seen recently and you know I think it would have to find some ad hoc arrangements for sort of global public goods issues that clearly couldn't be solved at the national level so I think there would be a network of less legitimate but useful institutions to try and make sure that everything from our post to our trade worked relatively fluently at a global level but you know it would be a rougher tougher more of a sort of strong man's world Absolutely Natalie your thoughts I'm going to agree with Mark on this one I think it's a hard counterfactual but you know we're all quite aware I'm sure this audience is of the UN's achievements and I think it is questionable if we would have got there without them but the one I would pinpoint is we're now at a situation where for better or worse even if we don't think it's working very well right now there is an expectation amongst the global public as we've seen in our consultations this year that we have an international community and that it should care about people it should try and address common challenges it should try to solve conflict it should work together on these issues and whether we would have got there had the league just slid away into obscurity and we didn't have the UN I don't think so and at a time when basically all the big challenges we face are global I would be really worried without something like the UN right one more question is also fairly controversial in some respect probably not but let me ask a question the question is that what has been the UN's three achievements and what has been the UN's three failures so can we name three achievements and three failures maybe Natalie you want to go first on this one I'll try I mean the first one I'll be cheeky and just say it is the creation of an international community and those expectations the second one I'll pick partly because it's something that I care about a lot and we've talked about it today is this concept of human rights human rights that apply to all and some kind of international structure human rights didn't start in 1945 but we wouldn't have the system we have today where again every member state has signed one international human rights treaty most 80% more than that I think now have signed up to at least for you know there is an expectation that there is accountability for human rights violations and thirdly I guess you know it's this it's that platform function and the power of when all the bits of the UN do work and align when you have the platform you have the civil society support as you did with a movement like decolonisation as you had with the anti-apartheid struggle I think when those things align you can achieve something and I think those moments have obviously transformed our world for the better and also show you what that is and I'll go with the failures I probably should have said them first because I don't want to end on a low note but I think the failures are a personal take but it's all the times when we should have when we said never again and then we had to say it again and again and again and my own examples my three would be very specific to me I think but I think that's something that universally people feel like this is something the UN should get right and has had time and again especially the youth I think because you mentioned that and so did Mark how do we get the youth involved that's very important too Mark your take on the three achievements and three failures there could be three achievements or failures but just starting off three achievements and three failures I think the successes have been very in operations that have saved lives repeatedly around the world in partnership with NGOs and others but UN leadership has been critical to them I think it has been for all the mixed successes as Natalie said human rights which has been put on the global agenda by the UN whatever the mixed situation I now reported and I think it is things like the MDGs and now the SDGs and before it Human Development and before that what Jim Grant did at UNICEF to really to sort of prioritize and globalize certain critical improvements whether it's around the well-being of children or public health and to really secure global results which have translated into lives saved on the downside I think there have been some absolutely spectacular political breakthroughs and peacekeeping successes but there have also been failures again as I acknowledged not really because of the fall to the UN officials involved ever really not ever but usually not but just because of the sort of gridlock of interstate opposition and I think there have been as a consequence wars that I wish we could have stopped happening and which the world has been a worse place for them happening but I think above all else maybe the biggest failure is those people who wrote the charter in 1945 had this view that war of the kind they just emerged from must be banished forever and while it is the case that thank goodness and thank God we've not had another global war of that scale the world remains a violent and dangerous place and never more so than for poorer, less protected people in all sorts of corners of the world so in that sense it's not so much that it's a UN failure but it's a UN business not yet done we've simply not made the world that those people in San Francisco hoped might start moving towards what can we learn from these mistakes, these failures are there things that we can say that the UN shouldn't have done and they are basically as we go forward are these failures really impossible to have dealt with at that time so what are the big warnings from those failures I think each one of the failures there's a very esoteric inside baseball game around it whether it was Hamshold and the Congo Kofi Annan and Rwanda or later the Congo and former Yugoslavia as well around each of these extraordinary crises that we all lived through there were things that any of us would have done differently if we had it to do again but I think in a sense the failures we all individually made pale compared to just the fact that nation states of ultimately particularly the bigger and more powerful ones resisted conceding power and sovereignty and decision making to this multilateral body and often cynically so you just take Syria as a very important example millions of lives have been destroyed in many cases killed because of the cynicism of big powers on both sides of that war absolutely thank you I would end the annual lecture event but I wanted to give both of your chance of just reflect one conquering thought that you might want to share with the audience Natalie first I think to go back to this point I tried to make in my response about the need for evolutionary change I think my answer to the previous question would have been apart from the specifics obviously around politics etc is that it's this idea that you can solve problems through creating a structure with ex-members in this process it needs to be more dynamic than that so I think all these brilliant minds you and you and wider who are listening in when you're coming up with you and reforms maybe an idea is to focus less on the specifics of your proposal and much more on that difficult question of politics and how to make it happen and how you can build a system that learns and can adapt because the world is changing so so so quickly and I wouldn't want the outcome of the 75th anniversary consultation to be reforms that were really good for today or yesterday to serve us well for the next 75 years so that's my plea to everyone watching absolutely thank you Mark thank you first to you and you and wider again for giving us this opportunity today and greetings to all of your colleagues for a wonderful work you'd always do my closing thought really takes off from Natalie which is that as I said in the lecture a generation is about to have the keys taken from it a new generation is going to come into power across the world and it'll probably jump a couple of generations in between this is one of those 1968 like moments and it's that because technologies are changing and therefore economies are changing and because those who are currently young feel that they have been unfairly excluded from a just share of that future and they're going to take it and seize it and you know the UN can't therefore be our grandfather's UN to use the phrase I said it's got to be a UN which adjusts and looks and feels like this new world which jumps on the issues that new world is seizing on which populates itself with dynamic young leadership representative of the change happening and really emphasizes the agenda that that young leadership puts forward and I think in that sense you know for someone like myself I can say don't resist that change but the defining of it obviously has to be that new generation of leaders not the likes of me. Thank you Mark but thank you so much Mark for a wonderful lecture which really challenged us in many ways and thank you naturally for such wonderful comments and such many insights and I particularly thank you for this very frank and engaging discussion we just had I think that was quite remarkable and I want to thank listening sent in so many questions I couldn't go through all of those questions myself but there were so many good questions and I also apologize for the technical problem we ran into one of the problems online even is fantastic because you reach out to a virtual audience around the world but you also can also as we saw and face some technical problems but hopefully they were not that they were not that major so thanks to all of you I want to end with what Mark said at the end of his lecture let the campaign begin thanks so much Mark thanks actually