 Hi, my name is Laura Bailey and I'm the retired global lead for stability, peace, and security at the World Bank and I've been here at USIP working in a range of conversations about the Global Fragility Act and in particular today I want to talk about the Global Fragility Act and Papua New Guinea. Risks in Papua New Guinea are many and most people will give you a list that includes climate change, natural disasters, economic inequality, tribal violence, gender disempowerment, and gender-based violence and I agree with all of those but I actually want to focus on two things. The first is the risk of not understanding risk accurately in Papua New Guinea it sits that country sits at the intersection of multiple risks and each one can act as a threat multiplier to the other and so if we try to understand and mitigate risk in a narrow siloed way we actually miss almost all of the negative impact so thinking about risk in Papua New Guinea requires thinking differently it requires thinking intersectionally. So I think there are a lot of important areas of intervention aligned mostly to the risks that I just listed tribal violence, gender disempowerment, natural disasters, etc but what I want to want them to focus on is thinking differently about how they work not just what they do. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that in Papua New Guinea you have a lot of experience with citizens having learned to distrust the state because the state over promises and under delivers all the time so they just don't trust the state and on the other side of the table the state has learned that citizens engage with the state in a transactional way just to extract things and most of the services that get delivered get delivered by donors rather than by the state so I think it's super important that as we try to address fragility and its manifestations we try our very best to work at the connective tissue interface between the state and the citizens and that would be a big shift. Well the first thing and this is speaking both from decades of my own experience but also from conversations with colleagues including in U.S. government agencies is that we need to listen more and differently. Right now many or maybe even most aid organizations listen most when they're in the design phase of an intervention or in the early agenda setting phase of a strategy but we think of it as a linear process that has an endpoint but in fact listening in order to understand emerging threats or emerging positive opportunities and being able to pivot or adapt which is absolutely essential for successfully addressing conflict and fragility requires us to be in kind of an infinite listening loop so we need to stop think of listening as a consultation process that allows us to write our project paper and then we stop for five years until we do a consultation as part of the evaluation so listening more but also listening differently asking questions from a wider range of audiences at stakeholders and maybe even setting up semi-permanent venues for listening community councils that you just routinely go and visit and hear what they have to say and also letting creating space to listen to communities without you telling them the questions just let them talk and tell you what's going on in their lives that would be listening more and differently the second thing I would suggest and this is true for the U.S. government as much as for the World Bank if you really want to be more effective in situations like Papua New Guinea you've got to be brave you have to invest more resources and more technical help so that as things change on the ground for better or worse that your team on the ground your mission can adapt and pivot you've got to delegate decision making as much as you possibly can to the field and you have to streamline the administrative and procurement processes because if you don't do any of that all of the really good knowledge and insight that your teams on the ground have won't get translated into new and improved ways of implementing because it takes so long for decisions to be made now I'll end by saying we made a big effort at this in the World Bank in 2008 our board of directors agreed on a massive policy that changed the way we would work but it turns out that it's human beings that implement new changed policies and there was so much resistance along certain quarters that this new flexibility didn't really take off unless there was a champion at the director or vice presidential level it's a little bit like gardening if you leave it alone the weeds grow back so that's a really important lesson and I think the U.S. government has a great opportunity with the Global Fragility Act to partner with the people of Papua New Guinea and do things differently