Meg Jones on United Nations and international collaboration

From Doctors Without Borders to the United Nations to Fairtrade International , what does a career spent inside the world's largest collaborative institutions reveal about why global cooperation works and when it fails? Meg Jones unpacks the mechanics of international collaboration and why compassion may be the most underrated driver of collective action. Subscribe for more episodes on real-world collaboration. Meg Jones has spent her career at the intersection of international development, trade policy, and humanitarian action. Her trajectory , from studying Japan's post-war reconstruction as an exchange student, through 15 years at the United Nations, to leading Fairtrade International's Australia/New Zealand operations , gives her an unusually grounded perspective on collaboration across cultures, institutions, and power asymmetries. Jones defines collaboration through an African proverb: "Alone I can go fast, together we go far." But she adds critical structure to that idea. Effective collaboration requires four elements: a shared vision, clarity about what each participant contributes and receives, agreed leadership, and trust. Without trust, she argues, nothing survives difficulty , and difficulty is guaranteed. The United Nations serves as her primary case study. Established from the rubble of World War II to ensure atrocities would never recur, the UN represents collaboration's highest ambition: sovereign nations voluntarily coordinating without surrendering sovereignty. Jones traces how this framework produced the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals , concrete examples of 193 countries agreeing on shared targets despite radically different interests. But the conversation does not shy away from failure. Jones describes how UN collaborations break down when institutional incentives reward individual agency performance over collective impact, when trust erodes between partners operating at different speeds, and when the gap between headquarters strategy and field reality becomes too wide. Her experience with trade facilitation in developing countries illustrates how collaboration must adapt to local context or risk irrelevance. The discussion turns to religion and spirituality as underexplored dimensions of collaboration. Jones argues that faith traditions have historically provided the moral frameworks and community structures that sustain cooperation across generations , a resource that secular institutions often overlook. On sustainability, Jones makes a pointed argument: if the science of collaboration does not integrate environmental sustainability as a core principle, it will miss the defining challenge of our time. The disposal of billions of COVID masks at $400 per biohazard bag illustrates how even crisis response generates new collaborative problems. When asked what she would change about humans, Jones chooses compassion , the ability to see past visual, linguistic, and cultural barriers to recognize shared vulnerability. If every person looked at another and saw someone who could catch COVID, collaboration would follow naturally. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.