London will host Climate Action Week from 20 to 28 June 2026, under the theme "Climate Cooperation in a Fractured World". As the world is beset by anxiety and upheaval fuelled by wars and the societal changes brought on by artificial intelligence, conversations around the climate crisis have receded into the background. But it continues to pose an existential threat to humanity. In this episode, we find hope on the front lines.

On this episode of the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, we ask what would change if the people on the front lines of the climate crisis were actually in charge. Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas are joined by Laura Garcia, President and CEO of the Global Greengrants Fund, which has moved more than 135 million dollars to over 17,000 grassroots groups across 168 countries since 1993.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Laura argues that environmental destruction always happens in "somebody else's backyard", and that when communities control their own resources and decisions, the logic of extraction starts to break down. She tells the story of how small, flexible grants of 5,000 to 10,000 dollars to communities in South Africa's coal belt helped seed a 20-year movement, anchored by the environmental justice group groundWork, that pressured the government to commit to phasing out coal. She asks who development is really for, explains why less than 1% of philanthropic funding reaches grassroots communities in the Global South, and makes the case for participatory, trust-based giving.

She also connects climate, peace and militarisation. War, she says, is total destruction of the environment, and in much of Latin America militarisation directly protects the extractive industries that environmental defenders risk their lives to resist. It is a hopeful, clear-eyed conversation about who gets to decide, and why nature, given half a chance, does the homework.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

00:00 Development in the name of who?

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In this short mid-season episode of the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini puts on her peace negotiation hat and asks a simple question: if she were in charge, how would she end the conflict with Iran?

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Drawing on thirty years in peacebuilding, Sanam argues that war is not working and economic sanctions are not working, which leaves only one real option on the table: negotiations. But not the adversarial, who-won-who-lost kind we are seeing now. She makes the case for a more inclusive peace process, one built on two pillars, political will and inclusivity, where Iranians from the health, education, housing and environmental sectors have a seat at the table alongside UN agencies to decide how reparations and rebuilding are handled.

She also tackles the question everyone is asking: who is actually in charge in Iran right now? And she closes with a reminder, in the words of the poet June Jordan, that "we are the ones we have been waiting for", and a reflection on what she calls advanced citizenship.

A full episode returns in a couple of weeks to mark London Climate Week with Laura Garcia, CEO of the Global Greengrants Fund.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

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Feminist economist Naila Kabeer joins Sanam and Kavita on the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge to ask why we still measure success in GDP and what we could build if we counted care, peace and the planet. A clear-eyed, hopeful conversation about Beyond GDP, the absurd cost of the war in Iran for future generations, and the everyday agency that changes the world.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

On this episode before we get to the interview, Sanam and Kavita pick up the threads Naila weaves through the conversation. They look at the $20 trillion annual cost of war, the way the care economy quietly runs on immigrant women, and the Iranian paradox where 65% of university professors are women inside a theocracy. A vivid reminder of why we need new ways to measure what's actually working in our societies.

We then welcome in Naila who explains how GDP was invented in wartime to count what could be sold, and what it has always quietly excluded: the unpaid work that holds families together, the rivers and forests that hold up the planet, and a system now monopolised by a handful of oligarchs. She unpacks the staggering price tag of war nearly $20 trillion a year, around 11.6% of global GDP and asks what we could build instead if we counted care, peace, human capabilities, and the rights of the living world.

We also hear about her new book “Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox” — a study of how ordinary women, in some of the most oppressive circumstances, have changed their societies not through revolution but through everyday persistence.

“Despair is a luxury for the well-off. I do not think we can afford to despair.”

Enjoyed this episode? Follow If You Were In Charge wherever you listen and leave a rating to help more people find the show.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Naila Kabeer Links.

LSE faculty page: https://www.lse.ac.uk/international-development/people/naila-kabeer

Naila's personal site (books, articles, talks): https://nailakabeer.net/

Renegotiating Patriarchy — free open-access download (LSE Press, 2024): https://press.lse.ac.uk/books/m/10.31389/lsepress.rpg

UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP — members: https://www.un.org/en/beyondGDP/members

IAFFE Feminist Economics Podcast (Kavita mentions this at the end): https://www.iaffe.org/feminist-economics-podcast

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On the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Italian peace activist Raffaella Bolini was on the streets of the 80s peace movement against the Euromissiles. Forty years later, she's back, pushing back on a Europe planning to spend €6.8 trillion on armaments over the next decade. In conversation with Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas, she makes the case for common security, the politics of care, and a multipolar Europe of intersectional regions. The only winning move, she argues, is not to play.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Sanam and Kavita open the episode with the latest flotilla to be intercepted on the way to Gaza, the unfolding war in Iran, and the absurdity of trillions being spent on defence at the expense of future generations, while everything from healthcare to social services goes without.

But not without hope. They also remember the remarkable legacy of Cora and Peter Weiss, whose memorial was held this month, two activists at the forefront of the peace and justice movement for their entire lifetimes.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

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A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

What beliefs make people willing to commit violence, and what could change their minds? In this episode, we explore what makes individuals vulnerable to white supremacist beliefs, what it means when extremism becomes mainstream, the surprising permeability of these groups, and how to talk to people in your life who express racist ideology.

Peter Simi is a professor of Sociology at Chapman University, and an expert on extremist groups and violence in the US. Among his many publications, he is co-author of American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate, and Out of Hiding: Extremist White Supremacy and How It Can be Stopped. Find out more about Peter at: https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/pete-simi.aspx.

Sara Winegar Budge holds a doctorate in Psychology and is a licensed psychologist in Oregon. She is the Director of US Programs at Moonshot, which builds technology to identify and disrupt organized crime, child sexual exploitation, and trafficking, among other forms of abuse and violence. Her clinical work focuses on individuals who are or have been involved in violent extremism. Find out more at https://moonshotteam.com/

In this episode, we talk about Stephen Tyrone Johns, Bridget's former colleague from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who was killed by a white supremacist. You can learn more about him, and contribute to a fund in his name, here: https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/in-memoriam/stephen-tyrone-johns-1969-2009.

Disrupting Peace is a production of The World Peace Foundation. The show is produced by Bridget Conley and Emily Shaw. Engineering by Jacob Winik and Aja Simpson. Marketing and Social media by Kaelen Song. Show artwork by Simon Fung. This season was partially funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Special thanks to Lisa Avery and Alex de Waal, and the Tufts Digital Design Studio team.

Find out more about the World Peace Foundation at worldpeacefoundation.org. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok at @worldpeacefdtn.

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The internet is a monocrop. A plantation of knowledge in English, owned by a handful of mega corporations, built on the bones of colonial infrastructure. And we are no longer just the consumers and as ever we are the product, the training set, the data points. So who gets to imagine the future?

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

This week on If You Were In Charge, Sanam and Kavita sit down with Anasuya Sengupta, co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. Anasuya traces a direct line from the telegraph networks of the British Empire to today’s Big Tech monopolies.

But this is not just a story of extraction. Anasuya shares what it looks like when voices from the margins reimagine technology. From building sovereign language models in Bangla, Urdu and Hindi, to transforming Wikipedia so that women are no longer invisible.

The episode opens with Sanam and Kavita reflecting on the Iran ceasefire, the extraordinary Lego memes coming out of Iran, and what it means when the world is surprised that Iranians have both sophisticated technology and a sense of humour.

Anasuya Sengupta — Co-founder of Whose Knowledge?

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Original Music, Little Monster Media

Executive Producer: Pearse Lynch

This is an ADA Production

Timeline

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Hospitals in Iran are preparing to evacuate children. International institutions are issuing statements while bombs fall on petrochemical plants. And five women sit down in Berlin to ask: what radical ideas should actually be common sense?

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

This episode of If You Were In Charge opens with hosts Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Ramdas in conversation about the Iran crisis. Trump’s threats of escalation, the spectre of nuclear disaster, and the devastating parallel with Gaza. They ask the question that frames the whole episode: have the institutions built by generations of careful, caring work, the UN, the IAEA, international law has finally failed us?

Then the episode moves to Berlin, where Sanam and Kavita are joined by three extraordinary guests for a live group conversation recorded at the Robert Bosch Foundation Forum:

Farhana Yamin — World-renowned climate lawyer. Attended COP 1 in Berlin in 1995. Now working on global governance and philanthropy for frontline communities.

Reetta Toivanen — Finnish legal anthropologist and Professor at the University of Helsinki. Researches refugee knowledge and just transition in Europe.

Rana Dajani — Palestinian-Syrian professor of molecular cell biology. Researches the epigenetics of trauma. Founded We Love Reading, now in 78 countries.

Together, they tackle: abolishing national borders, valuing care work, why trauma survivors inherit agency (not victimhood), diaspora economies that outperform foreign aid, AI that can’t tell a scientist from a nun, and what it really means to put feminists—of every gender—in charge.

Enjoyed this episode? Follow If You Were In Charge wherever you listen and leave a rating to help more people find the show.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Original Music, Little Monster Media 

Executive Producer: Pearse Lynch

This is an ⁠⁠⁠⁠ADA Production⁠

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What does it mean when the world's largest progressive Jewish organisation says "not in our name"? This week on the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Sanam and Kavita sit down with Stefanie Fox, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), to explore the growing movement of Jewish anti-Zionism in America and beyond.

Stefanie walks us through how JVP now three times the size it was three years ago is organising hundreds of thousands of Jews to withdraw their complicity from Israeli apartheid and genocide through boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, Israel bonds divestment at city and state level, and deep cultural work reclaiming Judaism beyond Zionism.

From the mechanics of how American taxpayer money flows to the Israeli treasury, to the personal cost of leading a movement under legal attack and White House scrutiny, Stefanie offers a clear-eyed, hopeful account of what collective organising can achieve and why refusing the politics of despair is itself an act of resistance.

We are also joined by Sanams daughter Soleh joins us from Cambridge. Where she gives her view on JVP and their role in the student protests over Gaza.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Guest: Stefanie Fox, Executive Director, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)

Links:

Jewish Voice for Peace

Wrestling with Zionism storytelling project

If You Were In Charge

Enjoyed this episode? Follow If You Were In Charge wherever you listen and leave a rating to help more people find the show.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Original Music, Little Monster Media 

Executive Producer: Pearse Lynch

This is an ⁠⁠⁠⁠ADA Production⁠

TIMESTAMPED CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00 – 00:33 | Cold Open

00:33 – 01:27 | Intro & Welcome

01:27 – 02:16 | How they got Stefanie

02:16 – 04:36 | Soleh on JVP's cultural impact

04:36 – 06:28 | JVP's statement on the war on Iran

06:28 – 08:50 | Asymmetric warfare

08:50 – 09:40 | Iran's opposition & the monarchists

09:40 – 11:04 | Global ripple effects

11:04 – 13:31 | Geography & supply chains

13:31 – 14:13 | Language & culture

14:13 – 15:43 | Happy Nowruz

15:43 – 16:35 | Human cost of targeted killings

16:35 – 17:17 | Transition to interview

17:17 – 20:07 | Who is JVP?

20:07 – 21:05 | Growth amid horror

21:05 – 23:45 | What is Zionism? Why anti-Zionism?

23:45 – 26:23 | Self-censorship & the anti-Semitism smear

26:23 – 28:42 | JVP's day-to-day work

27:38 – 30:27 | Israel bonds explained

30:27 – 32:20 | BDS-proofing the economy

32:20 – 34:31 | Complicity & tax resistance

35:03 – 39:50 | Culture shift

39:58 – 42:54 | Sanam on Iranian Jews & identity

42:54 – 44:44 | Anti-Semitism & Zionism as "cousins"

44:44 – 47:17 | Threats, lawsuits & Project Esther

47:17 – 48:46 | Q: Radical idea that should be normal?

47:59 – 49:56 | Q: If you were in charge of US policy?

50:02 – 51:13 | Q: Billionaire / What gives you hope?

51:13 – 53:50 | Tangible wins

53:50 – 58:41 | If you were in charge of the media

58:41 – 59:32 | Closing

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On the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, we begin with Sanam and Kavita discussing the war in Iran.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Sanam shares what she is hearing from inside Iran as US and Israeli forces continue to strike across the country. Reflecting on the school strike, the sinking of a naval vessel by a US submarine, and the election of a new Supreme Leader. She considers where this chaos and violence may ultimately lead.

Sanam and Kavita then sit down with Maya and Nancy Yamout, two extraordinary sisters from Lebanon who understand better than most the long-term consequences of war, extremism, and violence.

Maya and Nancy Yamout are forensic social workers renowned for their deradicalisation work targeting Islamist extremists within Lebanon's prison system. Following the death of a mutual friend who had joined an extremist group, they co-founded the non-governmental organisation Rescue Me in 2011, focusing on rehabilitating at-risk youth and inmates.

This conversation explores the complex world of countering extremism through personal testimony, rehabilitation, and community rebuilding in Lebanon. Maya and Nancy share their experiences working inside prisons, navigating family dynamics, and fostering empathy as a tool to prevent violence.

Enjoyed this episode? Follow If You Were In Charge wherever you listen and leave a rating to help more people find the show.

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Email ICAN: [email protected]

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Original Music, Little Monster Media 

Executive Producer: Pearse Lynch

If You Were In Charge Website

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A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

A world leader has been assassinated, schools and hospitals have been hit, and Donald Trump thinks that Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill. It’s all kicking off as the US and Israel’s illegal war escalates across the Middle East. All of this with the open admission of no real plan for what comes next. 

Struggling to absorb it all? Wondering if there’s another way? British-Iranian peace strategist Sanam Naraghi Anderlini MBE is here to fill us in. She joins Coco and comedian Sophie Duker, who is in the hotseat for Nish this week.

Soaring oil prices was not the backdrop Chancellor Rachel Reeves was hoping for ahead of her second Spring Statement. Finalised before the conflict broke out, her economic plan was “Trumped” before it was even delivered - so where does this leave the UK?

Plus - just as the UK gets dragged into this latest destabilising conflict, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood rips up the rules on UK asylum. 

Got a burning question for Nish or Coco? Big or small - they will be answered in a special episode! Email: [email protected] 

GUEST

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini MBE, founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN)

USEFUL LINKS

Sophie Duker
https://thesophieduker.com/

If You Were In Charge with Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/if-you-were-in-charge/id1770618616

CREDITS

Sophie Duker - Live at the Apollo / BBC One 
Keir Starmer / X
Parliament TV 
PBS News Hour / YouTube
BBC News 
Zoe Gardner / IG
Manchester Evening News 

Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.
Get in touch - contact us via email: [email protected]
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