Musings for a New Administration

Laura E Bailey
2 min readNov 30, 2020
#BuildABridgeToDifferent

When I saw the campaign theme for president-elect Joe Biden and VP-elect Kamala Harris, I’ll confess to a tiny grimace.

For the past several decades I’ve worked in the real-world trenches (and the hallowed diplomatic halls) to integrate the ways we respond to both natural and human-created crises so that we give as much attention to people as we do to infrastructure, and it’s been a rough road trying to get the well-meaning #BuildBackBetter folks to give as much time to social recovery, reconciliation, and justice for marginalized communities as they devote to rebuilding roads, bridges, and economies. I even co-authored a blog early on in the pandemic to push a different theme — #BuildABridgeToBetter. So when I saw the Biden-Harris team had adopted the older, well-known tag line, I was momentarily cranky.

Good News: the diverse range of bright, thoughtful people on the Agency Review Teams, and the early appointments being announced, have convinced me that the incoming team knows very well that we have to build differently, not just better. This has inspired me to take some of the seeds planted in my earlier blogs about pandemic response and grow them into more fulsome ideas about the opportunities we have in the realm of international development (including at the intersections with diplomacy and defense) to build a different, more just, more inclusive, more equal world. Here are some of the themes I’m digging into, and I’ll share where my own questioning ends up as the answers reveal themselves to me, in short future posts:

~ How should the USA reset our engagement with the world of multilateral institutions? Pushing beyond the high-priority headline actions we know will be taken on Paris, Iran, and the WHO, there are opportunities for the USA to leave behind outdated ways of engaging with and in multilateral organizations, and level up!

~ How can the investments US agencies make in situations of armed conflict, interpersonal violence, and state or social fragility have more positive and lasting impact?

~ How can the USA move beyond the legacy of inter-agency collaboration dominated by two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, and find more modern and effective ways to create positive change at the intersections of diplomacy, defense, and development?

I’d love to hear your ideas on any of these topics … we need as many voices as possible to build a bridge to different!

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Laura E Bailey

35+years working globally to improve lives & livelihoods and build communities’ resilience against violence & conflict. Passionate about nurturing leadership.