b'ManagementKatherine Barrett and Richard Greene are currently engaged as Visiting Fellows at the IBM Center for The Business of Government; Senior Advisors, Columnists and Co-chairs of the Advisory Board for Route Fifty; Special Project Consultants at the Volcker Alliance; Advisors and Columnists for the Government Finance Officers Association; Senior Advisors at the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois in Chicago; and Fellows at the National Academy of Public Administration. Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is also Senior Advisor for the Volcker Alliance and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.As the nation transitions from the heights of the pandemic, an opportunity presents itself to go beyond that first step andFour Principles for Building Partnershipsreach the next crucial level: actionable steps that federal, state, and local governments can take in responding and recovering to future, if likely less widespread, traumas.This report, assembled over the course of many months, addresses that goal of helping governments capture lessons learned for future action, relying not just on lessons from the pandemic but also from other tragic events of the near or intermediate past. Reflecting on this task, the report coins a new term for this moment when uncertainty mixes with opportunity: the Pandoric, based on the ancient Greek poet Hesiods mythic tale of the first woman on earth, Pandora. In this story, each of the gods presented Pandora with gifts of grace or beauty. One mysterious present, though, came as a dowry in the form of a large jar often used to contain oil. The jar was sealed carefully, but when her husband Epimetheus asked about its contents they opened it together. Out flew the pantheon of diseases, troubles, and worries that would forever afflict mankind. Once they had escaped, though, the box was not empty. Hope remained.Lessons learned over that period can and should apply to the current crisis, and those that will inevitably befall governments at all levels in months and years to come. Twelve principles follow for confronting and softening the impact of the next trial. These principles are based on conversations with experts, insights gained from academic and popular study of the pandemic and other similarly unpredictable yet devastating events, and reliance on a combined 120 years of experience the authors have accumulated in researching analyzing and writing about government.Discussion of the twelve principles form the large portion of this report. The first four principles address how governments1. All crises are localbut there is wide variation can build partnerships, the next four how governments canin how localities respond. COVID showed that big manage networks, and the last four how governments cancrises inevitably start as local problems, and then steer outcomes. percolate across borders in a way that proves a poor match for solving the larger crisis. Local governmentscities, counties, and statesmust lead the response, but the federal government has a primary responsibility to devise strategy and coordinate across the country, because one communitys problems can quickly become every communitys crisis.88 www.businessofgovernment.org The Business of Government'