Multiple global crises are worsening one another to produce what many policymakers, scholars, and commentators call a “polycrisis.” This website is a hub that helps this emerging community better understand and address the intersecting crises affecting humanity.
LATEST RESOURCES
The History of Bad Ideas: Polycrisis
In this podcast, David Runciman talks to historian Gary Gerstle about how the idea of the polycrisis was originally conceived, what its current popularity reveals about our times, and whether we are truly experiencing a ...
Polycrisis! Implications for Public Policy in the Global South
This book explores contemporary public policy and governance in the Global South, offering comparative analyses and detailed case studies from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. It examines how governments are navigating 21st-century ...
Beyond the Buzzword: Rethinking Polycrises in Public Policy and Administration Research
The author examines the use of the polycrisis concept in public policy and administration research, highlighting its potential for addressing complex challenges but noting a frequent lack of conceptual clarity and analytical depth. Polycrises are ...
How Can Aid for Trade Support the Resilience of the Least Developed Countries in the Face of Polycrisis?
This article examines the potential of Aid for Trade (AfT) as a tool for building resilience in developing countries and least developed countries amid the growing complexity of global polycrisis. Drawing on evidence from a ...
New Responses to Systemic Risks: An Exploration 2025–2045
This report presents the results of a futures exercise led by ASRA to explore novel responses to escalating systemic risks between 2025 and 2045. Using the ParEvo method, a group of experts collaboratively developed storylines ...
Systemic Management Practices—Enabling Local Governments to Adapt in Response to Complexity
The authors explore the impact of accelerating change and increasingly complex global and local challenges on the city as a complex socio-ecological service ecosystem (SES) and its capacity to ensure sustainability or ecosystem health. Drawing ...
Generative AI as intellectual augmentation for the polycrisis/metacrisis
In this webinar, Simon Buckingham Shum explores how generative AI intersects with the escalating global polycrisis, discussing how AI is both part of the problem and potentially part of the solution in addressing systemic challenges, ...
Polycrisis in Agrifood Systems: Climate-Conflict Interactions and Labor Dynamics for Women and Youth in 21 African Countries
This paper examines how armed conflict and climate change jointly affect individual labour intensity in 21 African countries. Using labour force surveys alongside climate and conflict event data, the study finds that extreme climate events ...
Polycrisis and Systemic Risk: Assessment, Governance, and Communication
In this article Huan Liu and Ortwin Renn examine the concepts of polycrisis and systemic risk. They outline key commonalities and differences and develop a joint understanding to inform risk assessment, governance, and communication. The ...
NEW TO POLYCRISIS.ORG
Polycrisis in the Anthropocene – A Global Sustainability Webinar
One year after the call for papers for the Polycrisis in the Anthropocene special issue, 13 articles have been published, with more contributions forthcoming. This webinar features five authors from the first set of papers ...
How Do Crises Spread? The Polycrisis and Crisis Transmission
Malte Brosig examines the conditions under which crises may transmit across systems, presenting a conceptual analysis that draws on a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, including neofunctionalism, rational choice, complexity theory, assemblage theory, and epidemiology. ...
What Comes After the Polycrisis?
In this article, Erik Assadourian explores how interventions during the polycrisis can be designed to be most effective in fostering a better post-polycrisis future, while also strengthening society’s ability to respond in the present. He ...
Try our guided tour of essential themes in the polycrisis discussion and key texts in the Polycrisis Resource Library.
This map charts the emerging community of scholars and practitioners working on polycrisis and closely related topics.