Notes on the Polycrisis
Policy Tensor
The author depicts “polycrisis as a wake-up call for siloed technocratic elites to peer out of the silos at the interaction term” – as a reaction to our tendency to…
Polycrisis Resource Library
The Polycrisis Resource Library is a growing collection of media that help to understand polycrisis, develop strategies to address polycrisis, and build a field of polycrisis analysis.
Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises
Adam Izdebski, John Haldon and Piotr Filipkowski (eds.)
The book presents a collection of papers from two 2020 seminars held at Princeton University and at the Berlin Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Science. The…
Understanding human psychology during the polycrisis
Colin Strong
Strong explores the impacts of polycrisis on the way people think, feel, and behave, highlighting several psychological responses to polycrisis: existential fear, the search for safety and protection, connection to…
Beating Around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism
Güney Işikara
Güney Işikara argues that “obscure jargon” like ‘overlapping emergencies’ and polycrisis “serve, with or without intention, to conceal the culprit, namely the totality of capitalist relations” as the fundamental source…
The New International Economic Order
Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, David Adler, and Michael Galant
Noting that “This is not our first polycrisis”, the authors point out that actors in the Global South proposed a “New International Economic Order (NIEO)” to deal with the polycrisis…
Politics Urgently Needs More Imagination. Competence Alone Will not Save us from this ‘Polycrisis’
Geoff Mulgan
Geoff Mulgan argues that the United Kingdom suffers from an “imagination gap” that impedes its ability to navigate multiple crises, manifest in short-sighted policies and over-reliance on past solutions. He…
What Happens when a Cascade of Crises Collide?
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström argue that global crises are accelerating in their occurrence, amplifying in their effects, and synchronizing due to largely unseen causal connections between them. The result…
Against Polycrisis
Noah Smith
Economics commentator Noah Smith opposes the term polycrisis, arguing that it overestimates the interconnectivity and severity of contemporary crises. He further posits that there are buffers in place in most…
The ‘Polycrisis’ and Global Development Finance: Options and Dilemmas
Cameron Hill
Cameron Hill discusses a “range of proposals to reform the international development finance architecture in ways that might alleviate some of the worst effects of the multiple global shocks for…
About the Resource Library
The Polycrisis Resource Library includes resources that:
- Comment on the polycrisis as a concept and as a present global reality
- Undertake similar analysis using different—but related—concepts
- Analyze crisis interactions among multiple global systems
Though not exhaustive, the Library strives to present a diverse representation of views on different aspects of the polycrisis discussion, and will be updated as that discussion evolves. Search for resources with the keyword search bar, or by using the drop-down menus to filter for type of resource, global systems addressed, and key themes.
How to Think about Policy in a Polycrisis
Martin Wolf
Wolf argues that we cannot think about and address the many problems facing the world separately from one another. “The alternative of thinking about the interactions among [macroeconomics, finance, politics,…