Policy and Practice

Our polycrisis demands a radically new approach to risk management

Ruth Richardson, the Executive Director of the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment, argues that the “escalating global polycrisis demands an urgent and transformative shift in how we assess, anticipate, and mitigate systemic risks.” She then suggests a range of practical actions governments could take to better contend with polycrisis, such as creating a Minister for […]

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Positive Pathways report

This Cascade Institute report explores how to translate an understanding of polycrises into actionable strategies to alleviate them. It suggests ways in which polycrisis analysis can build on existing approaches to systemic change to help chart positive pathways to better futures, by examining multiple factors — the sorts of systems changes required to avoid, mitigate

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A delusion of control: Loss of agency in modern complex systems

This article argues that as “we increasingly rely on [globalized complex adaptive systems], we surrender more and more individual autonomy and agency, diminishing our ability to actually control our outcomes and wellbeing.” Concomitantly, “the illusion that we as individuals–or even as a society–can fully control the modern complex systems-of-systems that enable modern living is a

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WTW Research Network Risk & Resilience Review: Emerging Risks from Geopolitical Shifts

This report by the WTW Research Network “introduces research and opinions that provide new perspectives to support risk management and resilience.” In particular, this report focuses on WTW’s work in geopolitics, topics such as supply chains, national competition, and emerging risks and their interconnectivity. WTW posits that the topics covered “highlight a need for an

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‘Pre-Polycrisis’ Hazard Mitigation

Nick King argues that industrial civilization has created many persistent and severe hazards (such as nuclear waste, methane leaking hydrocarbon infrastructure, contaminated sites, landfills, and deforested land), polycrises in the near future may significantly constrict humanity’s ability to manage these hazards, and therefore societies should prioritize long-term remedial actions now, while they still have the

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How useful is the concept of polycrisis? Lessons from the development of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit during the COVID-19 pandemic

The authors examine domestic policymaking processes amidst polycrisis by tracing the Canadian government’s development of its Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) during the Covid-19 pandemic. They argue that the process embodied three key best practices for national-level policy design in a crisis—policy integration, learning, and agility—and show how these elements evade capture by the polycrisis

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Navigating the Polycrisis – Governing for Transformation: The 2024 Agenda for the Systems Community

The authors argue that the concept of the “global problematique” introduced by the Club of Rome over 50 years ago anticipated what we now call polycrisis by presenting a cybersystemic perspective on the linkages between multiple challenges. They warn that the polycrisis concept could suffer the same fate as global problematique by changing discourse but

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Mitigating Global Warming is Not Our Only Problem: Are We “Sleepwalking” Towards a Global Polycrisis?

William White argues that climate policy around the world is lacking in dimensions of “should” (clear analysis of what must be done), “could” (the power to implement solutions), and “would” (the actual use of that power to address the problem). The even greater challenge, however, is that climate change is not the only global systemic

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