Policy and Practice

Hawaii Wildfires Expose Need for Resilience in a Polycrisis World

Joseph Fiskel argues that the Maui wildfire reveals just how unprepared communities are to face polycrises. In response, he advocates systems thinking and greater resilience: “Rather than simply ‘bouncing back’ from crises, a resilient organization will ‘bounce forward’ by sensing threats, adapting to new conditions, and improving its responsiveness to surprise events. This requires long-term thinking, […]

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Let’s Avoid ‘Trigger Fixation’

The authors argue that a trigger event can’t start a crisis by itself; some underlying stress or stresses must also be operating. They contend that leaders should pay far more attention to these stresses, because they’re ultimately far more important. The original title of the article was “Let’s Avoid ‘Trigger Fixation.” The Globe and Mail

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Transformation in the Poly-Crisis Age

This policy brief recommends that the European Union must shift from short-term crises responses to the long term systemic transformations required by a polycrisis era. It argues: “Today’s challenges require both anticipatory governance, long-term systems thinking and adaptive, agile decision-making. We must understand the real nature and root causes of the major crises we are

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World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023

Global Risks Report 2023

This 18th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is based on a risk perceptions survey of 1200 experts on the likelihood, severity, and interconnections between 37 global risks. It finds that the biggest risk in the next two years is the cost of living crisis, and the biggest risk in the next

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The New International Economic Order

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 of the 1970s by addressing food shortages, international debt, control over natural resources, and technology transfers. While the original NIEO failed, Progressive International has launched

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Politics Urgently Needs More Imagination. Competence Alone Will not Save us from this ‘Polycrisis’

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 explains how politics, financing, and academia contribute to the gap and provides historical examples where imaginative experimentation helped solve crises. Mulgan concludes that “it is

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The ‘Polycrisis’ and Global Development Finance: Options and Dilemmas

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 low- and middle-income countries. This blog canvasses several of the more prominent proposals, including the dilemmas and trade-offs they raise.” He focuses on “debt, global

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