Policy and Practice

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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Transformative resilience: the key to governing Europe’s sustainability transitions in the polycrisis

The report examines how the polycrisis challenges the European Union’s sustainability transition. It focuses on transformative resilience, the ability to absorb, adapt to, and anticipate shocks while driving systemic change. The report explores how this approach can strengthen sustainability policies in three key areas: the energy transition, circular economy, and just transition. It proposes governance

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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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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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A World of Debt – Report 2025

This report highlights the surge in global public debt, aggravated by a series of cascading crises in recent years. It also underscores how the growing debt burden disproportionately impacts developing countries, where public resources are increasingly diverted from essential development needs to service debt compromising their ability to react to emergencies, tackle climate change and

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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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