Highlighting the connections between economic and non-economic shocks to the world, Adam Tooze proposes that “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the […]
Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis Read More »
Ahead of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Lawrence H. Summers and Masood Ahmed implore these institutions to avoid a global economic downturn by addressing the polycrisis: “Challenges ranging from increased interest rates, climate change and an epically strong dollar, to food-supply shortages, high inflation and a still-prevalent pandemic all
IMF-World Bank Meetings are the Last Stop before a Coming Economic Storm Read More »
This Foresight Brief argues that conventional risk management frameworks cannot grapple with the growing number of systemic and existential risks generated by decades of globalization. Instead, these risks require more long-term thinking – “intentional consideration of what might happen in the future, the choices for influencing it and the consequences of those choices” (p. 10).
In this blog, Richard Hames discusses polycrisis, societal collapse, existential risk, and related themes. Notable entries include: · “Existential Risk and The Method of Collapsology” (23 June 2022) · “The decisive moment” (01 July 2022) · “On Staying Woke in Polycrisis Futurism” (06 July 2022) · “Attention Deficit Hyperobject Disorder” (18 July 2022) · “The Stakes of Sri Lanka”
This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy on Europe’s polycrisis, setting out the mechanisms of its “politics trap” and the strategies that have been utilized to try to deal with its constraints. It argues that “this ‘polycrisis’ is fracturing the European political system across multiple, simultaneous rifts, thereby creating a ‘polycleavage’.”
Melanie Hart, Jordan Link, and Ngor Luong of the Center for American Progress translate and discuss Chinese Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission Secretary-General Chen Yixin’s effort to explain President Xi Jinping’s “ten fundamental insights” on “preventing and resolving major risks”. Yixin considers black swan events and risk interactions, noting that “All categories of risk
Taking Strategic Initiative to Prevent and Defuse Major Risks Read More »
In this speech, then President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Junker uses the term polycrisis (albeit only once) to refer to the combined migration, financial, and Brexit crises facing Europe. He proposed: “It is not so long ago that our Union was in danger of sleepwalking from one crisis to another without waking up… Since
Seth D. Baum and Anthony M. Barrett argue that there are underappreciated systemic interactions between catastrophic risks. Actions taken to mitigate one catastrophic risk may increase or reduce another catastrophic risk. To address these interactions, leaders must use an “integrated assessment” of the whole collection of global catastrophic risks to ensure efforts to remediate one
Towards and Integrated Assessment of Global Catastrophic Risk Read More »
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker uses the term polycrisis to describe Europe’s governance challenges amidst the Greek debt crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the surge of Syrian refugees into Europe, and the pending Brexit vote. These problems “have not only arrived at the same time. They also feed each other, creating a sense of doubt
The authors survey the development of the adaptive governance concept, which they define as “A range of interactions between actors, networks, organizations, and institutions emerging in pursuit of a desired state for social-ecological systems” (p. 6). Flexible, polycentric networks of diverse stakeholders can better address the uncertainty and complexity of change in social-ecological systems than
A Decade of Adaptive Governance Scholarship: Synthesis and Future Directions Read More »
