The report highlights the distinctive harms for children and future generations of eight global trends that are part of the polycrisis: continued impacts of the pandemic, inflation, food insecurity, energy shortages, underinvestment in children, threats to democratic rights, international factionalism, and internet inequality.
Prospects for Children in the Polycrisis: A 2023 Global Outlook Read More »
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, social change, disease, and the environment] is also too hard. But sometimes, as now, it becomes inescapable… The point is that we need to analyse
How to Think about Policy in a Polycrisis Read More »
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
The New International Economic Order Read More »
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
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
The ‘Polycrisis’ and Global Development Finance: Options and Dilemmas Read More »
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’.”
