Op-Ed Commentary

The authors respond to criticism of the use of the word “polycrisis”, arguing that the world’s current crises are in many ways unprecedented and thus merit a new word and require new forms of analysis. They argue, “the past isn’t a good guide to our present and future. Too many basic parameters – such as

Noting that polycrisis was the key buzzword at the World Economic Forum’s January 2023 meeting in Davos, Daniel Drezner attempts to make sense of the concept as “the concatenation of shocks that generate crises in other systems that, in turn, worsen the initial crises, making the combined effect far, far worse than the sum of

Andreas Kluth argues that the term polycrisis is unhelpful to solving the world’s problems because it captures nothing new. Human history is full of complex crises, interactions between them, and the absence of single causes and solutions. “My practical advice is to stop coining Greek neologisms and attack complexity with simple words. We have problems,

In response to the 2023 World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Michael Peregrine argues that “the emphasis on polycrisis calls on boards to not only look more broadly on global risks that might affect the company’s business, but also to look at them in a different way. The fundamental governance message of polycrisis is to

Jonathan Derbyshire characterizes the year 2022 as a polycrisis, discusses the origins of the term, and provides the definition: “Noun: collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises of an environmental, geopolitical and economic nature.”