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Adapting The Way We Govern to Cope with ‘Polycrisis’

This article explores governance strategies for navigating the growing polycrisis, emphasizing the need for an adaptive, multi-level, and collaborative governance approach to enhance adaptability, cooperation, and resilience. Key strategies include multi-level governance, managing the political and bureaucratic landscape, and fostering personal and organizational resilience to ensure effective crisis response.

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Prepared for the Polycrisis? The Need for Complexity Science and Systems Thinking to Address Global and National Evidence Gaps

The authors argue that inadequate national and global level data prevent us from understanding the complex interactions of the polycrisis and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. They propose that applied systems thinking can address this gap by helping to hypothesize, model, visualize, and test system properties, especially if it uses participatory processes that “assist stakeholders

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Evaluation in the Polycrisis Epoch

Michael Quinn Patton argues that good public policy evaluation is crucial for addressing the global polycrisis, but requires an informed citizenry. It is thus presently “engaged in a battle against misinformation, politicized knowledge, irrational decision-making, and authoritarian governments. Framing his analysis with Ancient Greek philosophy, Patton proposes that evaluation is really about critical thinking and

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Our Polycrisis Demands a Radically New Approach to Risk Management

Ruth Richardson, the Executive Director of the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment, argues that the “escalating global polycrisis demands an urgent and transformative shift in how we assess, anticipate, and mitigate systemic risks.” She then suggests a range of practical actions governments could take to better contend with polycrisis, such as creating a Minister for

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Introduction: Escaping the Politics Trap? EU Integration Pathways Beyond the Polycrisis

The authors argue that since 2016, the European Union (EU) has been in a state of ‘polycrisis,’ where interconnected challenges threaten its cohesion and legitimacy. They develop an analytical framework elaborating the concepts of polycrises, polycleavages, and politics traps, applying it to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They conclude that, despite

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Transformative Resilience: The Key to Governing Europe’s Sustainability Transitions in the Polycrisis

This report explores transformative resilience in the EU’s sustainability transitions within the polycrisis context. Using a conceptual framework of transformative resilience, it addresses the following questions: How can the EU enhance the capacity of its policies to anticipate, adapt to, or absorb shocks while maintaining their transformative intent? How can European policymakers prevent the polycrisis

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The Disruption Nexus

Roman Krznaric explores the conditions in which crises lead to transformative societal change. He finds that transformative responses are most common in conditions of war, disaster, revolution, and disruption. The latter refers to “a moment of system instability that provides opportunities for rapid transformation” which is created by the “disruption nexus” of crisis events (typically

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Framework on Management of Emerging Critical Risks

This report presents a seven-step framework to help governments manage emerging critical risks in an increasingly interconnected global landscape, shaped by complex economic, social, and technological systems. It outlines processes for risk identification, assessment, information-sharing, maturity evaluation, and strategic planning to enhance flexibility and adaptability. By integrating emerging risks into traditional risk management approaches, the

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Local Organizing in a Polycrisis Era, American Politics, Healthy Democracy, Polycrisis

In this four-part essay series, Jacob Bornstein and Mesa Sebree explore the concept and nature of the polycrisis. The series offers insight into topics such as how social change works in a polycrisis era, the next steps for dealing with polycrisis, and factors for societal resilience in a polycrisis era. Subsequent posts in this series

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A delusion of control: Loss of agency in modern complex systems

This article argues that as “we increasingly rely on [globalized complex adaptive systems], we surrender more and more individual autonomy and agency, diminishing our ability to actually control our outcomes and wellbeing.” Concomitantly, “the illusion that we as individuals–or even as a society–can fully control the modern complex systems-of-systems that enable modern living is a

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