Polycrisis
Understanding, framing, interpreting and responding to polycrisis
All around us, the world appears to be going to Hell in a handcart. We are beset by crises in many spheres of life — political, social, economic, environmental — while, at the same time, having to cope with a fundamental shift in productive technologies that some believe will prove as profound as the Industrial Revolution. Edgar Morin, the French social philosopher, even coined a term for the predicament: polycrisis.
Voters in Western liberal democracies are rejecting traditional parties which have lost their trust to more nativist and chavinist nationalistic populists. This has been happening across Europe and in the United States, where an increasingly authoritarian President is testing the bounds of political convention and, indeed, consitutionallly-based rule of law and separation of powers.
In the most populous constitutional democracy, India, religiously-defined nationalism, in the form of hindutva, is challenging consitutional norms of racial neutrality which were firmly established in ithe 1947 constitution. Israel, meanwhile, the Middle East's only established democracy, is essentially at war with its Shiite neighbours and Iran, has similarly fallen in to the grip of religiously-dominated, hard-line nationalists and expansionist Zionists. Only recent federal elections in Canada & Australia have bucked the trend, largely attributable to electoral opposition in those countries to the threat posed generally to democracy and specifically to each of these close US allies by Trump's erratic and arbitrary actions as his second presidential term commences.
History bequeaths us chilling lessons about the capture of modern democracies from within by authoritarians. We must not let democratic reversal occur again in the West. We must fight back actively against the intransigence of those who seek to dominate or dismantle important liberal and democratic institutions for personal gain. We must meet untruth and electoral apathy and resignation with an active programme of rejuvenation of Western liberal democratic ideals. We must attack ignorance and untruth head-on in defence of Western & classical liberal ideals and the intentions of their cradle in Enlightenment aspirations of improving the condition of all people.
Defining polycrisis
We don’t seek to define polycrisis or the forms it has taken. Plenty of others have already done so. Our understanding of the challenges that nations, states and societies face is informed by all these definitions. A good starting point is the 2022 definition provided by the Canadian Cascade Institute (Victoria, BC):
❝ A polycrisis is any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks that produces a single, emergent crisis. The consequences could be confined to a particular geographical region or geopolitical jurisdiction and not escalate to the global scale.
❝ A global polycrisis, in contrast, must be planetary in scale. Specifically, we define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause acascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects. ❞
Scott Janzwood and Thomas Homer-Dixon, 2022, What Is a Global Polycrisis? And how is it different from a systemic risk?
Colm Murphy, 2024 ‘Polycrisis’
Adam Tooze, 2023 Chartbook #192 On deglobalisation and polycrisis
Michael Jacobs, 2024, After Neoliberalism: Economic Theory and Policy in the Polycrisis
Our approach to polycrisis
All forms of policy field-description, agenda-setting, objective-definition, targeting, development, approval, promulgation and implementation, sanction and assessament of impact involve communication. In addition, all aspects also require analysis at one level or at multiple levels from the needs and circumstances of individual actors through to the operation of complex social systems with mulitple actor-types and various, often conflicting needs and/or motivations. The determination of the actions of government and government-controlled entities occur within institutional settings to realise both super-ordinate social-political objectives and the objectives specific to that policy under consideration. Different policies may interact complexly and can (and often do) confound objectives of other policy areas.
In considering formulation of the response to individual crises and to polycrisis, all these factors muct be considered, explicitly or tacitly, for each of the constituent instantiations of crisis. Inherently, response will be complex but should also be defined and communicable along comprehensible (if not simple) lines.
Regardless of the proximate cause of each of the crises that contribute to polycrisis, they share a common series of antecedent factors.
Failure to engage with the issue as political and requiring political resolution — the locus of political attention
Failure to engage with the identified causes of the problem politically — the focus of political attention
Failure to contextualise the problem as the different issues contributing to transmitting or amplifying the problem or constraining effective resolution — the nexus of political attention
Failure to prevent capture by interested parties of the political & technical process of problem definition and specification of alternatives — the problem of policy capture and/or policy distraction
Failure to prevent capture by interested parties of the language used to describe or ‘spin’ the problem — the lexicon of political attention
Mis-specification of the nature of the problem as a manifestation of political economy — the technical nature of political attention
Failure politically to address the problem actively within the public sphere or to explicate the trade-offs required substantially to address the problem — the political-social or public nature of attention
Each of these failure represents a failure of attention and of control of the respective elements of the policy process. Axiomatically, each of these failures is also a failure of communication, usually at mutiple institutional levels
Within our analyses of policy crisis and its constituent phenomena (and noumena) considerable attention will be given to following crucial elements:
Uncertainty — beginning (but not ending) with ontological and epistemological uncertainties — in each of the crisis cases;
The human incertitude that results from the uncertainties and its impact of information search, issue framing, decision-making, action and impact of action;
The role of time from the perspective of each of the actors;
The material institutions involved in monitoring, assessing, defining, communicating and responding to each crisis case and the institutions and parties / actors impacted by the crisis the the first instance and subsequent order effects;
The interactions between actors, constituencies and audiences, including relationships, reliance, influence, and contingencies;
Identifying the body of economic theory or elements of economic theories relevant to each crisis and the key debates, challenges and controversies within that theoretical milieu.
This is how we, at Futuresphere, will approach the analysis of polycrisis and its constituent elements.