What's in a polycrisis?
🌐 The buzzword has value beyond the technical detail.
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We love to hate buzzwords.
Somewhat inevitably, they come with more than a tinge of disappointment.
It’s a bit like your secret gem of a neighbourhood café suddenly getting overrun with new clientele after a stellar review—just like that, what’s felt meaningfully yours gets dispersed and seemingly warped to the tastes of everyone else.
I should probably clarify that I don’t feel quite that strongly about the word polycrisis (or my local café for that matter). But a few days ago I was chatting with someone who brought up the term in the context of a piece of work about multiple threats to journalistic freedom. Is that what I understood it meant?, she queried.
The answer is no. I haven’t seen it used in that context. But the exchange piqued my interest. It signalled to me that the expression—a relatively recent addition to the global lexicon—may be moving beyond its original definition.
So what are we really talking about when we refer to a polycrisis—and why has it stirred up debate?
What the term means | The word derives from the Greek πολυ, which means “many”, and κρίση, which means crisis—but this isn’t simply about several crises happening at the same time. The term describes a state where multiple separate crises don’t just coincide or overlap, but get entangled with each other, creating a cascade that produces an overall impact which is stronger than the sum of its parts.
The more elaborate explanations get into how complex systems work to create this effect, and tackle questions like whether a polycrisis arises only when whole systems are interconnected—like environment or geopolitics—or whether it’s enough for components of a system to interact. To go deeper on this, a good place to start is international politics professor Daniel Drezner’s analysis piece in Vox.
Where it comes from | This is a kind of cascade in itself.
1999—The book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium gets published, in which French complexity theorist Edgar Morin and co-author Anne Brigitte Kern coin the term to warn of the “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet”. It then gets picked up by other academics.
2016—European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker uses the world polycrisis to describe the collection of shocks triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, including Greek debt, Brexit and refugees arriving from Syria.
2022—In June, economist and historian Adam Tooze publishes a Substack post that invoked the term. In October, Tooze publishes a Financial Times column that further popularises the concept. His writings reference a working paper published independently by political scientists Michael Lawrence, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon at Canada’s Cascade Institute, which offered a full analysis of the term.
Then comes the buzzword-making moment.
2023—The World Economic Forum (WEF) picks up the term, and uses it in its Global Risks Report to explain how “present and future risks can also interact with each other to form a ‘polycrisis’”.
This is how WEF defined it in a blog published at the time:
The cascading and connected crises we find ourselves in at the beginning of 2023 demand a new descriptor to define the scale of the problems the world is facing. The war in Ukraine sent energy and food prices soaring. The resulting inflationary pressures ignited a global cost-of-living crisis which has led to social unrest. On top of all that, carbon emissions continued to rise as economies reopened after the pandemic. The collective vocabularies stored in the world’s great dictionaries didn’t appear to hold a single world to sum up all this strife. So here’s a new one: Polycrisis. [emphasis theirs]
What kinds of crises are we talking about? | The WEF’s Global Risks Report pinpoints three specific crises: the cost-of-living, climate change, and growing pressure on finite resources—a wide-ranging category that encompasses food, water and energy, as well as the risks to ecosystems and international security that come with scarcity on those fronts. The report says that the greatest threat of polycrisis comes when ongoing risks intersect with emerging crises—the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, with its destabilising effect through social upheaval and disruption of supply chains; or the war on Ukraine and its knock-on effects on food and energy.
So, what’s new? | Something or nothing, depending on who you listen to. Does polycrisis reflect a truly a new phenomenon; or is it simply a catchy and useful label to capture a long-term trend, or even history repeating itself?
Drezner gives an account of arguments against the term that were made on the same platforms that helped to popularise it. At WEF in Davos, historian Niall Ferguson said it’s “just history happening”; FT columnist Gideon Rachman questioned whether it actually means anything.
One reason for the pushback, Drezner says, is a certain sense of déjà vu:
There is the largest land war in Europe in recent memory, a devastating pandemic, the surge in refugee flows, high inflation, fragile global governance, and the leading democracies turning inward as they face populist challenges at home. It seems easy — and enervating — to believe that the polycrisis is upon us.
The thing about the previous paragraph is that it does not just describe the current moment; it also captures the global situation almost exactly a century ago.
Fair point. But a more recent history also comes to bear, and it’s articulated by Tooze is a WEF blog making the case for why 'polycrisis' is a useful way to look at the world right now:
The 1970s is really the moment where much of our modern configuration comes clearly into existence. Many of the first forecasts, whether it's new types of infectious disease or the Malthusian problematic of the Club of Rome report, date to this moment 50 years ago.
[ICYMI: This WorldWise post touches on the significance of that moment vs. sustainability in the here and now.]
Back to Tooze:
So a series of really very dramatic risks are being generated by the very success of our economic growth story—on the resource environmental envelope side, but also on the pandemic disease zoonotic mutation side. […] But it's one thing seeing the shape of something, it's another seeing its reality. And that's where the pandemic experience of 2020, 2021, is just the showstopper.
This isn’t to say that there’s been a state of polycrisis since the 1970s, he explains. So, what’s different now?
For a long time, he says, you could cite a single cause for sweeping problems. No more: the problems are now more diverse, the pace of change is dizzying, and it’s hard to even see a single fix. Plus—as Cascade Institute director Thomas Homer-Dixon and colleagues argue in a New York Times op-ed—risks are growing more synchronised and interconnected, while resilience is wearing thin.
Unconvinced, detractors like economist Noah Smith counter that it’s easy to underestimate the numerous mechanisms that push back against shocks and prevent the system from spiralling out of control.
What’s interesting to me is how this debate essentially mirrors the arguments and counter-arguments triggered by Malthusian theories and the publication of Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome half a century ago. In essence, we still argue about whether this system we exist in, where humans and nature interact, can actually self-correct.
Except that this is no longer about forecasts decades down the line.
But it’s tempting, and easily done, to lose sight of the forest for the trees in this debate. The technical detail of what ‘polycrisis’ represents is important—but fixating on it is missing an equally important dimension.
In that sense, asking whether it’s entirely correct is the wrong question. Ask instead: is it useful?
Drezner concludes that use of the term “distracts more than it adds”. I have more affinity with a couple of other remarks he makes along the way. Here’s the first:
Thomas Malthus famously warned that the human population would exponentially outstrip mankind’s capacity to grow food. This proved to be spectacularly wrong, but the power of Malthusian logic remains [emphasis mine]. Neo-Malthusians are less concerned about food specifically and more about human civilisation outstripping other necessary resources.
So there’s an essence behind the term, and there’s the detail. What if we can find value in the essence regardless of whether the details turn out to be absolutely right?
Drezner gets at that here:
I think its proponents are trying to get at something more than just history happening. They are putting a name to the belief that a more interconnected, complex world is vulnerable to an interconnected, complex global catastrophe.
Here’s the thing. Part of the reason we may be framing the current moment as a polycrisis is not because there is no longer a single cause to the world’s problems—was there really ever a single cause?—but because the collective discourse can now more easily grapple with multiple causes and interconnections. Both in terms of analysis and public awareness.
No one can avoid feeling the pain of the current state of affairs. And the connections between forces that cause it are easier to see.
Putting a name to that is a powerful way to understand it.
Tooze seems acutely aware of this, and goes as far as to say the word polycrisis can offer a sense of relief. He sees this function as a key part of why the term is useful:
If you've been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you all at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.
He also argues that understanding this moment as a polycrisis can even help people see connections at a time that might otherwise seem chaotic:
If you just read a newspaper or watch the news, you are presented with this collage that begins to just look incoherent and crazy to the point where you begin to wonder whether you will actually be able to trust your own senses. What the polycrisis concept says is, ‘Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment’. I think that's useful, giving the sense a name. It's therapeutic.
From that point of view, the growing use of the word is actually a good thing. Because that’s what buzzwords often do, compromised as they are: they give us a shortcut that captures something about the present moment which needs to be expressed.
It’s not the only sign of the times in our collective use of a living language. In 2022, the Collins Dictionary’s word of the year was ‘permacrisis’: “an extended period of instability and insecurity”.
This is about human experience and perception at least as much as it is about analysis. Why should that carry less value?
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Story Threads
Three snippets from recent Briefing ($) editions:
Trend to watch | A few stories have highlighted a growing suppression of dissent in India. The government has given itself the power to remove online content deemed “fake, false or misleading” by a state-run fact-checking unit; it now also requires social media platforms and internet service providers to take down or block the flagged content. Textbooks have been edited down to remove historical facts such as the Muslim-led Mughal Empire and the 2002 mob killings of Muslims in Gujarat, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was chief minister. A BBC documentary that examined Modi’s handling of that incident has also prompted the government to launch a case of foreign exchange violations against the broadcaster, after previously raiding its offices.
Under the radar| Millions of modified mosquitoes are soon to be released across Brazil in a bid to tackle dengue. Once infected with Wolbachia bacteria, the insects can no longer transmit the disease. The strategy has so far been tested in smaller regions. It also appears to have succeeded in Colombia. Meanwhile, Argentina is using a different approach that also targets mosquito carriers: it’s fighting one of its worst outbreaks of dengue in recent years by sterilising mosquitoes using DNA-altering radiation.
Notable research | As food production declines due to water and climate pressures in Central America's rural areas, food insecurity spikes in cities connected by food trade—and this in turn ramps up conflict where there’s propensity for violence. A separate analysis suggests the impact of climate change on agriculture across Latin America means small farmers will find it harder to make a living, but it could also affect the global food supply: Brazil and Argentina alone supply a tenth of the world’s wheat exports and a third of those of coarse grains like barley, maize, and rye.
ICYMI
The latest Briefing Insight edition focused on the UN’s water conference, the first such convening for the best part of 50 years. It gives the bottom line and key details from the event through the media narrative and a first-hand account of the proceedings, concluding with a take on whether the conference could prove a pivotal moment for the neglected resource. Read it here ($).
Media Insider
We really somehow have overlooked this challenge to the photograph as witness.
Hype, fear and opinion about AI and its impacts on journalism have been everywhere since ChatGPT broke into the mainstream. Fred Ritchin, former photo editor at The New York Times, is raising the flag about the neglected risks AI poses to the credibility of the photographic image. What stood out for me in his recent conversation with Amanda Darrach in the Columbia Journalism Review is how its undercurrent evolves from alarm-bell-ringing about the impacts of a new technology, to an almost argument-defeating acknowledgement that this isn’t exactly a new challenge, to finally conclude with an attempt to picture an AI-inclusive future for visual journalism. Read more here ($).
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Check out the course page for details and scroll all the way down for reviews.
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