Polycrisis has our attention.
Last year, historian Adam Tooze re-introduced us to the term and spearheaded a polycrisis revival.
Tooze notes that polycrisis is a state where multiple crises are playing out at once which are not necessarily connected, but the sum of them exceeds the parts.
How can Australia make its future in an age of intense, interconnected crises?
Today’s risks, tomorrow’s crises
There are many dimensions to polycrisis.
The World Economic Forum links it to volatility and clustering of global risks and Cascade Institute warns that polycrisis has the potential to catastrophically and irreversibly degrade humanity’s prospects. Henig and Knight draw attention to polycrisis as a series of knotted events and the global condition of flux.
What can we learn from these discussions? Polycrisis may describe:
A situation where present and future risks interact, with compounding results
A temporal state, and a sense of urgency to “act”
An analytical framework, or a mindset that we might adopt to understand what’s taking place in our world
Indeed, whether descriptive, temporal, or analytical, polycrisis inhabits paradoxical terrain.
Use with Caution
The politics of crisis draw us in.
COVID-19, rising interest rates, and increased inflation dominate national conversation partly because they feed on a culture of uncertainty.
While polycrisis attempts to make sense of seeming chaos, we should proceed with caution.
The politics of crisis make for captivating headlines, but also risks distracting us from the systemic failures and opportunities that Australia should address to deliver the future its people want.
In this sense, when approached carelessly, polycrisis might be an illusion–adding a self-enforcing layer to the crisis narrative, without developing considered responses that help Australia to plan for future challenges.
Shared Experience and the Polycrisis Future
The notion of polycrisis can be overwhelming as we are more aware of the inundation of intersecting challenges on multiple fronts. However, it can also be a source of optimism.
In an era of short-termism, where Australia is not on track to deliver a flourishing future, polycrisis might operate as a stabilising force, and a means to make sense of the challenges and opportunities we face today.
Australians feel that our core institutions do not act in the public interest, compounded by a lack of engaged public decision-making. But polycrisis encourages us to think in shared dimensions, and therefore, is not only a means for us to describe current global conditions, but in an era of low-cooperation, also helps us to collectively focus, then prepare for the future.
As crises seemingly fuse into one another, we can perceive them differently. We can use constructive discussion to talk about complex and contested issues to frame opportunities for progress.
Polycrisis presents us with threats and opportunities. Making the future that Australia wants involves navigating similarly contradictory terrain. Tools such as constructive discussion will be critical to reconcile the paradoxes that we face across both.
From Crisis to Collaboration
A balanced approach to polycrisis thinking might use risk and the notion of crisis to frame opportunities. In systems thinking, this might take the form of leverage points which as Donella Meadows reminds us, are places where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
While crisis is not new, polycrisis is systems thinking in action–it may sharpen our focus to root causes of dysfunction and encourage us to develop multi-dimensional and collaborative approaches to making the future that Australia wants.
Somewhat paradoxical, the threats and opportunities of polycrisis might be exactly what we need for today.