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Polycrisis

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Polycrisis — the “What?”

This note answers what the polycrisis is. For how it is modelled and understood, see Frameworks for polycrisis modelling. For the world we might build in response, see Ecosocialism and Envisioning.

Definition

A polycrisis is a cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that reinforce each other, creating a more complex and severe predicament than any single crisis alone.

The core idea

Individual crises don’t sit in isolation — they reinforce one another:

  • Individual crises — distinct challenges such as the Covid pandemic, climate change, the Ukraine war, economic instability and democratic erosion.
  • Causal mechanisms — the crises amplify each other through common stresses, domino effects and inter-systemic feedbacks across global systems.
  • Fast + slow — fast-moving events (a pandemic, a war) combine with slow-moving stresses (climate change, inequality) to push global systems into disequilibrium.
  • Outcome — the combined effect is a more complex and severe predicament than any one crisis alone.
  • Required response — a systems-based understanding and (in the popularising coverage — The Conversation, cited below, rather than in Lawrence et al.’s own definition) an “adaptive political economy”; it actively rejects simple monocausal explanations. Note: “adaptive political economy” is now also the banner of Yuen Yuen Ang’s separate AIM paradigm — see ## Critiques for why the two must not be merged.

From buzzword to analytical framework

  • The term moved from a near-buzzword (2022) to a critical analytical framework (2024–present), used to understand the interconnected nature of global challenges.
  • Scholars identify causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement — common stresses, domino effects, inter-systemic feedbacks — linking multiple global systems.
  • It has been adopted in high-level discourse (World Economic Forum, UNDP, the UN) and in academic research to guide policy and future studies.

Critiques

The concept is not neutral, and is worth holding critically:

  • It can critique dominant paradigms — but be precise about who is doing the critiquing and what they are critiquing. The “adaptive political economy” line in this note previously implied the polycrisis concept itself carries a critique of mechanistic, Western-centric thinking. It does not. That is Yuen Yuen Ang’s separate argument, and she is arguing against the polycrisis frame, not from inside it:
    • Yuen Yuen Ang (Nov 2024, Project Syndicate; elaborated at the UNDP) coined “polytunity”: simultaneous disruptions are “a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the deep transformation of global institutions and ideas”. Her charge against the polycrisis framing is that when “fear becomes the central theme, the result can only be angst and paralysis” (she cites Mark Leonard after Davos 2024). Her constructive proposal is AIM — Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy: adaptive = govern societies “not as crude machines, but as living networks that learn and evolve”; inclusive = “mobilising local creativity rather than copying the models of the rich and powerful”; moral = “ideas are shaped by power, and to redress this imbalance”. Her 2026 essay introducing AIM states it “replaces the industrial-colonial worldview that has long shaped political economy, challenging its mechanical assumptions, Eurocentric benchmarks, and claims of neutrality”, and quotes Esther Duflo that “economists tend to think in machine mode”.
    • On the concept’s political function — The polycrisis and the uncertainty possibility space (Cambridge, Global Sustainability, 2025) argues Lawrence et al. “underestimate the politics of knowledge claims about the polycrisis, from the concept’s performative function, from the normative claims it enacts or enables, and from the program of action” it implies — i.e. the framework needs to be explicit about what it means to engage in politics through it.
    • On whose interests it serves — Sial (2023), cited in Lawrence et al., argues the polycrisis idea “obscures the operation of capitalist interests that are at the root of the world’s woes”, dismissing it as a term of “Davos elites”. Others argue the predicament is simply not novel — the world has seen entangled crises before.
    • Framed from political economy rather than science — Barry Gills’ “triple conjuncture”: the crisis of capitalist accumulation, intensifying uneven development, and the civilizational/climate crisis, together “a crisis of capitalist world order”.
    • Reframe: the polycrisis is best read not as a critique of Western thinking but as a causal claim — Lawrence, Janzwood and Homer-Dixon define it as crisis entanglement that “significantly degrades humanity’s prospects”, mechanistically via common stresses, domino effects and inter-systemic feedbacks. The decolonial and political-economy critiques are arguments about that claim, and they should be attributed as such.
  • The language can obscure root causes — critical accounts argue the polycrisis frame can hide disproportionate impacts rooted in systems of oppression (race, gender, class, geography), urging an intersectional analysis of who truly suffers and who shapes the narrative.

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