Where Did the Term Polycrisis Originate?
The concept of polycrisis is not new. Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern first used the term polycrisis in their 1999 book, Homeland Earth, to argue that the world faces “no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem” (p. 74). South African sociologist and sustainable transitions theorist Mark Swilling then adopted the term to capture “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause” (2013, p. 98). Climate change, rising inequality, and the threat of financial crises interact in complex ways that multiply their overall impact (Swilling 2013, 2019).
In the policy world, then-President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker used the term in a 2018 speech to refer to Europe’s conjoined migration, financial, and Brexit crises, asserting “we have slowly but surely turned the page from this so-called ‘polycrisis’” (see also Juncker’s 2016 speech in Greece). A special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy titled “The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? Integration and Politicization in an Age of Shifting Cleavages” interrogated Juncker’s claim in greater detail.
Around this time in the philanthropic community, the Omega Resilience Funders Network started framing its work in the terms of the global polycrisis, concerned that “Dozens of environmental, social, technological, and economic stressors are interacting with increasing velocity. Their combined impact is causing unpredictable future shocks of greater intensity.” Then in August 2022, the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation brought together the emerging polycrisis epistemic community for the conference “Navigating the Polycrisis” in Korsør, Denmark.
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