Does polycrisis call for "poly" response?
Learnings and reflections from a polycrisis mapping project: Part 2.
Does polycrisis call for “poly” response? Here, we share some learnings and reflections from a research project mapping responses to the polycrisis.
Read Part 1: ‘What does it mean to respond to polycrisis?’
How do we make sense of different orientations or aspirations of polycrisis response? In the matrix shared in Part 1: ‘What does it mean to respond to polycrisis?’, the World Economic Forum is located in the same cell as Cascade Institute and Post Carbon Institute. But how similar are these organizations’ orientations to polycrisis?
As Farwa Sial argues, some powerful international financial institutions are adopting the term ‘polycrisis’ to justify business as usual.1 And as a participant in one of our stakeholder interviews said: ‘I'm not sure we want a map of a drug cartel that understands the polycrisis, and is seeking to exploit government instability to advance its product marketing. … That might be an extreme example. But I think {what we’re doing is} sensemaking, it's looking for fellow travelers. Maybe we're all converging on a similar destination, even if we're coming at it from a different starting point’.2 How do we find those who are seeking similar destinations, instead of those who depart from similar analysis to potentially radically different ends?
One way to make sense of different responses to global polycrisis is through the three dimensions of action proposed by Joanna Macy: holding actions to hold back and slow down harm; structural changes to create alternative systems and institutions; and shifts in consciousness to lay the psychological, spiritual, and emotional foundation to sustain the new structural alternatives.3 In this framework, the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, with advocacy and organizing as their main activities, are primarily engaged in ‘holding actions’, whilst also gesturing towards ‘structural change’. Meanwhile, SALT is engaging in the creation of structural alternatives and work to shift consciousness.4 Not one of the pillars of action is sufficient on its own: this framework reminds us that effective response to polycrisis needs multiple approaches and multiple loci of action. In other words, a polycrisis calls for ‘poly’ response.
Viewing polycrisis response as ‘poly’ itself helps us to remember that different actors are living and working in different sociopolitical and bioregional contexts. This means they face different threats, pressures, and obstacles. In one of our research interviews, we heard a story of an advocacy worker in an African country whose children were kidnapped and we heard of death threats faced by advocacy workers as reprisals from political leaders against their work. We heard that they draw primarily on an informal national network of activists and advocacy workers for support in such circumstances and that training from a foreign organization in practices for personal protection, such as protecting the security of communication devices, has been supportive to their work. These experiences are an important reminder that challenge and support look very different in different political contexts.
As the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures research collective point out, the ‘multiple, converging crises that we collectively face [are] experience[d] in highly uneven ways’.5 The distinction they draw between contexts of ‘high intensity’ and ‘low intensity’ struggle complexifies our understanding of crisis, because what registers in a low-intensity struggle as a disruption of normality (and therefore counts as crisis by the Cascade Institute’s definition) might in a high-intensity struggle instead be an intensification of existing violence (less clear whether this counts as crisis by the same definition).6
We are also aware that the language of polycrisis may serve some groups and not others in terms of connecting with their target audiences. One interviewee shared that the concept of polycrisis resonated with their work but that in their work and communications they favor ‘lighter words that the communities and the beneficiaries and the people who are also power holders are used to so that we're not being advocates that are speaking outside the context of their country’.7 Another interviewee shared that in their own research into narratives of polycrisis they were finding that the ‘polycrisis’ term was currently being used within a relatively narrow circle of actors with a certain kind of ‘cultural programming’ within a Western educational or academic context and less so in movements on the ground. This does not mean that building coherence in the polycrisis field is not useful work; rather, it is a reminder that coherence does not mean universality.
How, then, can we best develop and support context-specific responses, and take seriously that polycrisis will not be solved by singular, hegemonic solutions?
This piece is excerpted with minor adaptations from: Catherine Tran and Rufus Pollock, ‘A Boundary Makes a Map: Reflections from building a prototype directory of actors responding to the polycrisis’ (2023). Read the full report here.
We welcome comments and discussion.
Farwa Sial, ‘Whose Polycrisis?’, 27 January 2023, Developing Economics, https://developingeconomics.org/2023/01/27/whose-polycrisis/.
Stakeholder interview conducted by Life Itself in 2023 to understand polycrisis mapping needs.
Joanna Macy, ‘The Great Turning’, Active Hope, https://www.activehope.info/book-key-themes/the-great-turning.
See snapshot summaries of our research on these organisations in the full research report.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, ‘The Storm Categories’, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, https://decolonialfutures.net/the-storm-categories/.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, ‘The Storm Categories’.
Stakeholder interview conducted by Life Itself in 2023 to understand the polycrisis response field.