Navigating the Polycrisis - Governing for Transformation

How can we avoid the polycrisis becoming merely another discourse without transformation? What kind of governance shift is needed to respond to interconnected crises? And how can the systems community orient its epistemologies and praxis toward deeper change?

In Navigating the Polycrisis, the 2024 agenda for the cyber-systemic community argues that the epochal challenges now gathered under the term “polycrisis” reflect not just multiple simultaneous crises but a deeper crisis of governance, the failure of existing modes of management, institutional fragmentation, and inadequate reflexivity. The 2024 agenda warns that without rethinking how we govern, the polycrisis risks becoming another empty trope, unlike the earlier “global problematique”, better at framing problems than driving real change.

To navigate this, the 2024 agenda for the cyber-systemic community advocates a shift from management to stewardship: a mode of governance that is more relational, humble, and adaptive. The 2024 agenda calls for epistemological transparency, being explicit about the assumptions, values, and boundaries of different ways of knowing, and for widening the gaze to engage the “cybersystemic perspective” more fully. That means systems scholars and practitioners need to reflect more explicitly on how their own vantage points, metaphors, and practices shape what transformations are visible or imaginable.

Finally, the 2024 agenda for the cyber-systemic community urges the systems community to mobilise praxis, that is, action informed by systems insight, and to reconnect thinking, being, and doing in service of transformation.

The 2024 agenda is thus a call to collectively re-orient systems scholarship toward governance innovation and systemic change, not merely analysis or critique.

Klein, Louis, Pamela Buckle, Nam Nguyen, Rika Preiser, and Ray L. Ison. ‘Navigating the Polycrisis—Governing for Transformation: The 2024 Agenda for the Systems Community’. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 40, no. 6 (2023): 973–77. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2990.