Polycrisis and Global Problematique
The focus of systems research is the bigger picture, the interconnectedness and interdependence of the whole. For the 21st century this is the polycrisis and the global problematique.
“The term polycrisis inspired by the works of the French philosopher and sociologist Morin is more and more used to describe the world we are living in at the beginning of the 21st century, globally and locally. The list of crises is long, starting with the climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity, the ebb and flow of economic crises and inflation, the energy crisis, inequality, poverty, hunger, armed conflict, and outright war. Yet, in contrast to the compartmentalised UN Sustainable Development Goals, the polycrisis is not a huge pile of different crises but—and here comes another increasingly popular word—an entanglement of interconnected and interdependent crises. One feeds into the other, feeding forward and feeding back, amplifying the predicament. But what is to be done to prevent the popularity of the term polycrisis from repeating the now familiar pattern of concept shifting without praxis change?
More than 50 years ago, the global problematique was formulated to describe a set of systemically related factors that together could be described, in the language of the time, ‘The Predicament of Mankind’. In this formulation, a cybersystemic perspective on the diverse political, social, economic, technological, and environmental challenges of pollution, population growth, resource depletion, and economic instability was offered.
The global problematique recognised the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of these phenomena feeding into each other, amplifying the predicament. While the term polycrisis describes the symptom, the global problematique provides a cybersystemic lens to understand and transform our circumstances through theory-informed practical action, or praxis.”
(Klein, L., Buckle, P., Nguyen, N., Preiser, R., & Ison, R. (2023). Navigating the polycrisis—governing for transformation: The 2024 agenda for the systems community. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 40(6), p. 974)
“The term polycrisis inspired by the works of the French philosopher and sociologist Morin is more and more used to describe the world we are living in at the beginning of the 21st century, globally and locally. The list of crises is long, starting with the climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity, the ebb and flow of economic crises and inflation, the energy crisis, inequality, poverty, hunger, armed conflict, and outright war. Yet, in contrast to the compartmentalised UN Sustainable Development Goals, the polycrisis is not a huge pile of different crises but—and here comes another increasingly popular word—an entanglement of interconnected and interdependent crises. One feeds into the other, feeding forward and feeding back, amplifying the predicament. But what is to be done to prevent the popularity of the term polycrisis from repeating the now familiar pattern of concept shifting without praxis change?
More than 50 years ago, the global problematique was formulated to describe a set of systemically related factors that together could be described, in the language of the time, ‘The Predicament of Mankind’. In this formulation, a cybersystemic perspective on the diverse political, social, economic, technological, and environmental challenges of pollution, population growth, resource depletion, and economic instability was offered.
The global problematique recognised the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of these phenomena feeding into each other, amplifying the predicament. While the term polycrisis describes the symptom, the global problematique provides a cybersystemic lens to understand and transform our circumstances through theory-informed practical action, or praxis.”
(Klein, L., Buckle, P., Nguyen, N., Preiser, R., & Ison, R. (2023). Navigating the polycrisis—governing for transformation: The 2024 agenda for the systems community. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 40(6), p. 974)