More than a buzzword? Mapping interpretations of the 'polycrisis'

Louis Delannoy, Jean-Charles Leveugle, Sofia Maniatakou, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen

“Polycrisis” leapt from Davos into everyday policy talk, yet its meaning remains fluid and sometimes contradictory. To take stock, we asked fifty experts to sort key statements, and Q-method analysis revealed four distinct framings. All agree that polycrisis spills across sectors and borders and reject the view that polycrisis is a mere buzzword. They diverge, however, on how much faith to place in current knowledge systems and on polycrisis’ drivers. Connecting these findings to Edgar Morin’s crisology recasts polycrisis as a metamorphic hinge where crisis and transformation intertwine. A forward agenda must therefore be historically grounded, relational, and reflexive: tracing feedbacks and power relations together, and welcoming plural knowledges. Morin’s principe de reliance also points to governance that is anticipatory, participatory, and cross-scalar. Taken together, the study shows that polycrisis is not a passing label but a fertile lens for understanding entangled planetary upheavals.