(Illustration by iStock/claudiodivizia)
The work of social change is always pressing, but those who do that work are under extraordinary stress right now. The polycrisis—which philosopher Jonathan Rowson neatly defines as “the world system of systems beginning to malfunction, with escalating risks due to emerging properties in the whole being significantly more dangerous than the sum of its parts”—is manifesting all around us. From devastating urban fires to the erosion of journalism and an assault on democracy, the world, as we once knew it, feels unsettled and unfamiliar. We are navigating by strange new stars; our usual maps and tools are insufficient.
And yet: We must still chart a course forward. Indeed, moments of crisis carry not only profound danger but also transformative possibility. However dire our current situation may be, it still offers critical openings to correct past oversights, build new forms of resilience, and widen our gaze. Now is a time to understand that we can’t work on the component parts of the polycrisis in isolation from one another while the emerging properties of the whole grow all the more dangerous.
The good news is that there is demonstrable demand for seeding new forms of holistic problem-solving across previously siloed efforts in democracy protection, public health, climate action, social justice, and peace and security. The UN has called for radically new forms of collaboration through its Pact for the Future, a groundbreaking pledge to open “a new beginning in multilateralism” and “a new kind of international cooperation” in an effort to stave off “tipping into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown.” There are increasing calls for a 2.0 version of intersectionality that can drive more informed choices and strategies: “We need to decrease transaction costs for leaders to understand how decisions they make in their discrete spheres are affecting the broader system,” as one leader lamented to us; another urged the need to “involve these intersections in the process of decision-making.”
Our current predicament stems in part from a tendency to work in isolation rather than building coordinated, long-term strategies across multiple systems. By investing in tools and frameworks that help us understand how various systems of security intersect and influence one another, we can better anticipate and prepare for future challenges while building bridges between traditionally separated fields. Below, we highlight four ways we can reapproach the problems of our moment, in ways not only possible but already emergent.
1. Reimagine long-term security. Traditional state-centric security frameworks can actually generate insecurity through militarization that escalates the potential for conflict, through surveillance that undermines civil liberties, through resource diversion from human development, and by the exclusion of key voices from security decisions. Might we dare to advance a transformative vision of security that centers human and ecological well-being, prioritizes prevention over over-reaction, values diverse forms of knowledge and expertise, and builds stability through development of trusting relationships?
We see signals of such a redefinition in the “One Health” paradigm in management of zoonotic disease, which recognizes that the interconnections between human, animal, and environmental health, viewing each as part of a larger whole. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is reimagining humanitarian aid, finding new ways to foster resilience and empathy in the face of converging crises. Democracy 2076 is developing amendments to the US Constitution to make it fit for purpose in the future. And we need more discussions like the 2024 Security & the Future symposium Horizon 2045 co-hosted by Ploughshares, which brought together experts from across issue spaces to think long-term about the intersections between nuclear challenges and other threats to human and planetary security.
2. Build lateral networks. To develop more holistic understandings of problem spaces and their points of intersection, we need to build up the connections between and across issues. Vertical networks are important, but new and better lateral crosswalks will enable leaders and organizations to learn from and lean into one another’s deep expertise, spanning issue spaces, cultures, and geographies.
For example, Horizon 2045’s legal strategies initiative is an interdisciplinary exercise in borrowing from, replicating, and integrating tactics from international environmental and humanitarian law to shrink the space in which the nuclear weapons complex can legally operate. The Systemic Climate Action Collaborative is bringing civil society, philanthropy, and public and private institutions to align climate ambitions, pool resources, and share knowledge. And WINGS is a global network of philanthropists, support organizations, and changemakers across 58 countries committed to ending inertia, breaking down silos, and challenging conventional wisdom to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
3. Create new civic spaces. Effective democratic participation requires more than just voting, public comment periods, and other traditional means of civic participation. We need sustained new spaces for collaborative sensemaking that can help bridge divides and build the social capital necessary for communities to navigate uncertainty together. For example, by combining horizon scanning techniques with citizen assemblies and digital democracy platforms like Polis, communities can create powerful new fora for shared understanding and action. In this way, diverse groups can identify and interpret emerging signals of change, drawing on both local knowledge and broader data patterns to build richer, more nuanced perspectives on complex challenges.
Through structured yet flexible processes that welcome participants from across the ideological spectrum, these kinds of civic innovations can help transform individual observations into collective intelligence, allowing communities to better grasp the interconnected nature of social, technological, and environmental shifts. Dark Matter Labs’ Radicle Civics initiative, Horizon 2045’s Foresight Radar, and Climate-KIC’s “Deep Demonstration” model for large-scale, place-based, cross-systems sustainable solutions all underscore the power and promise of engaged publics in new civic spaces.
4. Fund at the intersections. As Tamzin Ractliffe, director of Impact Trust and the Resilience Funders Network, has put it,
As there are no longer “single” crises, there are also no longer “single” solutions. Siloed solutions to philanthropy will just not work under the polycrisis paradigm.
Funders need to move beyond traditional issue-based grantmaking to support work that addresses multiple intersecting challenges simultaneously. Rather than funding climate adaptation and food security separately, funders could support Indigenous-led initiatives that combine traditional ecological knowledge with modern agricultural innovation to build both climate resilience and food sovereignty. Similarly, instead of treating mental health and environmental degradation as separate domains, funders could invest in "green care" programs that improve both ecological and psychological well-being through nature-based therapy and conservation.
For example, the Tata Trusts in India integrate water security, agricultural resilience, and gender equality in their rural development programs. The Nathan Cummings Foundation invests in a more sustainable and equitable future by funding at the intersection of climate change and inequality. And the Ploughshares and Skoll Foundation-funded Catalyst Forum brings together leaders from public health, arms control, international governance, and democracy to explore non-obvious relationships that will be critical to security by the middle of this century.
Securing the Future
What might the decades ahead look like if we do all these things soon and well? For one, we might rapidly develop a better grasp of Rowson’s “emerging properties of the whole,” seeing the bigger picture of our intersecting crises and discovering new opportunities to manage them. We would almost certainly enable better decision-making by tapping into more diverse expertise and knowledge in that process. We might also see a rebalancing between short-term and long-term thinking and competitive versus collaborative action, as the urgency of change and the value of collective problem-solving and collective wisdom continue to reveal themselves.
No matter what we do, the decisions we make right now—from how we define human and planetary security to how we reorient our systems around it—will have long tails. We must not allow future generations to suffer from our lack of imagination in this moment, or an insistence on staring at old maps when what we clearly need is new ones.
Read more stories by Erika Gregory & Jenny Johnston.