By Stephen DeAngelis
Last year, I wrote an article entitled “Are We Entering the Era of the Polycrisis?” In that article, I quoted Adam Tooze, the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, who wrote, “Pandemic, drought, floods, mega storms and wildfires, threats of a third world war — how rapidly we have become inured to the list of shocks. So much so that, from time to time, it is worth standing back to consider the sheer strangeness of our situation. … With economic and non-economic shocks entangled all the way down, it is little wonder that an unfamiliar term is gaining currency — the polycrisis.”[1] Michael Lerner, President and co-founder of Commonweal, adds, “[A few] years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis. … The polycrisis is new. … A confluence of environmental, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and power. … These unpredictable interactions are causing future shocks of ever greater frequency and amplitude. Because the polycrisis looks different, feels different, and is explained differently everywhere, there won’t be any single understanding of it.”[2]
Michael J. Albert, a Lecturer in Global Environmental Politics at the University of Edinburgh, builds on the idea that there won’t be any single understanding of polycrisis. To that end, he has written a book entitled Navigating the Polycrisis: Mapping the Futures of Capitalism and the Earth. Albert understands that trying to predict the future is a futile effort given the complexities involved in a polycrisis world. For that reason, his book is more of a “what if” exploration of some of the futures that could unfold. In his review of Albert’s book, Ben Shread-Hewitt, a Climate Change Researcher at The Climate Bonds Initiative, writes, “[Albert’s] new work proposes multiple pathways upon which the Polycrisis may take us — from utopia to apocalypse, socialism to capitalism, and the many winding possibilities in between. But beyond these scenarios, it also shows us how change occurs in tumultuous times, where new futures can emerge out of the breakdown of old ones.”[3] For his part, Albert writes, “We know that deeper challenges loom on the horizon, from the climate and mass extinction crises to future pandemics, ‘net energy decline’ for fossil fuels, an unsustainable and unstable global food system, the brewing new cold war between the United States and China, the simmering specter of far-right populism, the nascent threat of weaponized synthetic biology, and the destabilizing impacts of artificial intelligence on work, war, and human freedom. This book asks where the world-system is headed as a result of these intersecting challenges.”[4] Albert goes on to explain that his book makes three overarching arguments. Those arguments are:
• We need more systemic scenario analysis. “We must devote more systematic attention to the question of possible futures. ‘Business-as-usual’ will come to an end — whether by choice or by disaster. Thus, we need more future-oriented scholarship that can illuminate the possible roads ahead, their branching pathways, the dangers that lurk, and the opportunities that may emerge for progressive transformation.”
• We need a better holistic approach to polycrisis connectivity. “To illuminate the space of possible planetary futures, we need a holistic approach that highlights the relations and feedbacks between the numerous challenges that compose our planetary predicament. As more and more analysts recognize, we confront not simply a climate crisis, nor simply a collection of numerous isolatable problems that can be studied by separate disciplines, but rather a ‘polycrisis’ or nexus of reciprocally entwined crises characterized by complex feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and (in many cases) mutual amplification.”
• Build strategies based on complexity theory and world-systems theory. “A theoretical framework informed by complexity theory and world-systems theory can provide a new form of critical-futures analysis capable of grappling with the polycrisis condition. … Such an approach must be planetary in scope, voraciously synthetic, and utterly indifferent toward disciplinary boundaries.”
For years, I have argued that interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) activities provide the most interesting and beneficial discussions and point us to better solutions for many of the world’s greatest challenges. Albert also believes this to be true. He writes, “The goal of this book is to develop a new way of thinking about planetary futures that can help us create more useful and comprehensive maps of the possibility space. … This book is less concerned with ‘predicting’ the future than with illuminating possible lines of world historical development in order to inform present-day strategies that can help shape the future in more progressive (or at least less catastrophic) directions.” One of Albert’s greatest concerns is that scenario analysis is now primarily conducted by large organizations with self-centered objectives. He explains, “Militaries, intelligence agencies, central banks, and corporations are all deeply engaged in various forms of future-scenario analysis, which they use to develop strategies that may ‘perform well under a range of future conditions.’ Rather than allowing powerful actors to monopolize these techniques in their efforts to preempt and constrain the future possibility space, scholars and activists should engage in counter-hegemonic futures analyses in order to widen our imaginaries of possible futures and develop strategies to bring about more just futures. As John Urry says, the terrain of futures studies ‘is too important to be left to states, corporations and technologists, … and social science needs to be central in disentangling, debating and delivering those futures.”
I certainly have no problem with academics “widening our imaginaries of possible futures”; however, this shouldn’t preempt organizations from considering how they should plan for a range of potential futures. The efforts aren’t mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Albert is concerned that strategies aimed at advancing the self-interests of militaries, intelligence agencies, central banks, and corporations could lead the world into an undesirable future. He explains, “Ambitious policy reforms and technological breakthroughs — if constrained within a profit- and growth-oriented ‘ecomodernist’ framework — would likely push the world-system down a dystopian trajectory (or at best a ‘ustopian’ future, in Margaret Atwood’s sense, combining utopian and dystopian elements). From a counter-hegemonic perspective, the purpose of exploring these futures is to understand the mechanisms and elite strategies that may prevent global capitalism from decisively shifting away from its increasingly catastrophic trajectory, anticipate the different kinds of systemic crises and disruptions that would emerge, highlight both the challenges and opportunities that these crises would create for progressive movements, and warn of the dangerous amplifying feedbacks that could make such trajectories self-reinforcing.”
As bleak as his conclusion is, he understands that his arguments are unlikely to sway the institutions he mentions. To help create a better future, Albert believes he must paint a range of better outcomes that convince stakeholders to change their thinking. He explains, “The second task is the work of developing ‘concrete utopias,’ which involves the imagination of desirable futures that are ‘genuinely possible’ — or that may plausibly emerge through the conjunction of ongoing structural trends and counter-hegemonic struggles seeking to transform the world-system. Concrete utopias are not idealized worlds in which all conflicts, inequalities, and forms of injustice have been eradicated. They are better understood, as Thaler puts it, as ‘temporary stations on a continuous, yet rocky journey’ toward more just and sustainable futures. Concrete utopian speculation must negotiate the tension between radical imagination and rigorous social, political, and ecological analysis of the possible. In other words, it emerges from the always fraught encounter between utopianism and realism.”
It would be wrong to dismiss Albert’s book as the rantings of a liberal academic. He is grounded in realism. As Albert notes, “I am less interested in the precise contours of concrete utopian destinations than the processes and mechanisms by which they might emerge in practice.” Shread-Hewitt notes, “To map the trajectories of these ‘problematics’, and how they interact, Albert’s response is to look for ‘nodal points.’ These are moments when the ordinary functioning of a complex system is somehow disrupted, either by exogenous factors or (often as not) by its own internal forces reaching some critical threshold. … This is the great strength of the book. Rather than just outlining future scenarios, it leads us through them and shows where their trajectories are likely to rupture and split. Each crisis is an opportunity for positive change as much as it is an opening for further disorder. By tracking the future as a series of nodal points, Navigating the Polycrisis gives readers a heuristic guide with which to approach political, economic, and socio-ecological change.”
Albert understands that the biggest players on the world stage cannot be ignored. He concludes, “I focus primarily on developments in the world-system ‘core’ — mainly the US, China, and Europe — since what happens in the core will probably have the most influence over the planetary future as a whole. I counterbalance this by showing how trajectories in the core will be shaped and constrained by political struggles across the periphery and semi-periphery (or global south).” In this respect, Albert’s thoughts in some ways parallel those of my good friend Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett. Concerning the core (i.e., the North) and the South, Barnett writes, “The United States currently pursues a strategy of limited regret with [the South]’s slate of fragile states. We send foreign aid. When that is not enough, we send military personnel to train local security forces. And when that fails, we send in Special Forces to kill their bad actors. This narrow approach will not suffice in coming decades. Today, the European Union has its model of political integration known as accession, while China aggressively markets its model of economic integration known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Meanwhile, Washington largely limits its offerings to military assistance and alliances. America needs to elevate its game by innovating new forms of state affiliation for connecting South to North. These must broker more viable forms of statehood in the former while modulating the flow of climate refugees to the latter, the goal being to keep the South’s most resilient populations in place while accommodating the most vulnerable. Climate change forces all species — and all nations — to adapt, move, or die.”[5]
For years, I have been a fan of scenario analysis and planning. These exercises often provide new insights, new possibilities, and new directions. Albert’s book is an excellent contribution to this field and deserves close reading.
Footnotes
[1] Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the world of the polycrisis,” Financial Times, 28 October 2022.
[2] Michael Lerner, “Navigating the Polycrisis—Life in Turbulent Times,” CounterCurrents.org, 29 July 2023.
[3] Ben Shread-Hewitt, “A Review of ‘Navigating the Polycrisis’: A Map of Collapse, Utopia, and The Many Paths In Between,” Resilience, 2 May 2024.
[4] Michael J. Albert, “Navigating the Polycrisis: Excerpt,” Resilience, 18 April 2024.
[5] Thomas P.M. Barnett, “The global future is north-south integration,” email, 15 February 2024.
