By Dr. Maria Gavris.
Maria i
s assistant professor in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. She is a political economist with a particular interest in governance for sustainable development, capitalism's multiple interconnected crises, and alternatives to the mainstream development paradigm.
‘Polycrisis,’ which inspired the theme of the 2025 DSA Conference Navigating crisis: dangers and opportunities in development at the Centre for Development Studies (Bath), has become something of a buzzword in recent years. Sometimes also referred to as ‘overlapping emergencies’ or ‘permacrisis,’ it denotes a multi-dimensional crisis which is larger than the sum of its parts. The term was popularised by economic historian Adam Tooze (2021) during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to describe the public health crisis at the time, which then morphed into an economic crisis, a crisis of care, a cost-of-living crisis, all unfolding against a backdrop of longstanding ecological crisis and geopolitical instability. First coined by French complexity theorist Edgar Morin in 1999, the term has a longer history; still, Tooze’s framing has had particular traction, especially in cementing the notion that 2020 marked the beginning of ‘the first comprehensive crisis of the age of the Anthropocene’ (Tooze, 2021:22). Tooze’s reading of the polycrisis is a critical one, acknowledging the dependence of the economy on the environment and on social policy. When it comes to solutions, however, his scope narrows considerably, producing a surprisingly modest response, given the scale of the interlocking crises he outlines: Keynesian economic policies coupled with investments that would prevent or make future crises more manageable, for example in renewable energy, or vaccine development to prepare for future pandemics. The language of the polycrisis has since been taken up by global institutions like the UN or the World Bank, mainly to legitimise existing policies. These conventional approaches tend to assume that we can manage our way out of crisis with a few policy tweaks, improved coordination, and stronger governance, without questioning the paradigms that produced the crisis in the first place.
However, as Minna Salami (2024:52), Chair of the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme at the New Institute, highlighted: ‘the biased Europatriarchal approach to the polycrisis is unsuitable for tackling the polycrisis because it is the polycrisis’. Critical scholarship on the polycrisis argues that addressing it requires nothing short of systemic transformation. These alternative perspectives contend that the polycrisis lays bare the fundamental limitations of our existing development models. What is needed is not more top-down, rigid, techno-scientific fixes, but a genuinely transformative, egalitarian, and inclusive approach to development (see e.g. Leach et al, 2021). Engaging with these critical perspectives on the polycrisis is thus essential for reimagining development.
In my presentation at the DSA 2025, I identified three recurring (overlapping and non-exhaustive) themes that emerge across the more diverse critical literature on the polycrisis: first, the polycrisis as a crisis of social reproduction; second, as a crisis of global capitalism and its institutions; and third, as a crisis generated by multiple, intersecting systems of oppression. These insights span a broad intellectual terrain, from Black feminist thought to Global South perspectives in international studies. But across this diversity runs a unifying thread: the polycrisis is, at its core, a crisis of and about power.
Social reproduction
Feminist scholarship frames the polycrisis as, above all, a crisis of social reproduction. To understand the polycrisis, we need to remember that ‘capitalist accumulation not only depends on the exploitation of wage labour but also the expropriation of unpaid labour and ‘cheap natures’ in the spheres of social reproduction' (Bieler, 2025:2). This perspective highlights how ‘development’ has, for a long time now, been reduced to ‘economic development,’ or a model of development predicated on economic growth. What has been forgotten in this process is the dependence of economic development on the environment and on society; or, to put it slightly differently, the foundational role of care, broadly defined (care for people, for communities, and for the environment) in sustaining economic activity.
From this standpoint, the polycrisis emerged from the breakdown of these non-market systems that underpin and interact with the market economy (Heintz, Staab and Turquet, 2021). It began in the environmental sphere, driven by unsustainable industrialisation and urbanisation that have destroyed ecosystems and increased human proximity to disease-carrying animals, triggering pandemics like COVID-19. The crisis then spilled over into the economy, and from there into the other non-market sphere of care. In this latter sector, the burden fell disproportionately on women, especially Black and Brown women, who absorbed the shocks through unpaid or underpaid care work. This reveals the profoundly gendered and racialised dimensions of the polycrisis.
At its core, this perspective draws attention to the invisible labour that sustains life on Earth—what feminists call reproductive work. In terms of development policy, the implication is clear: we need a paradigm that centres this labour and makes it visible and valued. Since the onset of COVID-19, we have seen campaigns like Care Income Now, which builds on the 1970s Wages for Housework movement and demands a global care income for anyone—regardless of gender—engaged in care work. A related proposal, Wages for Earthwork (Temin, 2025), advocates compensating those who care for the planet, often indigenous peoples, and disproportionately indigenous women. This proposal goes beyond financial recognition to emphasise decolonial North-South reparations and indigenous land rights. The focus on social reproduction also raises bigger questions about the role of the economy in society and in our development models. Some feminist scholars, for instance, contemplate a potential alliance with the degrowth movement, which similarly critiques the dominance of economic metrics and seeks to redefine prosperity in more ecological and human-centred terms (Heintz, Staab and Turquet, 2021).
Global capitalism and its institutions
Much of this critical literature begins by questioning the term ‘polycrisis’ itself. While the concept is useful for capturing the complexity and interconnection of today’s crises, critics argue that it falls short in identifying their causes. Scholars like Işikara (2022) and Sial (2023) contend that ‘polycrisis’ is too tidy, too abstract; it describes what is happening without explaining why it is happening or who is responsible. As they put it, terms like ‘polycrisis’ or ‘overlapping emergencies’ obscure agency and conceal the real culprits—the poly-perpetrators—namely, global capitalism and its dominant institutions (Işikara, 2022; Sial, 2023). Yuen Yuen Ang (2024), who presented the ODS keynote on day 3 of the conference, likewise traces the roots of the polycrisis to the industrial-colonial paradigm embedded in the Bretton Woods institutions.
These scholars emphasise that the global order remains fundamentally neocolonial, shaped by Northern dominance and sustained by unequal power relations. This critique reframes the polycrisis not as a spontaneous or accidental convergence of crises, but as a political outcome—produced and perpetuated by systems designed to benefit a few at the expense of the many (Sial, 2023). A related argument sees the polycrisis also as a crisis of capitalist crisis management. In the past, institutions such as trade unions provided some buffer against the worst effects of global capitalism. But as those institutions have been weakened or hollowed out, the likelihood of insulating people from systemic harm has diminished (Jayasuriya, 2023).
In terms of implications for development, this critique offers an interesting challenge: the polycrisis could serve as an inflection point, a chance to rethink what we mean by ‘development’ and ‘progress’ – in Ang’s (2024) words, a ‘polytunity’. It opens space for alternatives to the Western capitalist model and reminds us that development does not need to be synonymous with extractive growth or colonial hierarchy. Above all, this perspective demands that we confront the systems of power that have brought us here. If we treat the polycrisis as a neutral or purely technical phenomenon, we risk depoliticising it—and in doing so, obscuring both the problem and the path forward.
Multiple intersecting systems of oppression
Typically, we tend to view the polycrisis as a context of worsening conditions, of accelerating breakdown. However, social activist adrienne maree brown (quoted in Black Feminist Fund, 2024:5) raises an interesting provocation: what if ‘things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered’? At the very least, we ought to question for whom things are getting worse. For many across the Global South, the realities now labelled as part of the polycrisis—climate change, pandemics, war, economic instability—are nothing new. These are not emerging crises, but ongoing conditions (Sultana, 2021). If large segments of the global population have been living under these compounded pressures for decades, why is it only now that the term ‘polycrisis’ has entered public discourse with such force? The answer lies in who is now being affected. As these crises begin to seep into the core of global capitalism and impact those with proximity to power, they are suddenly rendered urgent. In other words, the term has gained popularity because the crises are now touching populations that have previously been shielded, which are only now experiencing what the most marginalised groups in society have been experiencing from the start. In this light, the task before us is to uncover and expose the systems of oppression that have long structured crisis conditions.
This perspective pushes us to ask deeper questions: who gets to shape and define reality? Who decides what counts as a crisis, and when we are facing one? Whose voices are excluded from the conversation? What counts as knowledge and who defines this? The shift in focus from interlocking crises to interlocking systems of oppression (Salami, 2024) means asking not just who caused the polycrisis, but also who suffers from it most. In this way, of the three strands discussed here, this appears the most critical of the language of the polycrisis, for obscuring both the causes and the victims of the multiple interlocking crises facing the world today. The point to remember here is that even though the polycrisis is, to some extent, a collective experience, it is also a highly uneven one. Our experiences of it are profoundly shaped by race, gender, class, geography, and other intersecting identities.
This means that any meaningful response to the polycrisis in the realm of development must be rooted in intersectional analysis. In order to do development differently, we must account for how macro-level crises interact with lived experiences, and ensure that those most affected are not only seen but actively engaged in shaping the response. A just response to the polycrisis demands not only political and economic transformation, but a re-evaluation of whose knowledge matters, and how we come to know the world at all.
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Collectively, critical perspectives on the polycrisis urge us to move beyond abstract diagnoses and towards a deeper understanding of the systems and power structures that produce and sustain crises. Whether framed as a breakdown of social reproduction, a consequence of global capitalism and neocolonial institutions, or the lived reality of interlocking systems of oppression, these approaches all reach a similar conclusion: the polycrisis is not a neutral convergence of unfortunate events, but a deeply political phenomenon rooted in inequality and exploitation. Recognising this challenges dominant development models and compels us to imagine alternatives focused on care, global equity, and epistemic justice. If we are to respond meaningfully to the polycrisis, we must rethink not only what counts as crisis, but also what counts as development, what counts as knowledge, and ultimately, what kind of future we are striving to build.
References
Ang, Y. 2024. ‘Doing Development in the Polycrisis’, Project Syndicate (online), accessed 22 May 2025, available from https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/new-economic-development-paradigm-needed-for-climate-change-inequality-pandemics-by-yuen-yuen-ang-2024-11
Bieler, A. 2025. ‘Confronting multiple global crises: a political economy approach for the twenty-first century.’ Globalizations, pp. 1–18, online before print.
Black Feminist Fund, 2024, Black Feminist Movements and Crises Report, online accessed 22 May 2025, available from https://blackfeministfund.org/our-advocacy/black-feminist-movements-and-crisis/
Heintz, J., Staab, S., & Turquet, L. 2021. ‘Don’t let another crisis go to waste: the COVID-19 pandemic and the imperative for a paradigm shift.’ Feminist Economics, 27 (1-2):470-485
Işikara, G. 2022. ‘Beating around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism’, online, accessed 22 May 2025, available from https://developingeconomics.org/2022/11/22/beating-around-the-bush-polycrisis-overlapping-emergencies-and-capitalism/
Jayasuriya, K. 2023. ‘Polycrisis or crises of capitalist social reproduction.’ Global Social Challenges Journal, 2(2), pp. 203-211.
Leach, M. et al. 2021. ‘Post-pandemic transformations: How and why COVID-19 requires us to rethink development’, World Development, vol. 138, pp. 1-11.
Salami, M. 2024 ‘Intersections & Interventions: Black Feminism in the Age of the Polycrisis’, in Hanusch, F. and A. Katsman (eds.), Seeds For Democratic Futures, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 49-56.
Sial, F. 2023 ‘Whose Polycrisis?’, online, accessed 22 May 2025, available from https://developingeconomics.org/2023/01/27/whose-polycrisis/
Sultana, F. 2021. ‘Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: a feminist reading of overlapping crises.’ Social & Cultural Geography, 22 (4): 447-460.
Tooze, A. 2021. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. London: Allen Lane
Temin, D.M., 2025, ‘Wages for Earthwork’. American Political Science Review, vol.119(1), pp. 179-92.
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