Mapping the Polycrisis: A new project supported by ORA and in collaboration with Cascade Institute, Post Carbon Institute & Polycrisis Transition Consultancy

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We are excited to announce a new project, “Mapping the Polycrisis”, supported by the Omega Resilience Awards (ORA). The project will focus on an initial scoping exercise to: find and map polycrisis actors in the “Global South”; build a prototype directory; and reflect on what it means to be responding to polycrisis. 

We are pleased also to announce our collaboration with key stakeholders engaged in aligned efforts to map the polycrisis: the Cascade Institute, the Post Carbon Institute, and the Polycrisis Transition Consultancy. 

Background to the Project

The effects of the global polycrisis are being ever more keenly felt and there is a growing set of actors who are explicitly responding to this set of interconnected crises. These actors are often disparate, spread across the globe with limited strategic coordination with one another. Even the terminology used to describe our current time of crisis is not universally shared. 

Mapping those actors responding to the polycrisis has been identified as a highly valuable activity by many of us working in this area; mapping is the first step towards cohering the field of work responding to the polycrisis and facilitating the shared awareness, strategic alignment, peer learning and collaboration required to increase impact. 

Plan of Work

Mapping is a huge task. Commencing with a small initial scoping can provide the foundations for future work to build on, and help catalyze shared efforts through a concrete starting point. We therefore propose an initial, limited research project targeting actors explicitly responding to the polycrisis covering the following items:

  • Preliminary desk research and key informant interviews to create an initial directory of actors
  • Engagement of these actors via semi-structured interviews, using a snowball sampling methodology to find others
  • Building out an initial database of important and influential actors
  • Preliminary data analysis and insight generation [scoped based on available resource]
  • Engagement of others doing work aligned to the mapping, to begin to build a consortium for future collaboration

Delivery of this initial phase will be led by a team at Life Itself Research, consisting of Rufus Pollock, Theo Cox, and Catherine Tran, with input and oversight from Stanley Wu and Mark Valentine at ORA. 

Risks of Mapping

We are conscious that mapping, traditionally understood, carries a number of risks. These include the potential to quickly become outdated and redundant, being liable to the blindspots and biases of those doing the mapping and imposing certain framings on the mapped actors which they do not themselves resonate with. We acknowledge these and will guard against them in the following ways. 

First, this work will explicitly target the creation of a “Polycrisis Commons” of information, providing information which directly addresses the use cases of the actors involved hosted on a platform which is designed to be easily contributed to by the community in a wiki-like fashion. Second, we will leverage the network of ORA recipients and fellows as the starting point for the project to ensure that voices from the global south are represented from the outset of the project. Again, we intend for this to not only be a matter of including these actors, but of engaging them in a co-creative process as part of the consortium shaping the design of the commons itself.

Finally, while we refer to  the polycrisis here for simplicity, sensitivity to different framings and uses of language will be held at the forefront of our awareness throughout the work. We are conscious that many terms exist to describe the current global context, and will not only seek to make this explicit in our analysis but to focus on the common features of different actors’ perspectives and activities, rather than trying to impose  a shared conceptual banner which they may not align with themselves.

More about the Partnering Organizations

  • Life Itself: Life itself is a community committed to practical action for a radically wiser, weller world. We create coliving hubs, start businesses, do research and engage in activism to pioneer a wiser future.
  • Omega Resilience Awards: The Omega Resilience Awards (ORA) is an innovative catalytic grantmaking program that provides fellowships, research grants, and media creation to support new models of thinking, leadership, communication, and engagement in response to the challenges of the global polycrisis.
  • Cascade Institute: The Cascade Institute is a Canadian research center that addresses the full range of humanity’s converging environmental, economic, political, technological, and health crises. Using advanced methods to map and model complex global systems, they analyze interactions between systemic risks to anticipate future crises and identify opportunities for high-leverage interventions in social systems.
  • Post Carbon Institute: Founded in 2003, Post Carbon Institute’s mission is to lead the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world by providing individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises of the 21st century.
  • Polycrisis Transition Consultancy: PTC is a research agency that focuses on strategic responses to the global polycrisis. Their activities include: mapping; grantmaking; movement strategy; wiki and knowledge management; research and writing; and speaking, education, and events. 

Want to know more or get involved?

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