Each country will find its own toolkit to tackle the ‘polycrisis’

The interesting thing about polycrisis is perhaps its dualistic structure: a set of general crises that plague the world today, with an additional layer for every country or region. This presents a rare challenge for Indian strategists and planners as existing methodologies or tools are clearly insufficient to process and solve this complex skeleton of interconnected problems. The world is changing, and so should the toolkit.

Imagine the changes in the world since the start of the COVID pandemic in March 2020. This event, which happened once in a hundred years, brought the global economy to a complete halt. All risk scenarios never envisaged such a situation; Therefore, there was never a Plan B. The global lockdown broke all well-established supply chains built in the last 30-40 years across national borders. The knee-jerk reactions saw jurisdictional protectionists raise walls, threatening global trade and globalization. Then came the Russo-Ukraine conflict, which created a deep geopolitical crisis, including a re-ignition of nuclear threats. The war threatens to turn the world into factions, which tell of a not-too-distant past, but this time with differences. In the background is a slow-burning US-China Cold War, with increased muscle flexibility in the Indo-Pacific.

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The Russia-Ukraine conflict also lit a spark under the nascent inflationary trend, and in the attendant bushfires now central banks are rushing to raise interest rates, further eroding business sentiment and economic growth prospects. The war has inflicted many other costs, including severe shortages in the supply of energy and food grains. This has increased the debt of poor countries. Add climate change, and it not only exacerbates all of the problems mentioned above, but magnifies it by a different order of magnitude.

Economic historian and Columbia University professor Adam Touse is popularizing the term ‘polycrisis’, which was first used by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in 2016 to describe Europe’s combustible situation, including Brexit, Indebtedness was involved with climate change and a refugee crisis. The Jain Family Institute, a social science research organization based in New York, now has a new publication called Polycrisis. The University of Bath has launched a new lecture series on navigating the polycrisis. In the past few months there have been several papers trying to define and parse polycrisis. Touse uses the current multi-layered crisis to sharpen the definition: “A polycrisis is not simply a situation where you encounter multiple crises. It is a situation… where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.” is dangerous.”

True, except when the whole varies with geography.

Take, for example, the European Union. Apart from everything else being equal, the region is facing an immediate energy crisis. Largely dependent on Russia all these years for its energy supply, the EU must now find ways to meet winter heating demand from households (which include higher fuel subsidies), and then, through economic activity. To meet the industrial demand for UP. Essentially this would mean renewing investment in fossil-fuel capacity to meet the sudden demand-supply gap. It then distorts its climate policies and fiscal balance. Under it are the early, underground political fault-lines developing between liberal-democratic regimes and radical right-wing political formations originating in Austria, Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, Sweden and elsewhere on the continent.

The US, for example, is also grappling with its own set of distinct political, social and economic challenges; Or consider the UK, which is staring at a deep economic and political turmoil. And in South America, driven by inequality and wealth, country after country is electing a leftist government. All things being equal, each country brings something unique to the Polycrisis Party.

Ditto for India. In addition to global factors adversely affecting inflation, interest rates and currency values, India will have to address a unique set of challenges from the domestic economy (rising unemployment, a relatively stable economy and heightened communal tensions) and recent geopolitical choices. . Done by New Delhi. The ongoing world strategic rearrangement—along with Russia, China and Iran against the rest of the world—is a bit too obvious for India; Its unresolved border problems with an aggressive China spoil the equation. India clearly needs to leverage its newfound non-alignment, or strategic autonomy, not only to source mineral oil and semiconductor chips, but also to navigate a unique set of challenges on security, climate change, trade and economic ties .

Finally, as each country sharpens its custom-built equipment, it’s worth asking what happens to the global handbook of rules.

Rajrishi Singhal is a policy advisor and a senior journalist. His Twitter handle is @rajrishisinghal.

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