What Do Experts Mean by Polycrisis?
In Prep
Y. Emre Tapan · Sienna Mark · Samantha Holder · Daniel Hoyer · Rod Schoonover · Daniel P. Aldrich
“Polycrisis” has gone from academic margins to the World Economic Forum in under two years, yet experts still disagree on what it means. We surveyed 92 crisis professionals before the field’s major definitions were published, capturing a rare pre-convergence snapshot. The finding: experts overwhelmingly agree that polycrisis means crises that interact — but the features that published definitions emphasize most (global scale, extended timeframe) are almost never mentioned spontaneously. And when asked how crises combine, experts split sharply, with those most committed to interaction rejecting “additive” as too weak. The concept has a stable core, an unsettled mechanism, and a periphery that theorists may have mistaken for the center. Read as a question of informational segregation, the null is the news: the core does not fracture along social lines — role, geography, and credentials predict nothing, and only familiarity with the literature predicts naming interaction at all.