Institutions & Governance

№ 2026-65 · October 2026 · 22 min

The Global Polycrisis and the Architecture of Systemic Risk

Multi-domain shock years rose from about 6% of countries a year before 2020 to 9% since, after 33% in 2020. The observed network has a sink: economic shocks, internet shutdowns and governance shocks raise the next year's risk of displacement or mortality shocks 2.5, 2.0 and 1.6 times. Low-income countries carry eleven times the multi-domain burden of rich ones, and twenty countries with 705 million people face a 30% or higher modelled risk of multi-domain shocks in 2026.

№ 2026-62 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Architecture of Global Polycrisis Mitigation

Every national architecture has a weak link: the median country's weakest function trails its average by 16 points, and decoupling, the most common gap, barely tracks income. In 2020–2023 national capacities explained almost none of the growth and inflation damage, but steering was the exception, associated with 62 fewer excess deaths per 100,000 and a 5.7-point smaller rise in hunger. Thin buffers leave 3.5 billion people relying on a global backstop that covers a fraction of need.

№ 2026-45 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Architecture of Global Convergence Under Systemic Risk

Development has been dismantling the slow crises: since the early 2000s child deaths fell in 98% of developing economies, emissions intensity in 88% and hunger in 76%. The fast systemic crises did not follow: debt service improved in only 31%, conflict in 39% and inflation in 46%, and income growth explains none of them. Beyond growth itself, only government effectiveness and clean water predict broad crisis reduction — and with convergence now stalled at 49% of economies, the missing floors are institutional.

№ 2026-44 · October 2026 · 18 min

Digital Infrastructure as a Resilience Multiplier in Crisis-Prone Developing Economies

Digital rails speed up crisis response — India, Brazil and Pakistan paid emergency cash within 7–8 days in 2020 — but they do not replace a capable state. Across 207 shocks since 1991 and the COVID recession, government effectiveness predicts recovery far better than internet use. The exception is telling: where governance is weak, every 10 extra points of account ownership before COVID went with about 7 percentage-point-years less lost output by 2023. Digital infrastructure multiplies thin state capacity most.

№ 2026-43 · October 2026 · 19 min

Resource Scarcity, Environmental Stress, and the Escalation of Armed Conflict

Scarcity is an accelerant, not a detonator. Drought cuts cereal yields by about 6% and doubles the odds of a crop failure, but in the same country an ordinary dry year barely changes the risk of war. Severe droughts raise the chance a new conflict starts the next year by about 60%, and in fragile states local droughts shift fighting toward communal and militia violence. Violence concentrates where scarcity meets weak states: 24 such countries, 7% of humanity, suffered 37% of conflict deaths in 2016–24.

№ 2026-34 · October 2026 · 17 min

Mapping the Interdependencies of Twenty-First-Century Risk

Across 191 countries and 18 indicators, about half of what makes risks travel together is poverty: average link strength halves once income is held constant. What survives is a tighter web centred on conflict, displacement, resource dependence and rapid population growth. Countries stressed in three or more domains are almost all unstable, and the hubs point to where intervention breaks the most links at once.

№ 2026-32 · October 2026 · 17 min

Global Survivability Under Compounding Twenty-First-Century Risks

From 2000 to 2024, about 174 million children died before their fifth birthday, more than ten times the 14.9 million excess deaths of the pandemic's first two years. Today 69% of those child deaths fall in the high-risk countries that hold a quarter of humanity. Matching the best quarter of each income group would avert 2.4 million child deaths a year, nearly half the total, and 34 million more by 2050 than on current trends.

№ 2026-28 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Geography of Global Vulnerability

A quarter of humanity, 2 billion people, lives in countries at high or very high risk of humanitarian crisis, and all 16 of the highest-risk countries score 8.4 or more out of 10 for conflict hazard. Mapping 191 countries on the INFORM Risk Index shows that hazard is not destiny. Coping infrastructure improved in 154 countries over 2017–2026 while institutions stalled, and matching each country's income peers would cut the population at high risk by more than half.

№ 2026-25 · October 2026 · 18 min

Africa Ascendant

Africa's share of humanity is returning to its seventeenth-century level and then far exceeding it, from 13.5 per cent in 2000 to a projected 37.5 per cent by 2100. Five centuries of African demography, from 1500 to scenarios for 2500, alongside the diaspora and the mixed ancestry that spreads African heritage worldwide far faster than migration does.

№ 2026-24 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Polycrisis Apocalypse

What if the polycrisis outran humanity's capacity to manage it? The Polycrisis Apocalypse, a term coined by H Heuristics, names a slow collapse of industrial civilisation followed by centuries of regression. Past collapses, a stress-versus-repair model readers can run and today's ledger of ten crisis domains show how it could happen, and what keeps it hypothetical.

№ 2026-23 · October 2026 · 16 min

Resilience in an Age of Polycrisis

Exposure did not decide how hard the 2021–23 food-price cascade hit; falling currencies did. Tracing that shock month by month from gas to fertiliser, grains and household food inflation in 183 countries — and the 2026 Strait of Hormuz shock along the same chain — gives a framework for when to diversify, decouple, buffer and absorb.

№ 2026-22 · October 2026 · 12 min

The Polycrisis Century

Food, oil, markets, policy, conflict and disasters rarely go wrong in the same year: their year-to-year correlation averages 0.12. In the 2020s they did, with an average of 3.5 of six acute indicators in their worst quartile each year against 0.7 in the 2010s, on a chronic floor of record temperatures, conflict and displacement.

№ 2026-21 · October 2026 · 12 min

Polycrisis Resilience in the Twenty-First Century

Seventy-three countries are both highly vulnerable to shocks and poorly prepared to adapt, including 23 of the 24 low-income economies. Mapping the pressures converging on the world system against the adaptive capacity of 190 countries, and the financial buffers between them, shows where shocks become crises — with a country explorer built on the ND-GAIN index.

№ 2026-18 · September 2026 · 21 min

Convergence Without Absorption

Half of developing economies have not narrowed the income gap since 2019. The pathways now proposed in manufacturing's place — digital services, agro-processing, green industry, minerals — are tradable and productive, and they absorb a fraction of the labour. That splits convergence into measures that used to move together.

№ 2026-17 · September 2026 · 21 min

Navigating the Transition

Forecasts of fossil demand now disagree about the direction after 2030, which makes prediction a poor basis for policy. What is not in dispute is that resource revenue is becoming shorter-dated and more variable. That is an asset–liability problem, and it has four known treatments.

№ 2026-10 · September 2026 · 20 min

Climate Litigation Goes South

Climate litigation was a northern sport: a Dutch foundation, a German grandmother, an American youth cohort. In the past decade the centre of gravity has shifted south, where courts have ordered governments to implement their own climate laws, blocked coal plants and deforestation, and written a right to a stable climate into constitutions that never mentioned it.

№ 2026-08 · September 2026 · 18 min

One Source, Two Signs

Climate change and air pollution come out of the same combustion, which has made it natural to treat them as one problem. They differ in residence time by five orders of magnitude, in the geography of their harm, and in the sign of their effect on the planet's energy balance — and each difference changes what a combined strategy can do.

№ 2026-07 · September 2026 · 17 min

A Proactive Strategy for Mitigating the Twenty-First-Century Polycrisis

Every serious polycrisis strategy names the same four elements, and the list has never been the problem. The four differ in who captures their benefit and in whether anyone but the beneficiary can supply them — which determines the instrument that can deliver each, and explains why combined strategies underperform their parts.

№ 2026-05 · September 2026 · 19 min

The Economics of Prevention in an Age of Polycrisis

Prevention is appraised against doing nothing. Its real alternative is emergency response — already being paid for, repeatedly, at surge prices, on crisis financing, leaving no asset and restoring the exposure that produced the loss. The obstacles are institutional, not economic.

№ 2026-04 · September 2026 · 21 min

Breaking the Pollution–Poverty–Climate Nexus in Emerging Economies

Pollution, poverty and climate cause one another in every direction, and are managed by three ministries on three timetables. Integrated strategies keep failing not because the analysis is wrong but because integrated things must still be bought by a single budget holder on a single clock. The remedy is to appraise on the fastest.

Institutions & Governance