Polyrenewal
= the antidote to Polycrisis: "the simultaneous emergence of multiple, interconnected practices that regenerate ecological, social, economic and democratic life." [1]
Discussion
Petra Kuenkel:
"The concept of polycrisis, developed by complexity thinkers Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern in Terre-Patrie (1993), captures this entanglement: multiple crises interact and amplify one another, creating dynamics that cannot be understood or addressed in isolation.
We have sophisticated language for systemic breakdown. We have much less language for systemic renewal.
What if that matters?
Regeneration tends to be different.
It often happens locally and incrementally: communities creating energy cooperatives; farmers restoring degraded soils; Indigenous communities protecting ecosystems; women building cooperatives and solidarity economies; citizens experimenting with new forms of democratic participation; organisations developing collaborative leadership; communities creating systems of care beyond conventional markets.
These initiatives are usually treated as separate phenomena. But from a systems perspective, an important question arises:
What if they are not as separate as they appear?
What if thousands of local experiments constitute emerging responses to the same underlying systemic challenges — and our difficulty in seeing this pattern is partly a problem of language?
Attention follows what we can name: Language does more than describe reality. It influences what we notice, research and consider significant.
A useful analogy comes from ecology. When we look at a forest, we can focus on the trees that are falling and measure their decline while missing the seedlings, roots, fungi and countless processes through which the forest continuously regenerates itself.
Something similar may be occurring in human societies.
Beneath the visible dynamics of systemic crisis, another layer of activity may be developing — one concerned with restoring relationships, capacities and the conditions for life.
I propose calling this polyrenewal — as a working concept for this emerging systemic pattern.
What is polyrenewal?
By polyrenewal, I mean:
- the simultaneous emergence of multiple, interconnected practices that regenerate ecological, social, economic and democratic life.
The poly matters. Polyrenewal does not describe a single movement, ideology or coordinated global programme. Its manifestations are diverse: feminist, ecological, Indigenous, cooperative, democratic, community-based and economic.
They may use different vocabularies — care, solidarity, commons, regeneration, food sovereignty, degrowth, democracy, wellbeing, feminist economics — yet embody related principles.
The proposition is not that these initiatives constitute one movement, but that they may represent different expressions of an emerging systemic pattern of renewal.
This makes the concept particularly interesting in relation to polycrisis.
We may be experiencing polycrisis and polyrenewal simultaneously.
One describes interacting processes of breakdown in systems that have become increasingly extractive, unequal and ecologically destabilising. The other describes emerging practices that restore relationships and conditions on which collective and planetary wellbeing depend.
The two processes coexist — and interact."