14 September 2026 – We have become remarkably good at describing systemic breakdown.
Polycrisis. Planetary emergency. Tipping points. Cascading failures. Democratic backsliding. Systemic risk. Ecological collapse. Patriarchal backlash.
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?
Beyond the visibility of crisis
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.
The mycelium offers a useful metaphor. Social transformation may work similarly — as a network of relationships.
The individual initiative may not be the transformation. The transformation may emerge through the relationships between initiatives.
This matters because some initiatives will remain small, while others may become institutions. Their significance may lie not only in their individual scale, but in the connections, learning and mutual reinforcement between them.
From hope to research
For this reason, polyrenewal should not simply become another word for hope. It could instead become a hypothesis for observation, research, analysis — and collective action.
Where is polyrenewal occurring? Under what social, economic and political conditions does it emerge? How does knowledge travel between experiments? What allows local innovations to become durable institutions? When do previously separate initiatives begin to reinforce one another? Which forms of leadership and governance enable such networks to flourish?
And perhaps the most important question:
Under what conditions can distributed experiments become sufficiently connected to influence the wider system?
These are questions that remain significantly overlooked and under-researched. There is growing research on regenerative practices, social innovation and pathways of social transformation, but we need to move beyond documenting and celebrating “good practices.”
Polyrenewal needs to become an object of systematic inquiry in its own right.
We have begun to develop increasingly sophisticated understandings of how polycrisis emerges — how crises interact, cascade and reinforce one another. We now need to understand much better how processes of renewal work: how regenerative practices emerge, connect, learn, spread and become capable of reshaping systems.
A language of emergence
Polyrenewal does not cancel out polycrisis, nor does it guarantee a better future. Its value may simply be that it changes the question.
Rather than asking only “How do we respond to systemic crisis?” we can also ask:
What is already renewing life — and what conditions would allow it to connect, strengthen and scale?
This resonates with the Club of Rome’s emphasis on material and cultural transformation. Polyrenewal unfolds across both dimensions: through new economic and ecological practices, but also through shifts in values, relationships, forms of power and collective agency.
The future will not be determined by breakdown alone. Across communities, organisations and movements, people are already experimenting with different ways of organising economic, social, ecological and democratic life.
These are more than isolated exceptions. They may be visible signs of renewal processes already underway.
Yes, we are living through a polycrisis — and, at the same time, through a polyrenewal.
It is time we learned to see it.
