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Record W4407715861 · doi:10.1017/sus.2025.9

The polycrisis and the uncertainty possibility space

2025· article· en· W4407715861 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueGlobal Sustainability · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicReligion, Society, and Development
Canadian institutionsRoyal Military College Saint-Jean
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsSpace (punctuation)Environmental scienceComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Non-technical summary At the heart of the polycrisis debate is the struggle to grapple with both the scientific and political uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The struggles over what to do about the polycrisis are thus found at the intersection of science and politics. We must approach the polycrisis as simultaneously a scientific and political challenge. To do so we propose that the polycrisis project adopts the methods of decision-making under deep uncertainty as a way to integrate and encourage collaborations between the scientific and policy worlds. Technical summary The polycrisis concept points to the interaction of multiple global crises and, arguably, to the difficulties in grasping the current moment with conceptual clarity. While Lawrence et al. emphasize the causal relations between crises in multiple global systems to define and operationalize the concept, we argue that they underestimate the politics of knowledge claims about the polycrisis, from the concept's performative function, from the normative claims it enacts or enables, and from the program of action that it carries or implies. We argue instead that at the heart of the polycrisis debate is the struggle to grapple with the (deep) uncertainties – both scientific and political – of the Anthropocene. Polycrisis is found operating at the intersection of science and politics where claims to scientific knowledge and political value, and scientific and political judgements, collide. Dealing with the uncertainties of the polycrisis is thus a matter of scientific methodological conundrum and a matter of political judgement and decision. We then propose that the polycrisis research program adopts decision-making under deep uncertainty methods to reach its objectives of improving policy outcomes, but also to better navigate what we call the uncertainty possibility space of the polycrisis. Social media summary The polycrisis is a struggle to grapple with the uncertainties of the Anthropocene which demands a new policy approach.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.232
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.309
Teacher spread0.304 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it