Governance for the Long Transition – beyond the polycrisis framework

Author: Alexandra Nastase

The story we tell about our context defines the governance challenge we answer to. Today, the story we seem to have agreed upon is that of multiple simultaneous crises — ecological, geopolitical, economic, social, democratic — causally and consequentially interconnected. Problems reinforcing each other, solutions requiring coordination across systems. The corresponding institutional response is crisis management: fighting each emergency with increasing pressure and diminishing resources.

This narrative persists for good reason. The crises are real and the overwhelming feeling of everything happening at once is also real and, even more, we all get to experience it daily. The stakes are this high and an honest systemic reckoning with how institutions frame their role matters. It is precisely why the context assessment needs to identify the right starting point: is it possible that these crises are manifestations of a longer transition, experienced day-by-day, without the long view?

Assuming the transition framing holds, we need to expand the focus from exclusively asking how to manage the emergencies to how to govern the conditions producing them. That is a harder question, and it points toward at least three things that current institutional responses are not doing.

The first thing is an honest systemic orientation about our present.

If we take the longer view, the crisis-transition distinction is not only semantic but strategic. We respond differently to a crisis than to a transition. A crisis's main response is survival. By definition, a crisis has an endpoint and is focused on how to get back to what we have had before. A transition's main response is navigation. It does not hold the promise of a return to Before and focuses on understanding possibilities about what emerges, who gets to shape that and also who bears the costs.

The examples of the past few years are telling. When year after year, democratic institutions face declining and in many OECD countries historically low levels of public trust[i], the response is more or less better communication strategies, not a reckoning with what the trust was based on in the first place. When the European Green Deal met the farmer protests of January 2024, the EU's response included significant regulatory retreats, while the deeper questions about rural livelihoods, fairness, and participation in the transition remained only partially addressed. These are managerial responses oriented toward survival rather than navigation.

The objection to transition thinking in moments of acute crisis is that it looks like long-term luxury in the face of immediate suffering. The historical record suggests the opposite. The Beveridge Report — the blueprint for the British welfare state — was written in 1942, while the country was under bombardment and the war's outcome was uncertain. The Marshall Plan provided food and fuel for the immediate emergency while simultaneously building the institutional architecture of postwar European integration. The New Deal kept people fed during the Depression while constructing the regulatory and social infrastructure of the 20th century American state. In each case, the crisis created the political conditions for institutional transformation that stability had made impossible. Crisis management without transition building reproduces the conditions that produced the crisis. Transition building without crisis response is politically and morally illegitimate. The question is not which to prioritise. It is how to do both with the same resources — and that has always been the governance challenge that separates the adequate response from the merely competent one.

The second thing is getting the story of the past and the future right.

In today's polarised environment, people are pushed to choose between simplified narratives. Either we are living a story of structural injustice and ecological urgency, or one of national identity, economic protection, and cultural continuity. The more honest account is that it is both simultaneously — and that holding that complexity without collapsing into either narrative is the precondition for governing well.

Between 1945 and the early 2000s, Europe produced something historically unprecedented. Life expectancy rose from roughly 65 years to over 80 — a gain of fifteen years in two generations. Child mortality, which had claimed one in three European children as recently as 1900, fell to under 0.3% across Western Europe. Real wages roughly doubled in the space of a generation. The thirty glorious years between 1945 and 1975 — saw regular working people experience an enormous, ongoing growth in their buying power and standard of living, alongside the longest sustained period of inter-state peace in European recorded history. These achievements were not accidental. They were the product of deliberate political choices that created the required conditions and was backed by sustained public investment. They are worth defending, but nostalgia is not the right starting point but a correct understanding of the past and the changing current structural conditions.

Today, the same institutions are struggling to keep up. The welfare states maintain the language of universal protection while their capacity to deliver it narrows. Democratic structures invoke legitimacy while the conditions that produced public trust in them erode beneath them. At both levels, the risk is identical: institutions that maintain the form while losing the substantive connection to the reality they were designed to address. Hollow institutions do not simply become ineffective — they consume the political energy and public trust that would otherwise be available for building something that works. That is how institutional dysfunction becomes anti-institutionalism, which is the political trajectory we are watching unfold across much of the democratic world. 

The postwar institutional settlement built something worth defending, AND it was also imperfect, incomplete, and built on exclusions and inequalities. Getting this story right requires discernment across ideological lines— what was built well enough to survive in new forms, and what was always dependent on conditions that have now shifted?

The third thing is building on the lived experiences and creating opportunities for metabolising social problems collectively.

Governing the transition without integrating the experience of people living inside it makes the same error at greater cost. Discernment about institutions is insufficient without an equally honest account of what those institutions are failing to do for the people living inside the transition — and what it actually costs to live there. People’s experiences are not yet another soft addition to rigorous analysis. They constitute the terrain on which every systemic intervention ultimately succeeds or fails.

The IMF estimates that 60% of jobs in advanced economies have high exposure to AI disruption[ii]. This means that a significant share of their tasks could be performed or augmented by AI. The figure circulates widely in policy discussions – but is rarely accompanied by stories about what happens to a person whose daily structure, professional identity, and social status were organised around work that is being restructured faster than they can adapt. Research on the psychological dimensions of AI-driven redundancy consistently identifies the same pattern: the loss is not primarily of income but of identity, control, and social belonging[iii]. Policy that addresses the first without the second is not responding to the actual problem.

These are social problems that people are increasingly asked to metabolise as individual ones, a tendency that obscures their structural determinants and steers policy away from collective solutions[iv]. Community is how societies share risk and sustain the social fabric that makes adaptation possible. When that infrastructure has been quietly dismantled over recent decades — by economic individualisation, by digital platforms optimised for passive consumption over genuine connection, by polarising political discourse that narrows the boundaries of solidarity — the capacity for collective navigation weakens precisely when it is most needed. Rebuilding it is a governance priority, because it is built on the relational capacity, the key to navigating new territories by building the coalitions and trust needed to move through uncertainty together.

Governing effectively is not about promising certainty but bringing coherence.

The frameworks that currently dominate institutional thinking offer no horizon beyond the emergencies themselves and no account of agency within them. The transition is not only producing institutional hollowing and social fragmentation — it is also producing the plasticity that reinvention requires. The consequences of the crises and the uncertainty and fear about the future are producing the political conditions in which authoritarian movements thrive. The closing of civic space, the capture of media environments for polarisation, the delegitimisation of deliberative institutions these are (historically) predictable political consequences.

History also indicates that the same institutional failure that generates the authoritarian opportunity generates the counter-movement opportunity. The New Deal and the rise of fascism were contemporaneous responses to the same structural conditions. Our governance challenge is to build a countermovement with sufficient institutional alternatives before authoritarian consolidation closes the remaining space, doing the political and relational work of building the coalitions, protecting the civic infrastructure, and sustaining the social solidarity that keeps the democratic space open long enough for something genuinely new to become possible. The research on what makes this more likely points towards social protection systems as they reduces the conditions of desperation that authoritarian movements exploit; deliberative infrastructure as it builds the cross-cutting relationships that polarisation destroys; and work on the narrative, not because stories alone change politics, but because the story people tell about what they are living through determines whether they organise collectively or surrender to the promise of strongman restoration.

[i] OECD Trust Survey (2024). Government at a Glance: public trust in national institutions across OECD member states.

[ii] IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2024). Chapter 3: Artificial intelligence and the labour market — occupational exposure estimates for advanced economies.

[iii] MIT Work of the Future Task Force (2023). The work of the future: building better jobs in an age of intelligent machines. MIT Press.

[iv] Gillebaart, M. (2024). Use and misuse of the self-control concept in the public sphere. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. — for the individualisation of social problems claim.