“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” wrote Clifford Geertz.
Governance, in a polycrisis world, is what happens when those webs no longer match the storms in which we are trapped.
We keep talking about “systems failure” as if the systems were fixed machines that have suddenly broken. But much of our trouble lies in the lines we draw: who counts, who decides, who is visible, and who is treated as mere background noise. The Impact Trust’s dialogues on governance and the polycrisis step straight into this tangle and ask a simple, blunt question: if our crises are entangled, why are our boundaries still so wretchedly rigid?
The great anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s classic move was to stop treating groups as sealed containers with a shared essence inside and focus instead on the boundaries that sort “us” from “them.” What matters, he argued, is not the cultural stuff in the box but the social work that keeps the box’s edges in place.
Translate that into governance and the picture really shifts. The problem is not only bad policy; it is that the boundaries through which we organise responsibility, voice and power no longer map onto reality. Climate, finance, migration, digital tech, and politics now move through each other. Our categories—state vs market, North vs South, donor vs beneficiary, formal vs informal—lag behind like outdated maps.
If you take Barth seriously, governance stops being mere abstract architecture and becomes boundary-work: who gets in the room, whose knowledge is treated as “evidence,” where liability stops, and who is left enduring the risks.
The Impact Trust dialogues treat it exactly that way. They bring together actors who rarely meet on level ground—funders, systems thinkers, organisers, researchers, practitioners across regions—and ask: which boundaries are doing the real damage here? Between global rules and local realities. Between technical expertise and lived experience. Between financial capital and civic imagination.
Those lines don’t just exist; they are deliberately maintained. Through reporting templates that privilege certain metrics. Through funding logics that split “projects” apart. Through narratives that keep “capacity” on one side and “need” on the other. The polycrisis then looks less like an unfortunate pile-up of shocks and more like the fallout of boundary-making that has drifted wildly out of sync with interdependence and reciprocity.
Lester Salamon’s work on civil society adds another strand. By counting and mapping the nonprofit sector – its size, workforce, finances – he turned “civil society” from a fuzzy feel-good term into something one is obliged to both see and count.
That statistical move is boundary-work too. It draws a line around “civil society” as distinct from state and market, then shows that what lies inside that line is huge and structurally important, not a charitable afterthought. In a polycrisis frame, those numbers become more than technocratic trivia. They show where civic infrastructure is dense, where it is dangerously thin, and how mismatched it is to the scale of risk.
If we recognise that crises are systemic, we simply cannot keep treating civil society as a peripheral add-on. Salamon’s data quietly ask: what if this is part of our core planetary infrastructure for resilience? And if it is, why is it funded, governed, and valued as if it were optional?
Robert Chambers pushes on a different front: whose reality counts when decisions are made? In mainstream development practice, the answer has typically been ‘the professionals’, ‘the experts’, the capital cities.
Chambers’ participatory work was a deliberate attempt to flip that script. His question -“whose reality counts?”- challenged fundamentally the way boundaries are drawn between knower and known, planner and planned-for. When farmers map their own land, when so-called informal workers diagram their own economies, they are not just supplying “data”; they are redrawing the cognitive map.
This is where anger at the term “informal worker” really belongs. The phrase does a double operation. It makes people visible enough to be targeted as a policy problem, but invisible as historical subjects with a voice, a project, a politics. It is a subaltern label: a way of classifying from above that fixes people on the margins and presents their condition as natural, not deliberately produced.
The insult you feel when you hear “informal worker” is not just emotional oversensitivity; it is a political intuition that the language itself encodes subordination, that it erases employers and states, leaving only the worker looking like an oddity by choice.
Chambers offers one route out: create spaces and methods in which those at the sharp edge define the problem, the language, and the priorities. Gramsci offers another: organic intellectuals from within these worlds who start to name what is really going on.
In Gramsci’s terms, “informal worker” is a subaltern category. The people so named are spoken about but never permitted to speak politically in their own name. Organic intellectuals are not outside experts; they emerge from within these worlds and give lived experience language, coherence, direction.
In an economy organised around the “formal” worker as the norm, an organic intellectual of so-called “informal work” starts by naming what is really going on: these workers are not outside capitalism’s reach but at its cutting edge, at the frontier where risks are dumped and protections are stripped away. The margin is not residue; it is where the system’s logic is most naked.
The first move in that undoing must be linguistic. Instead of “I am informal” they say: I work in arrangements where employers and states dodge obligations and risks are dumped on me. Instead of “I am marginal,” they say: I am at the frontier where this economic model externalises its costs. That linguistic shift matters because it drags the invisible back into the frame: employers, intermediaries, legal and fiscal choices, all the machinery that produced the so-called informality. When “employer-evading arrangements” or “risk-dumping jobs” replace “informal work,” the beneficiaries of that invisibility—employers, intermediaries, states – re-enter the frame.
Changing words is not enough on its own, but without this work on language, the people most affected remain spoken about rather than speaking, seen as a category rather than recognised as protagonists. This, too, is bricolage. People piece together new vocabularies from fragments—union language, legal terms, neighbourhood slang, NGO jargon—and, in doing so, they re-wire what is thinkable.
Ethiopian “wax and gold”—sem ena werq—gives a powerful metaphor for what’s going on. In its home setting, sem ena werq is not just a literary flourish; it is a way of speaking politically in unequal settings. Surface meanings keep you safe; hidden meanings carry critique, solidarity, and warning. Double-coding is how people navigate power when saying things directly would be dangerous or simply ignored. Somehow the “gold” always registers at some profound level.
Polycrisis talk is its own kind of wax: overlapping climate shocks, pandemics, financial turmoil, wars, AI disruption. Gramsci’s “interregnum” and “morbid symptoms” is gold: a deeper crisis in which old orders are dying, and new ones have not yet taken shape.
The trick is not to stop at the wax. Each visible crisis is also a code: about whose labour has been discounted, whose reality has been ignored, whose risks have been systematically offloaded. Salamon’s data help decode some of that—where civic capacity is missing. Chambers’ methods decode another part—whose experience has been sidelined. The organic intellectuals you invoke decode yet another—how language itself is stacked against certain groups.
It is easy to treat “polycrisis” as a more sophisticated label for the mess. The harder move is to treat it as a design challenge: if there are no single crises and no single solutions, how do we build governance that is itself experimental, plural, and stitched-together?
Bricolage is not a bug here; it is the method. Polycrisis philanthropy that accepts entanglement and funds across silos. “Polylateral” arrangements where cities, states, movements, firms, and communities co-create responses without waiting for a single master plan. Dialogues that bring together unusual combinations of people into the same room and let them test new lenses with each other.
Design that takes the polycrisis seriously must treat anger, humiliation, and refusal as diagnostic tools, not noise: they flag where boundary-making has rendered people legible as problems but not as protagonists.
The test of governance, under these conditions, is not “is the diagram neat?” but “can this arrangement keep hosting contested, inclusive boundary changes over time?” Can it keep being re-spun as the webs of significance move?
If Geertz is right that we live in webs we spin ourselves, then the polycrisis is partly a crisis of our own weaving. The Impact Trust dialogues, Salamon’s civil society mapping, Chambers’ participatory provocations, the everyday work of organic intellectuals in “informal” worlds—they all tug at different strands of the same web.
For anyone stepping into these conversations, the invitation is simple and sharp: don’t just analyse the polycrisis. Watch your own boundary-making in real time. Notice whose reality you treat as default, whose you treat as optional, where your language quietly encodes hierarchy. Then, in small, improvised ways, start to move those lines.
That is not a grand solution. It is something humbler and more demanding: collective, ongoing bricolage on the very lenses through which we see—and change—the world.
Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1969.
Chambers, Robert. Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1997.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
Salamon, Lester M. The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003.