Abstract
Environmentalists have long warned of a coming shock to the system. COVID-19 exposed fragility in the system and has the potential to result in radical social change. With socioeconomic interruptions cascading through tightly intertwined economic, social, environmental, and political systems, many are not working to find the opportunities for change. Prefigurative politics in communities have demonstrated rapid and successful responses to the pandemic. These successes, and others throughout history, demonstrate that prefigurative politics are important for response to crisis. Given the failure of mainstream environmentalism, we use systemic transformation literature to suggest novel strategies to strengthen cooperative prefigurative politics. In this paper, we look at ways in which COVID-19 shock is leveraged in local and global economic contexts. We also explore how the pandemic has exposed paradoxes of global connectivity and interdependence. While responses shed light on potential lessons for ecological sustainability governance, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the importance of local resilience strategies. We use local manufacturing as an example of a possible localized, yet globally connected, resilience strategy and explore some preliminary data that highlight possible tradeoffs of economic contraction.
Highlights
Many environmentalists have long warned of the likelihood of a significant shock to the system given humanity’s inability to respond to our ecological emergency
While the scale of the economic impact of COVID-19 appears to have come as a surprise to policymakers, it is consistent with emerging evidence that the world is transitioning into a “postgrowth” era, as global economic growth rates have slowed over a period of decades
We consider the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic could act as a shock to the dominant socioecological regime, precipitating a transition toward a new systemic equilibrium more conducive to human and planetary health
Summary
Many environmentalists have long warned of the likelihood of a significant shock to the system given humanity’s inability to respond to our ecological emergency. It saw the undermining of international cooperation and institutions, failures of solidarity, and the re-assertion of civic nationalist interests, as what can only be described as panic gripped the policymakers of many key nations In these ways, the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have exposed fault-lines in the global system whereby the trajectory of medical and health systems will emerge as a function of: 2. This characteristic implies that even small perturbations, or minor crises, in a configuration that is close to a threshold, can push the entire system into a period of chaos, after which it settles into an alternative stable state Those monitoring escalating global risks from a systems perspective have long warned that pandemics, global financial crashes, and various ecological damages, including crossing planetary boundaries, resource depletion, and climate change, could lead to such tipping points [1,4]. With these insights into the dynamics of complex systems as a backdrop, COVID-19 enters the landscape as a “perfect storm” at the intersection of ecological and epidemiological change, and financial and geopolitical instability
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