Framing Crisis in Global Governance: Conjunctural and Structural Understandings in Theory and Practice

Crisis has become a central idiom of global governance, employed across scholarly and policy arenas to capture a world marked by recurring instability and disruption. Yet the concept remains conceptually ambiguous. Recent labels such as polycrisis point to systemic vulnerability, but without sharper conceptual specification such terms risk blending disparate dynamics into a single category that obscures the political implications of how crisis is interpreted. This paper addresses that problem by proposing a conjunctural-structural heuristic designed to clarify how crises are characterised in global governance debates and how these characterisations influence institutional responses and the horizons of systemic change that become politically conceivable. We distinguish between conjunctural interpretations, which treat crises as discrete disruptions within particular domains that can be addressed through incremental adjustment, and structural interpretations, which present crisis as an expression of deeper tensions embedded in distributive arrangements, geopolitical rivalry and the authority relations that support the prevailing global order. Conjunctural approaches generally work within established institutional repertoires, whereas structural approaches draw attention to contradictions that appear to require more consequential transformation. These orientations are analytically separable yet interact over time and spatially, shaped by actor preferences, institutional legacies and the political pressures that accompany governing amid uncertainty. The heuristic provides a vocabulary for examining how crisis discourse functions in global governance. Rather than approaching crisis as either an objective rupture or a rhetorical device, we treat it as a relational condition in which events, perceived exposure and interpretive practices converge. Crisis discourse shapes what is treated as urgent or peripheral, the range of responses regarded as credible and the normative assumptions that underwrite those judgements. It also influences whether debates concern crises in global governance, meaning disturbances within functional regimes, or the crisis of global governance, which signals pressure on the foundations of global order itself. We demonstrate the usefulness of the heuristic through the domain of climate change governance. Conjunctural interpretations, often framed through emergency language, sustain technical and modular interventions aimed at risk management within existing institutional boundaries. Structural interpretations cast climate change as symptomatic of long-standing tensions in global political economy, authority and temporal assumptions that structure global governance. The contrast illustrates how distinct crisis interpretations support and constrain assessments of institutional adequacy and expectations of systemic change. By approaching crisis as a site of political contestation rather than a mere reflection of disruption, the paper offers a diagnostic tool for analysing how actors in global governance mobilise crisis narratives to stabilise authority or promote alternative visions of global order. The conjunctural-structural heuristic contributes conceptual clarity and supports more reflexive inquiry into crisis politics across global governance domains.