Multiple crises

Today, we, as humanity, seem to be in a constant state of crisis. Kathryn Furlong calls attention to the importance of looking at everyday life to better understand how crises unfold, not as exceptional events but as a lived and recurrent experience. A crucial lesson from Furlong's reflection about crisis is that it is a quotidian phenomenon in which different scales, meanings and relations converge. From the most intimate and subjective, to the structural and macro-scaled, from the realm of the neighbourhood to the global, crises crash, connect, or intersect with one another. According to Furlong (2025), the breakdown of infrastructures is one instance where everyday crises could be induced, in which people are, ‘pushed into an existence defined by coping and inventing.’ This form of existence is in turn the origin of other crises. How people cope and invent in their everyday life, however, is a question that deserves further attention, as it positions the most vulnerable people and other actors as active agents who make decisions about the crises they experience, sometimes in the midst of precarity and inequality. Reading Furlong's piece inevitably made me think of the multiple ways in which people navigate the crisis perpetual. Therefore, I want to pick up where Furlong left off to reflect on what different actors located in dissimilar power positions do in the face of adverse situations. To this end, I will focus on three different forms of crisis in Colombia. The first crisis refers to the unequal access to electricity in low-income areas in Barranquilla, a spatially and socioeconomically segregated city in the Caribbean region of Colombia and how residents respond to it. Access to electricity as well as the maintenance of infrastructures have been unevenly distributed in this part of the country. Blackouts, poor maintenance and precarious infrastructures have shaped people's experiences with electricity. Yet, these phenomena have also created the conditions for people to come up with everyday solutions. Marañeros, for instance, are young men who have specialized in informally repairing connections, especially after heavy rains when flash floods cause damage to electricity poles. Even though these men solve this type of quotidian problems, stories of injured or even dead marañeros by electric shocks abound in the city (Acevedo-Guerrero, 2019: 488). While some people resort to marañeros to get the service back at their homes, others negotiate with other actors the alteration of electricity metres to reduce the cost of monthly bills. Living in Barranquilla and its metropolitan area, where the average temperature is 29°C, requires extensive air conditioning. Yet, the high costs of electricity make air conditioning unaffordable to many families, especially in the most vulnerable areas. This is particularly critical since in Barranquilla, as in many other unequal cities of the world, these vulnerable areas are exposed to higher temperatures (Nuñez et al., 2023), as heat is differentially experienced. In this context, some people manage to alter metres and connections so that air conditioning use does not increase electricity bills. Furthermore, to pay the bills and cover their daily needs, some people resort to informal moneylending, a transaction that is often mediated by coercive and even violent relations. Despite this risk, people resort to informal moneylending to pay bills and other expenses because their adverse economic conditions prevent them from accessing formal credits (Palomino-Martínez, 2025). This is also the case in many other parts of the world where stable work is not available as a source of income (Krige, 2019). However, although metre alteration is commonly attributed to low-income areas, instances of this practice occurring in wealthier neighbourhoods in Barranquilla have also been reported (Mestre, 2023). As expected, this practice has caused economic losses to the energy provider. This situation has been at the centre of intense controversies due to the high costs of its service in the Caribbean region of Colombia. The second crisis has to do with how specific actors use this situation for electoral purposes. The problems in the energy sector are part of a broader sense of crisis among a large segment of the Colombian population who oppose the government of the current left-wing president Gustavo Petro. Over the last few years, the narrative of crisis has been highly instrumental in electoral politics as a mechanism deployed by certain politicians to gain popularity and votes. This narrative is based on the premise that ‘President Petro is destroying the country’ (Mejía Marulanda, 2024) with his policies and reforms—a common statement coming mostly from right-wing groups and politicians. This narrative creates an atmosphere of social and economic catastrophe that would reach a point of no return if the Left stays in power. This point of no return, according to this narrative, would materialize when Colombia becomes a socialist state such as Venezuela (Vargas, 2018). During electoral times, the spectre of communism and socialism discursively reinforces the sense of crisis amongst citizens and paves the way for the only solution: a saviour. Presidential candidates often present themselves as the only saviours who can reverse the crisis and redirect the country towards what each of them considers the right direction. Yet, for those supporting the current president, the crisis means the rising forces of right-wing politicians and social groups and their eventual success in the elections. This sense of crisis, therefore, is rooted in the electoral agendas of presidential candidates, but also in the everyday life of a country which has long experienced the lethal and deleterious effects of violence, drug trafficking, inequality and corruption. These forms of injustice and inequality in Colombia have often intertwined with the global climate crisis scenario. Policies and programmes to eliminate poverty in rural and urban areas have long been electoral promises, as well as the focus of development policies. Yet, the advent of international concerns about global warming (one of the most critical crises of our current times) has reframed poverty also as a condition of vulnerability to climate change which finds in adaptation a desirable solution. The third case is precisely about the use of the idea of crisis in light of global climate concerns. National and international institutions and actors bring the discourse of the global climate crisis to impoverished areas where people's vulnerability turns out to relate to a planetary socioenvironmental problem. Aurora Fredriksen coined the term ‘Anthropocene ordinary’ to call attention to ‘the ways in which the idea of contemporary environmental crises as both anthropogenic and planetary is shifting affective experiences, emergent practices and ways of relating within ordinary life’ (2025: 490). The ‘Anthropocene ordinary’ resonates with Kathryn Furlong's conceptualization of crisis and, therefore, bringing them together helps us connect different spheres of everyday life. In rural areas of the Caribbean region of Colombia, where floods are part of the geographical and social configuration of the landscape, climate adaptation policies have found a fertile terrain for their implementation. Over the last decades, the collapse of embankments, the drainage of wetlands to expand cattle ranching and large-scale monocrop production as well as the accelerated—and often intentional—sedimentation of bodies of water have significantly contributed to the intensification of floods. Climate change adaptation projects focus on the impoverished communities of these areas to transform their relationships with these landscape changes. In this context, these communities are confronted with a new vocabulary (adaptation, resilience, climate change, early warning systems, etc.), new ethical positions regarding nature which encourage them to protect the deteriorated bodies of water—as if they were solely accountable for their degradation—and the constant participation in training workshops and courses despite the constant praise of their so-called local knowledge on the part of climate change agents. Meanwhile, structural inequalities, environmental injustices and other forms of exclusion that create different crises in the most vulnerable communities remain invisible in the language and priorities of climate change adaptation agents. For example, some areas targeted by climate adaptation agents are also home to historical conflicts over land ownership, or have become territories of extractivism where pollution and capital accumulation deepen social and environmental injustices. The climate crisis seems to be detached from other crises in the everyday implementation of adaptation projects. Kathryn Furlong's invitation to read crises from the perspective of the everyday life of those who are involved in them in one way or another provides relevant insights into the social life of crises in our contemporary world. By expanding this approach to different possibilities of action or even inaction in the face of crisis, the diverse meanings of crisis become centre stage. What does crisis mean to different actors? How do these different meanings interact? Why and how do certain meanings become dominant while others lose visibility? How do specific meanings of crisis change over time and across space? How do certain visions of crises exacerbate or overshadow other crises? The answer to these questions necessarily requires methodological and theoretical decisions to approach specific realities and contexts. A significant outcome of such an undertaking would be the possibility of questioning dominant narratives that place subjects, places and forces in different levels of accountability and vulnerability. These differential positions of subjects, places and forces reflect how power is distributed in a particular moment in history, as well as the ways dissimilar actors respond to it. The idea of disaster capitalism, which was formulated almost two decades ago by journalist Naomi Klein (2007) is precisely a lens to discern how some actors benefit from the tragedy experienced by others in moments of crisis. This is the case, for instance, of informal moneylenders who profit on people's crises. Kathryn Furlong provides a timely and constructive foundation to scrutinize a world where crises are often depicted as inevitable and, therefore, become instrumental to maintain certain forms of control and power.