Entangled Crises in South Asia: Climate Vulnerability, Governance Fragility, and Geopolitical Rivalries through the CEGEI Lens

Abstract

The twenty-first century is defined not by singular crises but by polycrises in which climate shocks, fragile governance, and geopolitical rivalries interact to produce cascading instability. This paper introduces the Climate–ESG–Geopolitical Entanglement Index (CEGEI), a novel framework that re-conceptualizes climate risk as a systemic outcome of overlapping environmental, institutional, and political stressors. Drawing on data from the Global Climate Risk Index, World Bank governance indicators, UN SDG trackers, SIPRI military expenditure, and conflict event datasets, Principal Component Analysis is applied to extract latent structures across these domains. The results reveal three distinct but interconnected dimensions: climate vulnerability, governance quality, and geopolitical risk, each statistically coherent yet dynamically entangled. Applying CEGEI to six South Asian countries from 1995 to 2022 demonstrates how resilience is not determined by exposure alone but by the interaction of governance capacity and geopolitical context. China and India illustrate how stronger institutions buffer against climate risk despite sustained geopolitical tensions, while Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka remain trapped in cycles of vulnerability driven by institutional fragility and political conflict. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Theoretically, it advances a paradigm shift for international management and global strategy by framing climate disasters as manifestations of systemic polycrises rather than isolated shocks. Empirically, it provides a replicable diagnostic tool that allows managers, policymakers, and international organizations to assess where resilience can be strengthened and where vulnerabilities are compounded by governance failures and geopolitical rivalries. By integrating sustainability, governance, and geopolitics into a single index, CEGEI offers a lens for navigating the entangled crises that increasingly define the global economy and international relations.