But as Lenin famously asked: What is to be done?

Polytunity is a rare moment not just to critique and dismantle, but to renew, beginning with how we think. Drawing on her own research and practice, Ang introduces one path forward: AIM—Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy.

This is Part 2 of From Polycrisis to Polytunity, Ang’s speech published in Oxford Development Studies (February 2026) and open access until May 5, 2026.

Read in Hindi

AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy

So, what is the alternative? That’s the hard question. I’m not the first to name these problems in development. Others have made similar complaints. But oftentimes what happens with these complaints is that they end with critiques or with platitudes (obvious conclusions) like ‘let go of control’, ‘be more tentative’, ‘embrace uncertainty’.

These are not answers. They are not methods. They do not provide guidelines or demonstrations of how we can go about studying and doing development differently.

A new paradigm must prompt a new way of doing social science. And I’m going to call that AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy.

• Adaptive means replacing machine thinking with systems thinking.

  Societies are complex, like forests, not complicated, like toasters. Complexity is not chaos. It contains evolutionary and emergent patterns that we must learn to see.

• Inclusive means replacing one-size-fits-all Western templates with “using what you have”—the creative repurposing of the indigenous practices, networks, and knowledge. Innovation does not happen only in Silicon Valleys. Humble innovation makes a great difference to the lives of many.

• Moral: Especially as development scholars, we must be sensitive to the reality that power shapes ideas. Simply declaring that we are objective does not make us objective. The best way to approximate objectivity is to be transparent about power dynamics. After all, how could power not influence ideas?

How I have Practiced AIM

Let me now share how I have applied AIM throughout my work, long before I gave it a name. AIM is not something I invented in 2024. It is the through-line of my entire research program, one that has always challenged mechanical thinking, universal templates, and Eurocentric assumptions.

The problem is that we study political economy in an unequal world. Western cases are treated as universal and non-Western cases as marginal. Because China appeared on the covers of my books, the intuitive question was always: ‘Can these concepts and theories apply outside of China?’

Now imagine if I had written about 17th-century England and claimed that liberalism was the singular cause of Western prosperity. Would anyone ask me about “scope conditions”? Would anyone doubt if my methods and findings could apply outside of England?

This is why I am now presenting the same ideas without China on the cover. Some have warned me: ‘Don’t broadcast your paradigmatic ambitions’. That reaction is revealing. As long as my work was confined to ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ – the special, ethnic aisle in the supermarket of ideas – challenging conventional wisdom could be tolerated. The moment the same ideas moved into the generic aisle, they felt outright offensive.

As I hope you can see, the question of who is allowed to define the universal is central to the ‘moral’ dimension of AIM.

We cannot debate with prejudices; we can only expose them.

Studying Development as a Co-evolutionary Process

My first application of AIM appeared in How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016).

The puzzle was straightforward: how did a massive social and economic transformation unfold in China from the 1980s to the 2000s? But the tools we inherited from conventional development theory were linear. They assumed either ‘good institutions’ come first, or economic growth comes first, or colonial legacies determine everything. All of these theories hit dead ends, because none could explain a reality in which everything was changing at the same time.

So, I stepped back. I realized the real problem was not the case; it was the paradigm. I began with a simple, common-sense premise: development is a nonlinear process. The economy, institutions, incentives, and state capacity co-evolve through stages of development. That is not an argument – that is a factual observation.

The hard question is: how does this coevolution actually unfold? How did it start? What sustains it?

To answer these questions, I spent years doing painstaking fieldwork – piecing together local histories from the 1980s to 2012, mapping how the economy, bureaucracy, property rights, and incentives all mutually adapted and co-evolved over time.

Two conclusions emerged: First, the initial spark of development is not ‘good institutions’ or ‘economic growth’. That is a chicken-and-egg fallacy. The first step is grassroots actors using what they have – creatively repurposing whatever institutions, networks, or practices already exist to start new economic activities.

Second, market-building institutions are not the same as market-preserving ones. The ‘good institutions’ celebrated in the literature are institutions that preserve markets that already exist. Early-stage development requires entirely different strategies and institutional forms.

In short: what works for development is stage-specific. AIM gives us the lens to see that, by exposing and correcting the normative assumption that the right solutions must look like an idealized vision of the West, and that anything unlike that is not a difference, but a defect.

Studying Corruption as a Multidimensional Problem

My second major application of AIM is in China’s Gilded Age (2020). This is a book that decolonized corruption studies in effect without using the term ‘decolonize’.

The starting puzzle was familiar: how could China experience rapid growth despite being perceived as highly corrupt? At first glance, this seems like a paradox. But the paradox dissolves once we unbundle corruption.

The phrase ‘Gilded Age’ comes from American history. When the United States was an emerging economy in the late 19th century, it was also riddled with corruption. What unites them is not the level of corruption but the type.

Over time, in the Chinese and American Gilded Ages, corruption evolved from petty or predatory forms (extortion, embezzlement) into access money – the exchange of power and profit among elites.

Access money can become institutionalized, legalized, and deeply embedded in advanced economies. That is the true story of capitalism – a story often sanitized in mainstream narratives celebrating “good institutions” as the foundation of Western prosperity, what I have elsewhere called fairy tales of Western development.

To demonstrate this empirically, I created the Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI) – a pilot measure that separates corruption into four types, including access money. When you unbundle corruption, the global landscape looks very different. Countries like the United States and the UK have lower overall corruption but high levels of access money – as high as some developing countries. And if we look at surging populism and declining trust in government across advanced democracies, we can detect strong links to institutionalized access money.

Again, AIM guided this work.

• Adaptive: explain complexity rather than purge it.

• Inclusive: respect lived realities in non-Western societies

• Moral: confront the power structures that shape what is seen and unseen.

By applying these principles, my books arrived at different ways of understanding development, institutions, and the relationship between corruption and capitalism.

Two Takeaways

AIM is a different way of doing social science and development. AIM is not a slogan. If practiced seriously, AIM changes the questions we ask, the methods we use, the data we collect, and the answers we consider possible.

It takes a lot of effort, but such effort is essential if we want to adapt to a disrupted, multipolar world, where the industrial-colonial paradigm has definitively expired.

Let me leave you with two takeaways.

1. First, the dominant narrative of the polycrisis is Western-centric. It obscures the deep structural inequalities and distortions of the old order that produced today’s overlapping crises. It names fear but not the causes. It ignores the agency of the global majority.

2. Second, the polycrisis paralyzes only those who remain tied to the old order. For the rest of us, this moment is a polytunity to remake not only our institutions but our paradigms.

To seize that polytunity, I offer AIM, not as a blueprint, but as a compass. My books show one path through this paradigm, built across twenty years.

But AIM is not about my path alone. It is an invitation for others to build, extend, and transform this paradigm in ways I cannot yet imagine.

Thank you very much.

To Learn More

• Part 1 of this speech: “From Polycrisis to Polytunity.”

• Yuen’s introductory essay on AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy is open-access at Oxford Development Studies

• For a shorter read on why this “polytunity” moment calls for AIM, read her earlier op-ed The World Order After 2025 in Project Syndicate

A recording of the speech is available online. This post is Part 1 of two installments, and a Hindi translation is available.

Read in Hindi

A Timely Conversation

Thank you very much to the organizers of DSA. I especially appreciate the reminder that we should always return to the question of what matters to us as development scholars.

This is a timely moment for such a conversation. I just came back from Summer Davos, organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF). If you recall, it was WEF that helped popularize the term ‘polycrisis’ in 2023 through Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian and European specialist.

Since then, ‘polycrisis’ has become an apocalyptic buzzword of the 2020s. It names the interconnected threats facing humanity today – global warming, pandemics, extreme inequality, democratic erosion, armed conflict. And global elites have responded to this convergence of crises with dread and paralysis. Even actors in the Global South, including marginalized groups, have adopted the term and oriented their agendas around it.

But there is something important we need to notice.

Polycrisis is a Western-Centric Agenda

Like most “global” agendas, the polycrisis is Western-centric in origin, content, and outlook.

Consider the genealogy. The term first appeared among French theorists in the 1990s. It resurfaced in 2016 when Jean-Claude Juncker, then President of the European Commission, used it to describe the difficulties of governing through multiple crises. And in 2023, Adam Tooze helped globalize it after being amplified by WEF – a gathering of the world’s political and business elites headquartered in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, the Global Majority – where 80% of the world lives – has experienced crisis after crisis over the past century, with very little global attention paid to their pain. No one called that a polycrisis.

More importantly, the polycrisis is not a diagnosis. It is merely an attempt to name a feeling of fear. Tooze himself said as much:

What the polycrisis concept says is: Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment … It’s therapeutic. Here is your fear; here is something that fundamentally distresses you.

So why has the term gained such traction despite offering neither diagnosis nor solutions?

Because it lets the establishment acknowledge fear without confronting the root causes of the crises. It abstracts the problems, making them appear like a natural convergence rather than the predictable outcomes of extractive and exclusionary systems. And by circulating through elite Western institutions, it acquires the appearance of being universal – when it is not.

So, before you repeat the word ‘polycrisis’, pause and ask yourself: what worldview are you reinforcing, and whose power does it serve?

Polytunity and Positionality

I do not look at the world only through dread and doom. I see something else in this moment of disruption and uncertainty. I see polytunity – a rare, once-in-a-generation opening to rethink not only our institutions but also our ideas, our paradigms, the way we think.

My perspective comes from my positionality. In his book, Orientalism, Edward Said reminded us that no scholar can detach themselves from their class, their beliefs, or their social position. So instead of pretending that I am untouched by my background, I want to be clear about how it has shaped the way I see political economy.

Specifically, I occupy a position on the margins of the establishment.

On the one hand, I have the privilege of being a tenured professor in the United States. Without that position, it’s fair to say I would have no platform. On the other hand, within the establishment – elite academia and policy circles – my arguments are often marginalized or dismissed.

Take one example. I have long argued that development begins by “using what you have.” Meaning: societies do not need idealized Western institutions in order to kickstart entrepreneurship or growth. The first step is repurposing whatever already exists – even if those systems appear weak, informal, or backward by Western standards.

China illustrates this, but it is hardly unique. If you look closely at the actual history of Western development, you will find a very similar pattern hiding behind the varnished narratives that development textbooks tell.

And how does the mainstream respond? ‘Using what you have sounds too simple. We don’t buy it’.

Why is indigenous innovation ‘too simple’, but the idea that foreign experts can parachute in and fix poverty with micro aid projects sophisticated? I am still waiting for someone to explain this double standard.

This small example opens a window onto a much larger reality.

The Breakdown of the Old Order

For those who have been fully protected by the status quo, it is uncomfortable to question what was wrong with it. For those who have been completely excluded, survival leaves little room for reflection and expression. It often takes an in-between positionality to see the cracks clearly.

So, what, exactly, was wrong with the old order that has brought us to today’s polycrisis?

The post – World War II order was essentially defined by Western-led global capitalism. It rested on a grand bargain. Countries would have stability in exchange for Western dominance – political, economic, and ideational. They could participate in globalization and free trade in exchange for entrenched North – South inequality.

This bargain delivered benefits. Late developers like China, Singapore, and South Korea seized the opening to export and industrialize their way out of poverty. Western multinationals accumulated wealth by outsourcing production to wherever labor was cheapest. Middle-class consumers in rich countries could afford to import and buy lots of stuff – more than they needed.

But today, that grand bargain is breaking down. That is what defines the polycrisis. Endless cheap consumption has fueled environmental destruction. Inequality has ignited populism in the North. And that populism has in turn driven politicians to punish the South for domestic crises that the South did not create.

These are not isolated problems. They are interconnected symptoms of a deeper unraveling.

The Industrial-Colonial Paradigm

What, then, is the intellectual foundation of this old order we’ve inherited? It is what I call the industrial-colonial paradigm. A paradigm is a worldview – a way of seeing and navigating the world.

The mechanical worldview was not subtle. Esther Duflo, the 2019 Nobel laureate economist, described the mainstream approach as ‘thinking in machine mode’. Technocrats treat complex social and economic systems like toasters. Their job is to find ‘the button that will get the machine started’ – a root cause, single intervention, or silver bullet.

Paired with this mechanical mindset is a colonial one: the assumption that Western capitalist democracies represent the endpoint of human evolution, and the rest of the world simply needs to catch up. The term ‘catching up’ implies assimilation.

All of this was wrapped in universal language – think ‘good institutions’. Canonical development theories claim that Western settler economies prospered because they had inclusive institutions. Omitted from them is the historical reality of conquest, slavery, and extractive domination.

Distorting and Disempowering

When the industrial and colonial paradigm is applied to development practices and analysis, the effects are distorting, if not outright disempowering.

When machine thinking was applied to agriculture, it increased production through uniformity and efficiency. But over the long term, the loss of biodiversity and the overuse of chemicals have resulted in severe ecological damage, including widespread forest death, which is accelerating global warming. Indeed, the climate crisis is the ultimate reminder that humans cannot reduce natural systems to simplistic mechanical models.

When that same paradigm is applied to the study of development, the adaptive, multicausal qualities of political economies are reduced to toaster-like entities. Their complexity is treated as a nuisance – an annoying complication to be purged.

Take global poverty. We know that poverty is a multicausal problem, embedded in larger systems of structural dependency. Ignoring this context, mainstream research poured disproportionate resources into studying micro-aid interventions and randomized controlled trials (RCTS).

Yet in fact, no society has ever escaped poverty at scale through aid. They have only done so through sustained growth, innovation, and social transformation—like in China and the West.

But mainstream economists today avoid studying growth and transformation because these are complex processes that do not fit their mechanical tools and are not easily publishable. You might think of growth itself as a ‘machine-unfriendly reality’ in development economics.

Next, consider the effects of the colonial paradigm. Assimilation was orchestrated through one-size-fits-all ‘good governance’ reforms, promoted by international organizations like the World Bank.

But just as homogenizing forests through industrial farming has destroyed biodiversity and resilience, the economist Lant Pritchett and sociologist Michael Woolcock observed:

Simply mimicking and/or adopting through colonial inheritance the organizational forms of a particular Denmark has in fact been a root cause of the deep problems encountered by developing countries

The parallel distortions seen in industrial agriculture and development economics are not coincidental; they are systemic—outcomes that flow from applying an industrial-colonial worldview.

Construction is the Best Criticism

So, as Lenin famously asked: What is to be done? It’s easy to criticize the polycrisis, as many others have done (Daniel Drezner, for example, calls it a “buzzword”).

If not polycrisis, then what is the alternative?

I’m not just making critiques. Polytunity is a rare moment to actualize a paradigm shift, which I call AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy.

• Adaptive: Systems thinking

• Inclusive: Plural pathways

• Moral: Power-aware

This is not a new slogan, but the formalization of 20 years of thinking and research that I am now applying to reframe global crises as an imperative to advance new voices, new ideas, and new solutions that previously could not be heard.

More in the next installment.

To Learn More

• Reading ahead: Read Yuen’s article on AIM published in Oxford Development Studies

• Looking back: Introducing polytunity at the UNDP Global Leadership Forum in South Africa in 2024, with UNDP Chief Administrator Achim Steiner

Polytunity in Other Languages

• Spanish: Poliunidad, by Margarita Cedeño, former Vice President of the Dominican Republican, an editorial in response to polytunity. (July 2025)

• Chinese: Reprint of “The Global Polytunity” in The Business Times (Singapore), with a Chinese translation: 全球多重机遇. (Nov 2025)

The panel was chaired by UNDP Chief Administrator Achim Steiner, and included Nigerian Minister Bosun Tijani and Arunabha Ghosh from India. The theme was “Development in a Time of Disruption.”

The audience of hundreds of UNDP officials, who had gathered from around the world, responded with spontaneous applause. A recording is available here.

YYA: Thank you very much for the opportunity to visit this big family [UNDP]. The world is moving steadily in a multipolar direction, and that should be unambiguously good news as it implies greater equality and inclusion. Yet many experts and policymakers, especially in the Western hemisphere, react to these and other disruptions with dread. Some label it the “polycrisis.” Why is that?

Our reality is rapidly changing, but our paradigm—the mental operating system we use—is still stuck in the last century, shaped by the global institutions and norms of that era. This old paradigm has two features that go hand in hand.

Mechanical Logic

The first is the mechanical logic—an outgrowth of industrialization. We take complex systems, whether in nature or society, and reduce them to simplistic mechanical models. This logic pervades all areas of development policy, and indeed much of modern life. Log-frames, siloed operations, an obsession with control over adaptation, and the inability to distinguish risk from uncertainty (where risk is a known problem you can control, and uncertainty is a possibility that might be good or bad) – these are all symptoms. This logic shows up everywhere in our activities.

Imposing mechanical logic on complex systems is distorting, if not outright destructive. For example, we have leveled ancient forests and turned them into monotonous farms. This generated a short-term boost in production, but scientists now know that it is causing widespread forest death that worsens climate change.

Colonial Logic

The second feature is the colonial logic: the belief that Western capitalist democracy is the endpoint of human evolution. In the 1990s, this was called the “end of history”, and the rest of the world was expected to “catch up”—in other words, assimilate.

Colonial logic creates two major blind spots:

• First, it prevents us from seeing alternative paths of development and governance. With one idealized standard, anyone unlike the US, UK, or Denmark is deemed deficient. We talk about inclusion, but in practice, differences are seen as defects.

• Second, it blinds the Western establishment to longstanding internal problems with capitalism and democracy in their own societies.

Disruption triggers deep anxieties because it exposes the failures of these two outdated logics.

Enter Polytunity

Here’s the takeaway: development today is not just a problem for the poor; it’s also a problem for the rich. We need to challenge the ingrained habit of seeing development only as a “poor country problem,” because the real challenges cut across all categories.

Meanwhile, the global majority is increasingly uninterested in joining a value system where they are judged by their distance from the liberal West—which they see are in trouble today.

For those clinging to the old order, these changes feel threatening. But for anyone willing to adopt a disruptive spirit, this is a polytunity. It’s a rare chance to question the industrial-colonial paradigm and replace it with something suited for a complex, multipolar world.

Crucially, UNDP is positioned for this mission: paradigm shifts cannot be accomplished by individual countries acting alone. Changing development’s operating system is like updating the OS on your device—once you do, everything else transforms with it. And building such a shared platform is, ultimately, a global public good.

Given that my five minutes is up, I have to stop here. I should mention that [interrupted by applause]… Thank you very much… Yesterday I publish an editorial in Project Syndicate, “Doing Development in the Polycrisis,” where I highlight three opportunities for new thinking and action. I’m happy to talk more during the Q&A.

To Learn More

• Speech – UNDP Keynote: Listen to remarks on the keynote panel by Ang and other speakers

• Op-ed – Doing Development in the Polycrisis: Ang elaborates on her keynote in this Project Syndicate article, translated into French and Spanish.

• Report - From Polycrisis to Polytunity: In this UNDP Report, Ang goes further to introduce AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy as an intellectual foundation for the polytunity, highlighting applications from her books.