AIM for a New Political Economy
If polycrisis reinforces fear and paralysis, then what is the alternative?
Many voices from the margins have criticized “polycrisis” as a Eurocentric buzzword—one that reinforces fear and paralysis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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