This transcript of Yuen Yuen Ang’s speech - From Polycrisis to Polytunity - at the Development Studies Association (DSA) Conference in June 2025, was originally published in Oxford Development Studies (February 2026) and open access until May 5, 2026.
A recording of the speech is available online. This post is Part 1 of two installments, and a Hindi translation is available.
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.
By circulating through elite Western institutions, it [the term ‘polycrisis’] acquires the appearance of being universal – when it is not.
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.
That grand bargain is breaking down… populism has driven [Western] politicians to punish the South for domestic crises that the South did not create
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.
Indeed, the climate crisis is the ultimate reminder that humans cannot reduce natural systems to simplistic mechanical models.
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)