Polytunity

Every September, world leaders gather in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly. They come weighed down by climate disasters, widening inequality, democratic erosion, trade wars, and threats to multilateralism. They leave with heavier burdens than when they arrived. 

We now have a fashionable word for this convergence of problems: polycrisis. Since the Columbia historian Adam Tooze popularized it at the World Economic Forum in 2023, it has become the apocalyptic buzzword of the decade. Tooze himself was disarmingly frank in admitting that he was only giving fear a name.

What the polycrisis concept says is: Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment. I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic. Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. That is what it might be called.

Therapy, maybe. Diagnosis, no. Solutions, zero. Yet “polycrisis” has caught on worldwide.

Why? Because it is comfortable. Polycrisis is a descriptor that the establishment can agree on without challenging itself. It abstracts the causes of crises, making them appear as natural convergences rather than the systemic outcomes of extractive and exclusionary orders. And it makes the concept appear global when in fact the voices, experiences, and priorities it reflects are overwhelmingly Eurocentric.

The virality of polycrisis reveals something deeper: the enduring power of elite discourse. Even though the term is empty, its followers amplify it—and the echo reinforces paralysis. If leaders remain content with only naming fear, they will consign themselves to irrelevance.

I see things differently. I call this moment a polytunity—a term I coined in 2024 to reframe disruption not as paralysis but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for deep transformation.¹ Transformation not only of our institutions, but of our ideas, our paradigm, and the way we think.

Diagnosing Polycrisis from the Margins

Why do the most influential thinkers stop at naming fear? Why do they not see possibility in crises? The answer has much to do with positionality. As Edward Said once observed, “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from a class, a set of beliefs, or a social position.” Transparency begins with recognizing where one stands and how that shapes what you can see.

I stand on the margins of the establishment. On the one hand, I am privileged to be a tenured professor in the West—without that position, it is fair to say, I wouldn’t be heard at all. On the other hand, within the establishment, I am confined to the edges. Not white, not male, foreign accent, contrarian ideas.

Take one of my recurring arguments: development begins by “using what you have.” Societies do not need perfect Western-style institutions before they can grow. They begin by creatively repurposing what exists, even when those arrangements look weak, wrong, or backward by first-world standards.

China is a vivid illustration of this pattern, but hardly unique. Actual histories of western development—not the sanitized versions—reveal the same dynamic.

Yet when I present this argument in mainstream forums, the response is consistent: “That sounds too simple.” Apparently, indigenous innovation is simplistic, while foreign-designed aid projects are rigorous and sophisticated. I am still waiting for someone to explain these double standards.

That is the vantage point from which I speak: close enough to see the establishment from within, but far enough to recognize its blind spots. From that perspective, polytunity becomes visible.

Development Born Unequal

If we want to understand how the old order’s perversions led to today’s polycrisis, there is no better arena than development. Despite being widely equated with progress and inclusion, the very concept and the industry of development were born unequal.

The word “development” was coined in the 1920s by colonial administrators as part of their “civilizing mission,” as historian Sara Lorenzini noted. It described a paternalistic duty: advanced societies would “take colonized peoples by the hands and teach them the rules of modernity.” Two decades later, development re-emerged as a global aspiration, promoted alongside newly independent postcolonial nations and the founding of the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF.

A glimpse at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference reveals the hierarchy baked into this system. John Maynard Keynes—the revered economist who chaired the meeting—grumbled that the presence of the Latin American delegates made it “the most monstrous monkey house assembled for years.” His colleague from the British Treasury added that Mexicans and Brazilians could hardly discuss matters “at the expert level.” Their role, he said bluntly, was “to sign in the place for the signature.”

The pattern continued through the Cold War, when development and foreign aid became instruments of great-power competition. For the United States and the Soviet Union, development was an ideological battleground for cajoling weaker states to follow their respective “models.” When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. and its allies declared victory. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “End of History”—the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.

From its inception, development projected hierarchy. The West set standards, and the Rest followed.

The Industrial–Colonial Paradigm

What is the intellectual foundation of that old order? I call it the industrial–colonial paradigm, which operates across a range of modern activities, from agriculture to corporate management, but particularly in development projects led by foreign experts pledging to save the poor. It rests on two entwined logics.

The first is mechanical. Technocrats study and manage societies as crude machines, like toasters. Esther Duflo, one of the 2019 Nobel laureates in economics, calls this “thinking in machine mode.” World-leading experts break down wicked problems with multiple interconnected causes into separate bits, then design precise nudges for each. Push the right button, and the machine will run.

The second is colonial. Without saying “emulate the West,” mainstream political economy treats Western capitalist democracies as the endpoint of human evolution. Just look at the parade of “global metrics” measuring governance, innovation, even “goodness” itself. The same countries are always at the top; the same are stuck at the bottom. These numbers provide statistical backing for the claim that “good institutions”—as exemplified by a select group—are universal templates for development.

Even as disruptions rattle the global development industry, it clings to this industrial–colonial paradigm, inherited from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Indeed, it is doubling down.

Consider the recent Nobel prizes in economics, the highest distinction in the discipline. In 2019, the prize went to Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer, and Duflo for addressing global poverty by breaking it down, in the words of the Nobel Committee, into “smaller and more manageable specific topics, each of which could be rigorously studied via a carefully designed field experiment.” Duflo calls this “plumbing.”

I applaud their precision. But no society has ever escaped mass poverty through aid or RCTs. Transformation has always come through national growth and innovation—inherently complex processes that demand methods and theories suited to their nature.

In 2024, the prize went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (AJR) for explaining why some countries are rich and others poor. Their answer: settler colonies prospered because Europeans brought “inclusive institutions.” The Nobel Committee praised their conclusion with this line: “The more European settlers, the greater the probability of long-run growth,” leaving one to wonder what the implications could be.

What was left out were exploitation and land grabs. Even the Financial Times noted: “they used the bits about American freedom and tossed the bits about American slavery.” The fuller truth is that settler colonies built wealth by establishing bifurcated economies: inclusive and non-extractive for elite white males, systematically extractive for everyone else.

Yet take any modal syllabus in political economy, and you will still find it stacked with these two clusters of canons. That persistence, even in the face of disruption, reveals the grip of the industrial–colonial paradigm.

Yesterday’s Development Missions

To be clear, there are merits in both canons. But when they are celebrated uncritically, they reinforce a dated worldview in which the West saves the Rest, or the Rest must become like the West.

With each passing year, the gap between our intellectual norms and the reality of a complex, disrupted, multipolar world grows wider.

Traditionally, the first mission of development was to eradicate poverty through foreign aid—specifically Western-designed interventions and RCTs rooted in a mechanistic logic. But within the first two months of 2025, the Trump 2.0 administration abruptly ended much of U.S. foreign assistance by executive order. European countries are also slashing aid budgets and reallocating funds to defense. In short: the era of aid dependence is ending—if not already over.

The second mission of development was to spread “good institutions” around the world, based on the claim that these are universal prerequisites for prosperity. But both democracy and capitalism in the West are now in deep trouble. As Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister of Germany, declared in 2024—the same year AJR won the Nobel Prize—we are witnessing “the end of the liberal West.”

As I wrote earlier in The Ideas Letter, AJR should have received the Prize 20 years ago. Winning it in 2024 made it, in the words of Mark Taylor, “the most controversial Nobel Prize in recent memory.”

Why? Because the Global Majority—home to 80% of the world’s population—is no longer willing to echo the canons. As the Malaysian economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram put it, “Rewarding AJR seeks to re-legitimize the neoliberal project at a time when it is being rejected more widely than ever before.”

Yet here lies the great problem: the Majority has never been the intellectual core of the modern century. It has never been the producer of global concepts, theories, methods, or language—let alone a paradigm. That is where I hope to take a modest first step in filling the gap.

Polytunity: From Naming Fear to Building New Agendas

If polycrisis names the breakdown of the old order, polytunity names the opening it creates.

If polycrisis is Eurocentric, polytunity strives to be truly global. It exposes the false globalism of dominant frameworks and centers the marginalized majority.

If polycrisis is therapy through fear-naming, polytunity is a call to action. It is not a buzzword or slogan. And it is certainly not a “poly-opportunity” ticketed retreat with candles and songs.

Polytunity begins with a call to build new research agendas in development. Research agendas mean raising new questions, applying new methods, and collecting new data. Like any serious social science project, they require years of persistent investigation and validation. They are more than vague gestures at “rethinking” or “embracing.” They should deliver findings and patterns—not platitudes.

The paradigm I propose is called AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy.

• Adaptive means replacing machine-thinking with systems-thinking—seeing societies not as toasters with buttons, but as living forests of trees. In development, this specifically means studying development as a coevolutionary process, not a linear one.
• Inclusive means rejecting the idea that all societies must mold themselves to a single template—an idealized US or UK. AIM instead takes diversity seriously, valuing modalities and solutions tailored to context.
• Moral means acknowledging how power asymmetries shape the production of knowledge. It rejects the pretense of objectivity without positionality.

AIM draws from multiple literatures but is distinguished from each in crucial ways. I tap complex systems theories, but I underscore their lack of attention to Eurocentrism in mainstream thinking. Judging by the make-up of authorities in the field, one would think we still live in the 20th century.

I’ve also been inspired by decolonizing discourses. But I am not simply adding another critique. AIM advances a different kind of social science—one that builds new empirical agendas, including:

• Tracing causality differently;
• Measuring core concepts differently;
• Reconstructing development histories differently.

These are not daydreams. Over two decades, I have cultivated a genealogical forest rooted in AIM. The embryo was How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. From it grew more trees: China’s Gilded Age, “Unbundling Corruption,” and “Fairy Tales of Western Development.” Polytunity is both a counter-narrative to polycrisis and the portal into this budding ecosystem.

This agenda is not “anti-West” or “pro-China.” My consistent objective has been to puncture the false binary between the U.S. and China, showing how they are more alike than assumed. My purpose is to expose the hidden sinews of asymmetrical power in traditional development narratives—a necessary step toward genuine inclusion.

Development as Coevolutionary, Not Linear

Within the AIM forest, let me zoom in on one of the shoots: studying and practicing development as a coevolutionary process, not a linear one. If you “think in machine mode,” how do you see development? You theorize it as a linear cause-and-effect. Press a button, and warm bread pops up. And if you also subscribe to a Eurocentric worldview, what do you expect development-promoting institutions to look like? You assume they must resemble Western capitalist democracies.

Combine these assumptions, and you end up with the three dominant schools of thought in development:

1. Institutional theory: Development begins with good institutions that then enable growth.
2. Modernization theory: Development begins with growth that then enables good institutions.
3. Legacy theory: Development begins with a kind of colonialism that supposedly brought good institutions that led to long-run growth and better institutions, happily ever after.

All three schools are trapped in a chicken-and-egg problem—what social scientists call endogeneity. If growth and good institutions rely on each other, then which comes first? And if countries began with the “wrong” kind of colonialism, are they doomed forever?

Applying Adaptive Political Economy, my analysis begins with a different assumption: socio-economic development is by nature nonlinear. So instead of arguing about which factor comes first, or applying linear regressions to “treat endogeneity” (as if it were a disease), my work applied a particular process-tracing method to map coevolutionary —mutually causal—processes of change.

Applying Inclusive Political Economy, I also reject the assumption that the “right” institutions must look like Western ones. Instead, I conducted a decade of fieldwork in China and further years of comparative research (including the evolution of trade in late medieval Europe, public finance in antebellum United States, and the unlikely boom of Nollywood in Nigeria), letting the facts speak for themselves.

What worked in the beginning? How and why did these arrangements change over time as economies took off?

My nonlinear (Adaptive) plus non-Eurocentric (Inclusive) assumptions, which motivated a different method and perspective, led me to very different conclusions from conventional wisdom. 

4. Coevolutionary theory: Development begins with “using what you have”—repurposing normatively weak, wrong, or unorthodox means to build new markets → Emerging markets stimulate and enable modern institutions → Modern institutions preserve markets.

In other words, this is a stage-variant theory of institutions. What works for advanced economies may not work for start-up economies, and vice versa. We know plenty about the “good institutions” that support advanced economies (impartial courts, technocratic bureaucracies, formal private property rights), but the canons have been largely blind to the institutions and methods that work for the start-ups.

Distilled to one line: market-building ≠ market-preserving. Institutions that fit one may not fit another.

What are the practical implications for global development? This must be a collective conversation. But to kickstart, let me name one possibility. Shouldn’t we invest in discovering what works in start-up economies—approaches unlike the standard package of “good institutions” or neoliberal prescriptions?

Policy reports occasionally sprinkle anecdotes. But imagine something bigger.

Imagine a depository of knowledge on “using what you have”—indigenous innovation, possibly enhanced with modern technologies. Or a systematic collaboration between researchers and practitioners, on a scale comparable to the World Bank’s “good governance” campaign in the 1990s.

Picture a generation of brilliant social scientists refining our understanding of development as a coevolutionary process. Over the last 40 years, economists have produced 1.4 million RCTs and papers on cash transfers to the poor. Instead, imagine just 1,400 papers on how entrepreneurship emerges out of adversity, and what governments can do to build new markets, beyond preserving existing ones.

From my experience on the margins of the establishment, you’ll be told: “Too simple.” “I don’t see any policy implications.” “There’s nothing new—Adam Smith has said it all.” But the deniers cannot deny one thing: their own traditional approaches do not work. They are obsolete. That is why I say: the polycrisis is a polytunity—if you seize on disruption to reset paradigms.

The Future of Development

Development is a test-ground for the possibility of harnessing crises for renewal in a variety of settings.

The profession can no longer revolve around the old missions of foreign aid and importing templates. Poverty reduction requires diversified growth strategies and indigenous innovation, not more precisely measured nudges. Good governance means designing stage-specific institutions tailored to context.

Actualizing these new directions calls for a different intellectual foundation—AIM. I share my theoretical and empirical work not as a blueprint, but as a compass. Of course, one person’s effort is small. But imagine if a community comes together.

As Margarita Cedeño, a former Vice President of the Dominican Republic, wrote in a resonating editorial: “Moving from polycrisis to polyunity is not just a semantic exercise. It is an invitation to change the paradigm from which we interpret reality and design the future.”

Against the backdrop of the UN meeting, the choice for leaders and change-makers is simple. Will you keep naming fear? Or will you join in building new knowledge systems and policy agendas?

That is the call of polytunity.

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is a recipient of the Peter Katzenstein (political economy), Viviana Zelizer (economic sociology), Douglass North (institutional economics), Alice Amsden (socio-economics), and Theda Skocpol (comparative politics) Awards.

1. I first introduced the term “polytunity” in The Ideas Letter (October 2024) and subsequently in “Doing Development in the Polycrisis,” (Project Syndicate, 25 Nov 2024) and “From Polycrisis to Polytunity” (UNDP, June 2025). My thanks to Prof. Ha-Joon Chang, whose conversation at SOAS in June 2024 about the “polycrisis” opened the portal to this line of thinking. ↩︎