Yuen Yuen Ang argues that we need a fundmentally different way of thinking about our biggest global problems

The term “polycrisis” has become a buzzword of the 2020s. It refers to the interconnected nature of the threats facing humanity today, from global warming, pandemics, and extreme inequality to democratic erosion and armed conflict. With few solutions on offer, experts and policymakers have reacted to this confluence of crises with dread and doom.

One typical response is to lament our many problems, draw up fancy diagrams depicting how the world could collapse, and conclude vaguely that the goal is not to present a fatalistic perspective despite predictions of a “ghastly future.”

Few doubt that a disrupted world needs systemic changes, yet, in practice, elite institutions and donors reward piecemeal solutions. In 2019, the Nobel Prize in economics went to three economists for their method of breaking down global poverty into “smaller, more manageable” problems that can be tackled one micro-intervention at a time.

The reason conversations about the polycrisis always seem to hit a dead end is straightforward: they fail to recognize the industrial-colonial paradigm that has led to our crises in the first place.

Warning about the polycrisis, the World Economic Forum listed the “Top Ten Risks” that keep rich-world elites up at night. This framing reinforces the industrial mindset of “risk” (a potential future problem) and control. But we are facing uncertainty (unknown possibilities, which can be good or bad) – a concept distinct from risk – which should motivate adaptation and learning.

Likewise, given the elitist, Western-centric nature of the conventional wisdom resulting from this mindset, proponents cannot imagine solutions emerging from non-elites and places outside Europe and North America. China leads the world in renewable energy. African firms “innovate under the radar” with limited resources. Indigenous activists demonstrate ways to heal damaged eco- and social systems by replacing the logic of extractive capitalism with the value of reciprocity.

In orthodox development thinking, the period beginning with the Industrial Revolution in England is seen as the Age of Progress – one that has raised billions of people’s living standards to previously unimaginable levels. But notwithstanding all the laudable achievements of modern science and technology, “progress” must be qualified. After all, we are heirs to the Age of Domination, characterized both by industrialization (human domination over nature) and by colonialism (Western domination over everyone else).

The polycrisis instills fear in global elites because it exposes the limits of both forces, and the mental models that lay behind them. Industrialization promoted a mechanical worldview, or what Esther Duflo, one of the 2019 Nobel laureate economists, dubbed “thinking in machine mode.” Viewed this way, even complex, dynamic natural and social systems are treated as mechanical objects (like a toaster), implying that outcomes can be determined simply by finding “the button that will get the machine started” – the singular root cause of the issue. The adaptive, multi-causal qualities inherent to complex systems (like forests) are regarded as annoying complications to be purged.

When machine-mode 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 harmful chemicals has resulted in severe ecological damage, including widespread “forest deaths” that accelerate global warming. Indeed, the climate crisis is the ultimate reminder that humans cannot reduce nature to simplistic mechanical models.

The colonial worldview accompanies the mechanical mindset. Although formal colonies no longer exist, global institutions emerged in an era when they did. The twentieth century was a period of Western domination, with American and European men exercising monopoly power in designing the rules of the global order and dictating intellectual canons. The animating assumption in development circles was that Western capitalist democracies exemplify the end point of human evolution, and the rest of the world only needs to “catch up” and assimilate.

Such assimilation was orchestrated through one-size-fits-all “good governance” reforms advanced by Western-led international organizations like the World Bank. But just as homogenizing forests through industrial farming has destroyed their diversity and resilience, economist Lant Pritchett and sociologist Michael Woolcock observe that “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.”

I see three opportunities for new thinking, research, and action. First, we should replace machine-mode thinking with the paradigm of an “adaptive political economy.” This approach recognizes a basic fact: the natural and social worlds are not complicated objects (like toasters), but rather complex systems (like forests). Complex systems comprise many moving parts that are constantly adapting, learning, and connecting with one another within the context of a larger emergent order. Imposing mechanical models on such systems is misleading, if not destructive.

Studying how complex systems work, especially in the Global South, can help us derive new insights and solutions in a world distorted by machine-fetishism and rarified narratives about Western growth. My own work studying economic development as a non-linear (co-evolutionary) process in China and Nigeria finds that institutions suited to an early stage of development usually look and function differently from those suited to mature economies. People can repurpose normatively “weak” institutions to build new markets, but only if they are not locked into the one-size-fits-all template celebrated in mainstream economics.

Second, an adaptive paradigm must incorporate an inclusive and moral dimension. This means replacing the colonial logic of assimilation with the pithy maxim: “use what you have.” Every day in developing countries, people are improvising and creatively using whatever is available to them to solve problems. The farmer Aba Hawi inspired a new social movement in Ethiopia when he revived traditional conservation techniques to regenerate the land. Similarly, China’s development since the 1980s was the result of “directed improvisation,” rather than top-down planning (which failed miserably under Mao).

Third, rather than oscillating between the two extremes of unfettered markets and command-and-control economies, governments in the twenty-first century should be directing adaptive processes. This involves coordinating and motivating a decentralized network of actors, discovering but not predetermining successful outcomes, and making ample use of experimentation and bottom-up feedback – actions that go beyond the scope of traditional industrial policies.

The polycrisis is paralyzing only for those who are attached to the old order. For those who are not, it offers what I would call a “polytunity” to usher in new paradigms that invert the way we think about the development process, the sources of solutions, and the role of the state.

Yuen Yuen Ang, Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap and China’s Gilded Age. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024, published here with permission.