WASHINGTON, D.C.. The term polycrisis has become a buzzword in 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 the armed conflict. Faced with few solutions available, experts and policymakers have reacted to this confluence of crises with fear and pessimism. A typical response is to lament our many problems, draw up extravagant diagrams describing how the world might collapse, and vaguely conclude that the point is not to present a fatalistic outlook despite predictions of a “dire future.”
Few doubt that a disrupted world needs systemic change, but 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 addressed one micro-intervention at a time. The reason why conversations about the polycrisis always seem to reach a dead end is simple: they do not 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 the rich world’s elites awake at night. This framework reinforces the industry mindset of risk (a potential future problem) and control. But we are faced with uncertainty (unknown possibilities, which may be good or bad) – a different concept from risk – which should motivate adaptation and learning.
Furthermore, given the elitist and Western-centric nature of the conventional wisdom resulting from this mentality, advocates cannot imagine solutions emerging from non-elites and from places outside of Europe and North America. China leads the world in renewable energy. African companies “innovate under the radar” with limited resources. Indigenous activists demonstrate ways to heal damaged ecological and social systems by replacing the logic of extractive capitalism with the value of reciprocity.
The polycrisis instills fear in global elites because it exposes the limits of both forces and the mental models that support them. Industrialization promoted a mechanical view of the world, or what Esther Duflo, one of the 2019 Nobel Prize-winning economists, called “machine mode thinking.” Viewed this way, even complex and 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 make the machine go,” the singular root cause of the problem. The adaptive and multi-causal qualities inherent in complex systems (such as forests) are considered nuisance complications that must be eliminated.
When machine mode thinking was applied to agriculture, it increased production through uniformity and efficiency; But in the long term, biodiversity loss and overuse of harmful chemicals have resulted in serious ecological damage, including widespread “forest deaths” that accelerate global warming. Indeed, the climate crisis is the definitive reminder that humans cannot reduce nature to simplistic mechanical models. The colonial worldview accompanies the mechanistic mentality. Although formal colonies no longer exist, global institutions emerged in an era when they did exist. The assumption animating development circles was that Western capitalist democracies exemplified the end point of human evolution, and that the rest of the world just needed to “catch up” and assimilate. Such assimilation was orchestrated through one-size-fits-all “good governance” reforms pushed by Western-led international organizations such as the World Bank. But just as the homogenization of forests through industrial agriculture has destroyed their diversity and resilience, economist Lant Pritchett and sociologist Michael Woolcock observe that “simply imitating (or adopting through colonial inheritance) the organizational forms of a “Denmark in particular has, in fact, been a root cause of the profound problems facing 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: cultural and social worlds are not complicated objects (like toasters), but complex systems (like forests). Complex systems comprise many moving parts that constantly adapt, learn, and connect with each other within the context of a larger emerging order. Imposing mechanical models on such systems is not only misleading, but 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 rarefied narratives about Western growth. My own work studying economic development as a non-linear (co-evolutionary) process in China and Nigeria finds that institutions suitable for an early stage of development generally look and function differently than those suitable for mature economies. People can repurpose normatively “weak” institutions to build new markets, but only if they are not locked into the single template that the dominant economy celebrates.
Second, an adaptive paradigm must incorporate an inclusive and moral dimension. This means replacing the colonial logic of assimilation with the succinct maxim: “use what you have.” Every day in developing countries, people improvise and creatively use everything that is available to solve problems. Farmer Aba Hawi inspired a new social movement in Ethiopia when he revived traditional conservation techniques to regenerate land. Similarly, China’s development since the 1980s was the result of “managed 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, 21st century governments should lead adaptive processes. This involves coordinating and motivating a decentralized network of actors, discovering but not predetermining successful outcomes, and making extensive use of bottom-up experimentation and 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.
The author
Yuen Yuen Ang, professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016) and China’s Gilded Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024 www.project-syndicate.org
