Conflicts, trade wars, inequality, and democratic decay fill today\u2019s headlines. Each crisis appears to be feeding the next, and it can feel as though the world is coming apart. Western leaders and thinkers have embraced a single word to capture this entanglement of threats: \u201cpolycrisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adam Tooze<\/a>, the Columbia University historian who helped popularise the term,\u00a0summarised<\/a>\u00a0its appeal in 2023: \u201cHere is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called.\u201d But when fear becomes the central theme, the result can only be angst and paralysis, as Mark Leonard\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0after the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos.<\/p>\n Crises, however, are not necessarily followed by collapse. In fact, disruption has often paved the way for renewal \u2013 but only for those who were willing to let go of the old order.<\/p>\n With that in mind, I see the same moment through a different lens \u2013 as\u00a0polytunity, a term I coined in a November 2024\u00a0Project Syndicate\u00a0commentary<\/a>\u00a0and then later elaborated at the\u00a0United Nations Development Program<\/a>. The idea is simple: Simultaneous disruptions offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the deep transformation of global institutions and ideas. When everything seems to crumble at once, we are forced to go beyond patchwork solutions and redesign systems from the ground up.<\/p>\n For starters, we should recognise that the polycrisis is a Western-centric narrative masquerading as global. Two European theorists\u00a0coined<\/a>\u00a0the word in 1993, while another European expert\u00a0popularised<\/a>\u00a0it recently. A Western-based summit of elites gave the term a prominent\u00a0platform<\/a>, prompting its viral amplification by Western\u00a0media<\/a>,\u00a0think tanks<\/a>, and\u00a0academics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite constant lamentations about a \u201cghastly future<\/a>,\u201d the conversation on polycrisis rarely, if ever, acknowledges the agency of the non-Western world \u2013 nowadays euphemistically called the \u201cGlobal South<\/a>\u201d \u2013 or the solutions it has offered. Even as some theorists call for \u201cRenewed Humanism<\/a>,\u201d they fail to confront the reality of a structurally\u00a0unequal order<\/a>\u00a0and growing frustrations with it. Western dominance of international finance and institutions persists, while non-Western ideas and voices remain marginalised in supposedly global canons.<\/p>\n The establishment favours the language of polycrisis because it obscures the root causes of global breakdowns, making them appear like natural disasters. In reality, today\u2019s overlapping crises can be traced back to the industrial-colonial paradigm that has prevailed since the Industrial Revolution, a worldview that defined progress as control: mechanical control over nature, and Western control over the rest of the world.<\/p>\n To be sure, that chapter of modernisation produced immense material and social gains. But it also sowed the seeds of our current predicament. Global warming, the defining crisis of our time, is the result of an extractive industrial model, supported by a trading system in which workers in poor countries manufacture for low pay what consumers in rich countries purchase in excess.<\/p>\n The industrial-colonial paradigm has expired in a hyper-complex, multipolar world. We need a new mindset \u2013 which I call\u00a0AIM<\/a>: Adaptive, Inclusive, and Moral Political Economy. To be adaptive is to govern societies not as crude machines, but as living networks that learn and evolve. To be inclusive is to recognise that progress depends on\u00a0using what you have<\/a>, which means mobilising local creativity rather than copying the models of the rich and powerful. And to be moral is to acknowledge that ideas are shaped by power, and to redress this imbalance.<\/p>\n Over the course of decades of research, I have studied China \u2013 as well as\u00a0other countries<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 through the lens of AIM. In my book\u00a0How China Escaped the Poverty Trap<\/a>, I traced development not as a linear path, but as a co-evolutionary process, marked by a recursive feedback loop (Adaptive<\/a>). This analysis showed that the strategies that create new markets can look starkly different from standard prescriptions for \u201cgood institutions\u201d (Inclusive<\/a>). Then, in\u00a0China\u2019s Gilded Age<\/a>, I challenged the Orientalist assumption of \u201cChinese exceptionalism<\/a>,\u201d revealing that China\u2019s trajectory mirrors forgotten Western histories, not the mythologised versions taught in textbooks (Moral<\/a>).<\/p>\n AIM provides a compass for thinking and policymaking in an age when the global majority is increasingly\u00a0taking ownership<\/a>\u00a0of its own development, rather than following Western formulas or waiting to be rescued from poverty through aid.<\/p>\n Consider, for example, that China, India, and Saudi Arabia are investing heavily in clean energy, while sub-Saharan African countries are experimenting with\u00a0energy leapfrogging<\/a>. And as US tariffs shrink export options to high-income markets for late developers like Vietnam and Ethiopia, South-South trade is\u00a0surpassing<\/a>\u00a0North-South trade in volume.<\/p>\n On the intellectual front, the experts most qualified to teach about the \u201cpolitical economy of justice\u201d and \u201ccircular economy\u201d are not philosophers or consultants in Europe and North America, but\u00a0indigenous groups<\/a>\u00a0who have long\u00a0protected ecosystems<\/a>, despite centuries of dispossession.<\/p>\n Polytunity is not a call for naive optimism in the face of existential threats. Instead, it represents purposeful realism that draws on the creativity of a genuinely global community, not a single region or privileged class. Nor does it promote platitudes or vibes.\u00a0Polytunity<\/a>\u00a0is a constructive agenda grounded in an empirical foundation. Applied correctly and seriously, it should change the way we study and tackle a range of challenges, not least\u00a0development<\/a>.<\/p>\n What we are witnessing is not the end of progress, but rather the end of the industrial-colonial paradigm and the beginning of another \u2013 if we have the conviction to develop it.<\/p>\n