Yuen Yuen Ang argues, in this expert commentary prepared for the UNDP Development at Risk Report (2025), that the current period of global disruption should be understood not primarily as polycrisis but as polytunity — a generational opening for deep intellectual and institutional transformation that those attached to the old order are ill-positioned to see. The root of today's overlapping crises, Ang argues, is the industrial-colonial paradigm: the worldview that has governed political-economic thinking since mass industrialization, combining mechanical assumptions — the search for "the button that starts the machine," in Duflo and Banerjee's phrase — with a colonial logic of assimilation that positions the West as the universal endpoint of development. Translated into practice, this paradigm drives a persistent and persistently unsuccessful search for the single cause, silver bullet, or copy-and-paste template that will unlock growth. AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy is Ang's response. AIM rests on two distinctive features: first, it recognizes that social systems are complex, not complicated — and that the task is to illuminate the order within complexity rather than to simplify it away. Second, it shifts development's focus from emulating an idealized Western standard to amplifying the adaptive, innovative capacity of actors in the developing world, expressed in the principle of "using what you have": building on local knowledge and existing resources rather than importing foreign blueprints. A paradigm, Ang argues, is not a theory or a framework — it is an operating system. Change the OS and all the applications must change with it. Advancing such a shift is a public good that UNDP is uniquely positioned to lead.
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