The Polytunity Project

Led by SNF Agora faculty member Yuen Yuen Ang, The Polytunity Project reframes today’s disruptions—often labeled the “polycrisis”—as a generational opening for deep transformation in global thought. Its intellectual foundation is AIM (adaptive, inclusive, moral) political economy, which Ang has applied across her scholarship.

Project Description

What new ways of thinking do we need in a disrupted, multipolar world?   

Yuen Yuen Ang, Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy, tackles this urgent question through The Polytunity Project at the SNF Agora Institute.  

In recent years, global discourse has been dominated by the buzzword “polycrisis”—a label for the convergence of threats facing humanity, from climate change to democratic erosion to geopolitical tensions. 

Rather than treating disruption as paralysis, Ang flips the frame. She defines the current moment as the polytunity—a once-in-a-generation opening to confront the inequities of the old order and build a more just, inclusive future. 

At the heart of this call is Ang’s paradigm of AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy. Though only formally named in 2024, AIM has long underpinned her award-winning scholarship, from How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) to China’s Gilded Age (2020). With this project, Ang invites changemakers worldwide to carry AIM forward—seizing today’s polytunity to drive transformation across regions and fields.

“ I call this moment a polytunity – to reframe disruption not as paralysis but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for deep transformation. ”
Headshot for Yuen Yuen Ang Polytunity: The Future of Development (2025)

Polytunity Project Resources

  • Polycrisis vs. Polytunity: Global Echoes of a New Paradigm

    Yuen Yuen Ang challenges the fear-driven language of “polycrisis” with a bold alternative: polytunity. Her concept reframes disruption as a global opportunity for transformation, sparking responses from leaders and thinkers worldwide.

  • Carnegie India Reviews Adaptive Political Economy

    In a Carnegie India review, Suyash Rai engages Yuen Yuen Ang’s Adaptive Political Economy, highlighting her challenge to linear models of development and her call to see political economies as living, coevolving systems.

  • Turning Polycrisis into Polytunity

    Writing in her role as Senior Advisor to the UNDP, SNF Agora faculty Yuen Yuen Ang reframes the polycrisis as polytunity in this expert commentary for the UNDP Development at Risk Report

  • Adaptive Political Economy: Toward a New Paradigm

    The conventional paradigm in political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. This treatment has driven political economists to oversimplify big, complex social processes using mechanical models, or to ignore them altogether.

  • Polytunity Substack

    For updates, follow Ang’s new Substack, Polytunity, where she will share her writing as well as new thinking and action from global changemakers.