DLD Annual Lecture with Professor Yuen Yuen Ang - Adaptive political economy: Toward a new paradigm
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- Brunei gallery lecture theatre
- Event type
- Event highlights & Lecture
About this event
Political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. In this talk, Professor Yuen Yuen Ang (Johns Hopkins University) proposes an adaptive political economy.
The conventional paradigm in political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. This has driven political economists to over-simplify big, complex social processes using mechanical models, or to ignore them altogether. In development, this has led to theoretical dead ends, trivial agendas, or failed public policies. I propose an alternative paradigm: adaptive political economy.
It recognises that social systems are complex, not complicated; complexity can be ordered, not messy; and social scientists should be developing the concepts, methods, and theories to illuminate the order of complexity, rather than over-simplifying it.
I illustrate one application of adaptive political economy by mapping development as a coevolutionary process of economic and institutional change. This approach yields fresh, important conclusions that mechanical, linear models of development have missed, including that market-building institutions look and function differently from market-sustaining ones.
The event is followed by a drinks reception.
About the speaker
Professor Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. A multi-disciplinary scholar of development and innovation, specializing in China, Ang's work has been recognized for both its intellectual and public impact.
She is the author of two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China's Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist and described as "game-changing." She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics," awarded by the American Political Science Association, in addition to book awards across multiple social sciences: the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and Barrington Moore Prize (honourable mention, historical sociology). Apolitical, the UK platform for public servants, named her among the world's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government.
Foreign Affairs, the premier outlet on US foreign policy, named her writing among the "Best of Books" and "Best of Print." She has advised multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and UNDP and national development agencies on adaptive governance, anti-corruption, and China's role in global development. Ang has been profiled in American, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and European outlets, including podcast interviews at Freakonomics Radio and The Ezra Klein Show.
Discussants
Dr Jean G Boulton, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Department of Social and Policy Studies, University of Bath
Professor James Putzel, Development Studies, London School of Economics, LSE
