Adaptive Political Economy: Toward a New Paradigm 

Abstract

Adaptive Political Economy (APE) is a paradigm proposed by Yuen Yuen Ang for studying political economies as complex adaptive systems, rather than as mechanical objects, and for developing concepts and methods that illuminate complex social features such as adaptation, coevolution, and uncertainty, rather than simplifying them away.

APE emphasizes four core principles: 

(1) Complex ≠ Complicated: societies are living, adaptive systems (trees), not predictable machines (toasters). 

(2) Development as co-evolutionary, not linear: markets and institutions evolve together through mutual adaptation, not one before the other. 

(3) Influence over control: in complex systems, top-down control fails; more fruitful is designing meta-institutions that enable adaptation and learning. 

(4) Simple but not any simpler: models must capture interdependence, endogeneity, and uncertainty, without oversimplifying them away.

Excerpting from How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), this article highlights one key application of APE: Coevolutionary Development, demonstrated in China and Nigeria. 

Keywords: Paradigm, AIM Political Economy, Adaptive Political Economy, Complex vs Complicated, Influence vs Control, Uncertainty vs Risk, Coevolutionary Development: China as Demonstration, Coevolutionary Development: Nigeria as Demonstration, non-linear causation, Simple But Not Any Simpler