Western-Centric Thinking is a mode of reasoning that treats Western capitalist democracy as the universal benchmark or endpoint of development. It casts non-Western societies as lagging cases that must catch up or assimilate, often through one-size-fits-all “good governance” reforms and global metrics that rank all societies against an idealized West. 

Directed Improvisation with AI, introduced by Yuen Yuen Ang in 2026, extends her 2016 model of Directed Improvisation to human–AI co-creation by redefining human agency—from humans producing answers on their own to directing how humans and AI produce them together. 

Autocracy with Democratic Characteristics resolves the puzzle of why reform-era China sustained growth without becoming a liberal democracy: it carried out political reforms through bureaucratic reforms that injected the “democratic characteristics” of accountability, competition, and partial limits on power into a single-party autocracy. 

Adaptive Policy Communication is a theory of governance under complexity, which explains how leaders can combine clear and ambiguous instructions to steer policy implementation in large, decentralized organizations—with ambiguity providing room for interpretation, flexibility, and feedback. In this way, it functions as a meta-institution.  

Access money refers to high-stakes exchanges in which business actors offer substantial rewards to political elites in order to obtain exclusive, lucrative privileges, and not merely to bypass red tape (in contrast to speed money). 

Variation, Selection & Niche Creation are three adaptive mechanisms that govern how solutions are generated, how success is defined and rewarded, and how heterogeneity across units can be turned into a system advantage.  

Meta-Institutions are higher-order structures and strategies that facilitate adaptive and learning processes.

Enabling Adaptation is a research and policy agenda focused on creating the conditions that make effective adaptation possible, framing it as a series of design problems.

Complex vs. Complicated is an ontological distinction between systems made up of interconnected elements that adapt to one another (complex—like trees), and mechanical objects composed of separate parts whose operations are linear and controllable (complicated—like toasters). 

Complexity and Development is an emerging agenda that treats development problems as complex rather than complicated, rejecting cookie-cutter solutions in favor of localized adaptation and experimentation.  

Adaptive Efficiency refers to the capacity of societies to adapt to changing conditions and novel problems.  

Adaptation refers to a particular type of change in which agents fit themselves to changing environments through mechanisms such as variation and selection, whereas other forms of change—such as shocks or aging—do not involve adaptation.