Coevolutionary Development: Nigeria as Demonstration

Term

Coevolutionary Development: Nigeria as Demonstration

Idea level

Application: Development

Definition

Coevolutionary Development: Nigeria as Demonstration refers to Yuen Yuen Ang’s use of Nigeria to illustrate how markets can emerge through informal, normatively weak arrangements in the absence of strong state capacity, demonstrating the generalizable logic of Coevolutionary Development beyond China. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Ang shows how widespread piracy in Nigeria’s film industry functioned as informal distribution at a challenging, market-building phase, before demand for formal institutions of regulation and intellectual property protection arose.

Sources

Empirical demonstration:

• Ang, Yuen Yuen. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), Chapter 7, Section “Coevolutionary Dynamics in the Unlikely Rise of Nollywood”

Theoretical synthesis:

• Ang, Yuen Yuen. “Adaptive Political Economy: Toward a New Paradigm.” World Politics (2024).

Genealogy

[Paradigm] AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy)

→ [Pillar] Adaptive Political Economy (APE)

→ [Pillar] Inclusive: development pathways need not conform to Western institutional templates (strong intellectual property rights as precondition)

→ [Theory] Coevolutionary Development

→ [Concept] Normatively Weak, Functionally Strong

→ [Application: Development] Nigeria’s Nollywood as demonstration (informal market-building through film piracy)

Quotes

“If we look carefully within developing countries, we can find pockets of coevolutionary change in the most unlikely places, hidden in plain sight. One extraordinary instance is the rise of the filmmaking and creative industry in Nigeria—known as Nollywood—within a burst of twenty years.”

— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), “Coevolutionary Dynamics in the Unlikely Rise of Nollywood,” pp. 232

“In both the rise of Nollywood and China’s capitalist economy, preexisting weak institutions were adapted to build markets.”

— Ang, “Coevolutionary Dynamics in the Unlikely Rise of Nollywood,” p. 237

Concept Constellation

Across Ang’s work, Coevolutionary Development: Nigeria as Demonstration consistently co-appears with the following concepts and analytic themes:

• Compare: Coevolutionary Development: China as Demonstration

• Normatively Weak, Functionally Strong

• Market-Building vs. Market-Preserving

• Using What You Have

• Non-state-led market formation