Enabling Adaptation
Term
Enabling Adaptation
Idea level
Others (research and policy agenda)
Definition
Enabling Adaptation, as advanced by Yuen Yuen Ang, is a research and policy agenda focused on creating the conditions that make effective adaptation possible, framing it as a series of design problems. This stands in contrast to literature that prescribes or exhorts adaptation as a solution without explaining how it is produced—shifting the focus from agreeing that we should adapt (mindsets) to designing meta-institutions and learning from real-world experiences (mechanisms).
Specifically, enabling adaptation requires addressing three universal design problems:
how alternatives are generated (variation),
how success is defined and rewarded (selection),
how diversity across units can be turned into a system advantage (niche creation).
Sources
First articulation:
Ang, Y.Y. (2016). How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. Introduction; Chapter 2: Directed Improvisation.
Policy-facing communication:
Ang, Y.Y. (2018). “Complexity and Development 2.0: From Agreeing We Should Adapt to Creating the Conditions for Adaptation.” Presentation at the Institute of Development Studies (UK).
Ang, Y.Y. (2021). “Adaptive Bureaucracies.” Expert Comment at ODI Global.
Genealogy
[Paradigm] AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy
→ [Pillar] Adaptive Political Economy (APE)
→ [Critique] PDIA, Doing Development Differently: prescribe adaptation as toolkit or moral pledges without examining the necessary conditions for effective adaptation
→ [Concept] Enabling Adaptation: addressing a series of design problems
→ [Concept] Meta-Institutions
→ [Application] Directed Improvisation: empirical demonstration in reform-era China
Quotes
“Normally we are inclined to think about adaptation itself as the solution to all problems. Thus popular literature readily invokes buzzwords from complexity and adaptation to accessorize slogans: ‘Embrace experimentation! Muddle through purposively! Promote innovation! Celebrate diverse solutions! And above all, don’t fear change!’
Although adaptation is universally desirable, people often fail to adapt, and even if they try they may still fail. Experimentation and muddling through may not produce useful solutions or indeed any solution. Bottom-up participation may degenerate into shouting matches and gridlock, as is sometimes seen in democratic settings. And if promoting innovation were easy, then we would all have done it long ago, and all our problems would have been magically solved.
Obviously it is easier said than done to adapt and to adapt effectively.”
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), pp. 15–16.
“Effective adaptation is something we all love to have, but how do we get it?... Under what conditions do agents adapt to changing circumstances? What defines and influences effective adaptation?... Rather than thinking about adaptation as a unidimensional process, it is better understood as a bundle of mechanisms (variation, selection, and niche creation) that collectively drives the process of evolution. Therefore, the conditions that foster adaptation are an assembly of measures taken to address certain problems inherent in each adaptive mechanism.
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), pp. 48.
“China is not exceptional in the adaptive problems it faced; rather it is unique in the way it tackled these problems.”
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), pp. 16.
“In recent years, there has been an encouraging shift away from ‘best practices’ in the dominant good-governance agenda toward a localized ‘best-fit’ approach in foreign aid and reforms…
Andrews prescribes the following rules of thumb in an approach he calls ‘problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA)…
The hard part, however, is how to put them into practice. Some development specialists have tried to “operationalize” the task of promoting adaptation by reducing it to a technical or even ideological problem…
Recently, the Harvard Kennedy School initiated the signing of a “DDD [Do Development Differently] Manifesto” based on the principles of PDIA. Those who sign the manifesto ‘pledge to apply these principles in our own efforts to pursue, promote and facilitate development progress.’… Yet one cannot help, of course, but be reminded of Marx’s communist manifesto. Chinese cadres and citizens, too, were once enjoined to pledge allegiance to Marxist principles, but such promises were thrown out the window as soon as Mao exited.
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), pp. 53-57.
Wishing to adapt is not the same as being able to adapt…. Worse, ’adaptation’ and ’innovation’ risk becoming a new-age burden imposed on already overstretched bureaucracies. If the existing paradigm is Complexity 1.0, I propose Complexity 2.0: moving the focus from agreeing that we should adapt to enabling adaptation.
— Ang, “Adaptive Bureaucracies” (2021).
Concept Constellation
Across Ang’s work, Enabling Adaptation consistently co-appears with the following concepts and analytic themes:
Complexity & Development 2.0