Date:
Location:
"Directed Improvisation: Creating the Conditions for Effective Adaptation"
Speaker:
Yuen Yuen Ang, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, University of Michigan.
Contacts:
Jessie Bullock
jbullock@g.harvard.edu
Andrew Leber
andrewmleber@g.harvard.edu
Shannon Parker
shannonparker@g.harvard.edu
Faculty Advisors:
Gwyneth McClendon, Faculty Associate. Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies, Departments of Government and Social Studies, Harvard University.
Yuhua Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Abstract:
Social scientists and policy advisers frequently invoke the term “adaptation,” describing, prescribing, and crediting it as a cause of performance or resilience. Yet despite numerous references, adaptation is rarely defined, much less explained. What exactly is adaptation? What are its mechanisms? Why are some agents able to adapt but not others? Can the supporting conditions for effective adaptation be created, or are they endowed and fixed?
This chapter of my book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, lays out the theoretical framework for a new research agenda: strategies that enable effective adaptation. Contrary to popular prescriptions, adaptation is not the solution to all problems; rather, enabling adaptation is itself a problem. Specifically, I highlight three universal problems of adaptation: how to balance variety and uniformity of choices (variation), how to define and reward success among agents (selection), and how to turn unequal resource distribution across units into a collective advantage (niche creation).
Applying this framework to China, I trace the regime’s extraordinary adaptability in the reform era to the ways in which its reformers tackled these problems—summed up in an approach that I call “directed improvisation.”
Yuen Yuen Ang is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She is the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, Cornell Studies in Political Economy, September 2016).
