Key takeaways

• The world has entered a period of permanent emergency defined by continual overlapping crises.
• Development strategy must be built to address persistent disruption, not temporary shocks.
• Continuity should be the key priority. Strong institutions, infrastructure, and productive sectors help countries keep progressing during crises.

Conventional development strategy assumes that crises are interruptions. Wars end. Commodity prices stabilize. Supply chains recover. Political tensions ease. Things settle and development can then resume.

That assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Over the past decade or so, countries have been confronted with a succession of shocks that would once have been considered beyond extraordinary. A global pandemic. Major wars in Europe and the Middle East. Armed insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A seemingly endless succession of droughts, floods, storms, heat waves, wildfires. Supply chain disruptions. Energy price volatility. Food price inflation. Fiscal crises borne of rising debt burdens. Growing geopolitical fragmentation. Ethnic and religious clashes. These are no longer isolated events but rather key features of the operating environment within which development must occur.

This is the age of the permanent emergency. Its implications for development strategy, policy, and research, and for the lives of billions in the paths of various crises, are profound. It requires that development actors reassess roles and approaches that have, in many cases, been the norm for decades. We must acknowledge and confront this current reality of permanent emergency—which presents not only new forms of risk (or old forms in new guises) but opportunities to build stronger, more resilient institutions and capabilities.

Mounting crises

Evidence from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Food Programme, IFPRI, UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program all points in the same direction. Conflict has reached its highest level in decades. Forced displacement continues to rise. Climate shocks are intensifying. Progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals has stalled or reversed in many areas, particularly food security.

This is not to argue that the world is worse off than during the great wars and famines of the 20th century; in many respects, humanity is healthier, wealthier, and more technologically capable than ever before. Rather, development today takes place in an environment that is more persistently disrupted. The central question is no longer simply how countries grow, but how they continue growing despite repeated shocks.

The American diplomat George P. Shultz described one of the defining challenges of modern societies in the post-Cold War period as “governing vulnerability.” That insight is even more relevant today. Vulnerability is widespread and persistent. Development strategy must therefore be designed around the expectation of disruption rather than the hope of stability.

Ensuring continuity

This recognition is already reshaping policy thinking. Governments across Africa and Asia increasingly combine long-term transformation with resilience, implementation capacity, regional integration, and preparedness. International institutions are similarly returning to questions that once seemed old-fashioned: productive capacity, logistics, infrastructure, institutions, jobs, and state capability. The lesson emerging from recent crises is straightforward. Countries with stronger economic and institutional foundations are generally better able not only to grow, but also to sustain growth when shocks occur.

The task is not merely to recover from crises, but to ensure that the key functions upon which development depends continue despite them. Governments must continue governing. Economies must continue producing. Investment must continue flowing. Essential services must continue operating. Markets must continue functioning. Development itself must continue moving forward.

This continuity perspective changes how we think about leadership requirements and development priorities (Table 1). Infrastructure is no longer simply a driver of growth; it is the foundation of continuity. Reliable transport, energy, water, storage, and digital systems enable societies to absorb shocks while maintaining economic activity. Trade is no longer only about efficiency; it is increasingly about diversification, regional integration, and supply-chain resilience so that countries remain connected even when global systems are disrupted. Finance is no longer simply a source of capital; it must provide the capacity to mobilize resources, manage risk, and sustain investment under uncertainty. The continuity imperative also explains the growing emphasis on private-sector engagement. Governments and humanitarian actors remain indispensable, but neither can substitute for businesses that continue producing, investing, employing people, and maintaining value chains in long-duration disrupted operating conditions.

Table 1

Seizing opportunities

In addition to readiness for adversity, development strategy under the permanent emergency requires readiness for opportunity.

Progress rarely occurs in a smooth, linear fashion. Periods of stability, political reform, technological change, successful harvests, regional integration, or post-conflict recovery create windows during which reforms and investments become possible. Countries that advance most rapidly are often distinguished not only by how they manage crises, but also by how effectively they recognize and exploit these opportunities.

Development under the permanent emergency is therefore neither a strategy of pessimism nor one of perpetual crisis management. It is a strategy of continuity. Its purpose is to preserve the institutions, productive systems, investments, and capabilities that allow societies to keep moving forward despite repeated disruption, while remaining prepared to accelerate progress when favorable moments arise. The objective is not to preserve particular policies or institutions regardless of their effectiveness, but to preserve the capacity for development progress through continuous adaptation, learning, and renewal.

The key role of research

This changing development landscape has major implications for development research. Repeated crises are reminding policymakers that the foundations of development still matter enormously. Infrastructure. Institutions. State capability. Productive sectors. Logistics. The ability to move food, fertilizer, fuel, information, and finance quickly and reliably at scale. These structural building blocks of economies require renewed attention.

If the central challenge of development strategy is continuity, then a central challenge facing development research is boosting understanding of the core building blocks of continuity: what allows markets to keep functioning, governments to keep governing, firms to keep investing, food systems to keep operating, and societies to keep progressing despite repeated shocks? Recent IFPRI work, including the book War and Resilience: The Multifaceted Impacts of Sudan’s Conflict and Pathways to Recovery, affirms the value of studying development through crisis. Under the permanent emergency, continuity can no longer be viewed as an implicit or accidental by-product of development strategy. It must be embraced as the chief objective.

Steven Were Omamo is Director of IFPRI’s Development Strategies and Governance Unit and Director for Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Opinions are the author’s.