Development strategy under the permanent emergency: Building continuity amid crisis

By Steven Were OmamoJuly 9, 2026

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.

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