Understanding assemblages

Within the field of critical development literature in which this thesis is situated, there has been a sustained debate over methodological approaches employed to understand the process of

development (see Bebbington, 2004; Bernstein, 2006; Crush, 1995; Kothari, 2005b). To give a brief summation of these debates, the first wave of critical development scholars employed a range of methodologies, from ethnography, to household surveys, to political ecology inspired approaches, in order to show the unexpected consequences of capitalist development and the divergence between development policies and on-the-ground outcomes (for instance: Bernstein, 1994; Blaikie &

Brookfield, 1987; Hirsch, 1989; Schumann & Partridge, 1986). The importance of these pioneering

30 studies was their dedication to ‘thick’ ethnographic descriptions of livelihood struggles in the context of state policies and market forces that were often blind to inequality and injustice. A second generation of scholars, largely influenced by Foucault, employed critical discourse analyses to examine project documents, policies and development rationales and how they create technical apparatuses or an ‘anti-politics machine’ that enrol people into the inner logics of development (Crush, 1995; Escobar, 2011 [1995]; J. Ferguson, 1990; E. W. Said, 1993; Slater, 1997). Many of these analyses were especially concerned with power, and how a particular discursive grid that takes poverty and improvement as its focus legitimised the workings of the western development bureaucracy while simultaneously creating a new field of expertise. Several in-depth historical studies published in the 1990s also examined driving rationalities of ‘development’ within the context of industrialisation, colonialism and the enlightenment (Cowen & Shenton, 1996; Headrick, 1990; E. W. Said, 1993; J.C. Scott, 1998). The importance of these studies is that they showed that development is primarily an idea, reproduced through project documents and bureaucracies which is quite capable of reproducing itself autonomously from the actual material conditions of poverty that it takes as a target (Quarles van Ufford, Kruyt, & Downing, 1988).

A third wave of critical development theorists have turned back to ethnography, not so much to focus on livelihood struggles, but to examine the actions of those within aid bureaucracies. In particular they focus on how the ‘travelling rationalities’ of development are ‘translated’, through

‘brokers and translators’ within diverse circumstances and localities (Anne-Meike Fechter &

Hindman, 2011; Kothari, 2005a; Lewis & Mosse, 2006a; T.M. Li, 2007; Mitchell, 2002; David Mosse, 2011a; Wallace et al., 2007). Rather than just focusing on the rationalities and discourses of development projects as espoused through policy documents and goals, they focus on how technologies, objects and individuals facilitate the production of success and project coherency under challenging circumstances. They bring to light the complex politics of aid-chains, the

contingencies and failures of development interventions, and yet nonetheless show how the will to

31 improve and govern over the often-chaotic world of people and things is what matters in the

reproduction of development institutions and ideas.

Of course, the history of critical development thinking is not linear, and is far broader than what is briefly presented here; political ecology and Marxist approaches have for instance been infused with radical feminism, post-colonialism and actor-network theory approaches to produce novel critiques and perspectives on development. Nor are the former studies necessarily less complex or less relevant to critical development studies than the latter – with an increasing trend towards discourse analyses and actor-network approaches in place of detailed village level case studies, detailed political ecology influenced studies that focus on livelihood struggles are as relevant and as needed as ever.²¹ The purpose however of this caricature of critical development studies is merely to

broadly outline how an assemblage approach at once draws on elements of all three approaches, yet is distinct in key ways.

What distinguishes an assemblage approach from these three broad bodies of literature is that an assemblage approach does not privilege the epistemological or the ontological. It does not take discourses or rationalities to be the driver of development theory (as early Foucauldian inspired work has been criticised of doing) (De Sardan, 2005; D. Mosse, 2005), but nor does it fall back on the relativism of the everyday, or a prioritisation of the messiness, complexity and contingency of the local – what Massey (2005:110) terms the ‘fetishization of the local’, or Latour (2005:168) ‘social sciences obsession with context’ – as some of the more empirical village level work has been accused of doing. Rather, an assemblage approach challenges one to account for how micro

techniques (as famously described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977) for instance) combine

21 As Achille Mbembé (2001: 8) notes on studies on Africa: ‘[I]nstead of patient, careful, in-depth research, there are off- the-cuff representations possessed and accumulated without anyone’s knowing how, notions that everyone uses but of origin quite unknown— in Kant’s well-known formulation, “groundless assertions, against which others equally specious can always be set.”

32 with institutional rationalities, discourses and individual interests and desires to form durable bonds between people and objects. Rather than starting with discourses and rationalities and searching for their effects on the marginalised (an approach De Sardan (2005)terms ‘deconstructive populism’), the challenge is to account for how an institution, set of ideas, and set of techniques maintain some sense of coherency across time and space; i.e. through what exact material process and geographies does the institution maintain itself? In this way, an assemblage approach is interested in force and power – how particular discourses and rationalities are projected across space, and the effects they have on bodies and space, but also on how desire, capital accumulation and individual interests form a constitutive part of assemblages. To elaborate on this, Deleuze’s ontology of assemblages will be explained.

At base level, Deleuze (Deleuze, 1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 2009; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) understands an assemblage as a confluence of forces; the meeting of different powers across a space which form durable relations and which can be reproduced in time. Importantly, assemblages cannot be understood as a complete whole where each internal component is subordinate to, and makes up an overall individual entity. Unlike classic metaphysics there is no distinction between subject and object, society and nature and inside and outside (DeLanda, 2006). Rather the ‘flat ontology’ of assemblage theory sees assemblages not as hierarchies of bodies but as collections of bodies, each of which ‘drums to its own beat’ (Allen, 2011b). As Anderson and McFarlane (2011:

124) put it ‘deploying the term assemblage enables us to remain deliberately open as to the form of the unity, its durability, the types of relations and the human and non-human elements involved.’

Rather than a unity, assemblages can be understood as being intersected by crisscrossing flows that exist beyond the focus of the researcher. In terms of studying climate change, the implications of such an approach are important; for instance much of the adaptation literature doggedly holds onto

33 a model of an external climate which is a part of nature and which effects ‘inside’ human groups which are a part of the ‘social’.²² An assemblage approach helps to break down such binaries.

Assemblage thinking also acknowledges that bodies never find themselves in a single assemblage, orientated towards singular instrumental ends. Thus a ‘climate assemblage’ in Cambodia is not understood to mean a group of individuals all with homogenous aims and desires who doggedly pursue a singular set of institutional goals and interests. Rather a climate assemblage is composed of people with very divergent, contradictory agendas, who are none the less compelled to chase particular agendas at particular times. For instance, in his deployment of assemblage theory, Farías (2010) envisions an ‘urban assemblage’ as a heterogeneous group of elements that at key times come together forging strong relations between different bodies, while at other times only

demonstrating weak or disjointed connectivity. Employing this approach hopefully mitigates against the common practice within much of the climate change-development literature of using abstract analytical units such as ‘the state’, ‘market’ and ‘civil society’ which tends to obscure actual relations between different people and objects rather than shed light on them.

Similarly, and in relation to researching development and environmental issues, assemblage theory complicates linear notions of causality. It resists the temptation to assign some hidden motor as the driver of outcomes and events – whether this be capital accumulation, a particular discourse, or the state, as is common in the critical literature, or laws, the market or institutions, as within

mainstream development theory. For example, unlike neo-Gramscian approaches to climate change, assemblage theory does not look to any ‘hegemonic block’ or class contestations as a driver to climate politics (Levy & Egan, 2003; Meckling, 2011) and unlike neo-institutionalism or neo regulation theory, assemblage theory does not pose that the ‘right’ dosage of expertise, laws, rules, norms and scientific concepts, can casually overcome climate change and ecological problems (e.g.

22 As Taylor (2015) states, the adaptation literature sees the climate as ‘an external system that provides exogenous stimulus and shocks to which society must then adapt’ (Taylor, 2014: 6).

34 see Elzen, Geels, & Green, 2004; Percival, Schroeder, Miller, & Leape, 2009). Rather, an assemblage approach looks to climate change as a material phenomenon co-produced through capitalism and geographically uneven patterns of energy use and waste distribution. Vulnerability is understood as something assembled amongst groups and within particular landscapes in relation to particular histories. This thesis hones in on just one particular part of this broader assemblage – the

institutions, people, flows of capital, rationalities and desires that have successfully been assembled together to deal with climate change on a global level.

The question then arises, what makes an assemblage an ontological entity- what makes it a material

‘thing’ in contrast to the vast complex and chaotic material world around it? For Deleuze, it is a question of relations. Assemblages are always made up of durable relations which can reproduce themselves across time and space. Thus a climate assemblage in Cambodia incorporates

government officials who are embedded in Cambodia-specific patron-client relations – and whose careers are almost exclusively orientated toward moving up the patronage chain. Yet it is also incorporates foreign technocrats who are genuinely dedicated to liberal universal notions of democracy and the ‘rule of law’ – which in many cases are in utter contradistinction to their Cambodian counterparts. However, an assemblage forms when donor-government relations become stabilised through annual ‘roundtable donor-government meetings’ and through the development of institutions such as the Cambodia Development Cooperation Forum and

Cooperation Committee for Cambodia, and most significantly through the annual flows of aid money and expertise from donor countries. In this instance, flows of aid money and expertise help to establish durable relations between different actors which can weather the ups and downs of government-international donor political relations. Indeed, aid to the Cambodian government has been increasing year on year regardless of criticism over land alienation and what the UN has termed the ‘worsening human rights situation’ in Cambodia (UNHCR, 2015). Thus, the focus of an assemblage approach becomes less the task of describing what is taken to be already there, but the

35 more onerous task of describing the actual process of assembling – the constant quest to establish secure relations between heterogeneous elements (see B. Anderson & McFarlane, 2011).

The aim is then to sketch how different discourses, rationalities and agendas have at different times given coherency to the climate assemblage – i.e. served to stabilise relations between diverse actors.

Similarly, according to theorists of biopower such as Michael Dillon (2008) and Kevin Grove (2015), the challenge is always to account for how schemes of biopower are actually assembled, just as for governmentality theorists such as Mitchell Dean (2009), the emphasis is on how governing

rationalities are hashed together to legitimise government, rather than seeing such rationalities as mere top down blueprints for establishing rule. In a similar vein Sandra Halperin (2013) reverses the common critical account of the relationship between market integration and development by emphasising that it is not merely the case that state-led development is driven by a desire to open up areas to market forces. Rather, at specific historical times elites have mobilised the concept of development both to profit from export orientated enclaves while simultaneously shielding

agricultural hinterlands from capitalist relations. What all these authors suggest in different ways is then that assemblages cannot be thought of as merely being driven by any singular instrumental goals. Capital accumulation, the will to govern people and things, and popular discourses clearly interact in complex ways - and the rest of this chapter will focus on these complex interactions by considering a few key components of assemblages which will inform the rest of the thesis.