Transient assemblages,ephemeral encounters,and the “beautiful story” of a Japanese social enterprise in rural Bangladesh

Abstract

Eleven Japanese corporate executives and 10 Bangladeshi village-based entrepreneurs stand around an array of gleaming solar panels perched precariously on piles of bricks and hay. Despite being labeled a “social enterprise,” this solar-energy initiative emerged neither from development planning nor from a company’s market strategy. Instead, the project emerged from a chaotic series of events and the Japanese state’s decentralized patronage politics that drew together a cluster of non-state actors in a haphazard initiative in Bangladesh. This article offers an ethnographic case of ephemeral encounters (building on Faier and Rofel) and contributes to a theory of transient assemblages in development (drawing on Tsing and DeLanda). It teases apart the diverse factors that produced and were produced by a solar social-enterprise pilot project, which neither arose from a plan for a social enterprise nor generated one. I argue for a diffuse understanding of project agency, the productivity of noncommunicative interaction, and the unequal material politics that characterize these encounters across difference. This alternative view on development decenters the project and instead focuses on the emergent properties of the act of assembling, even when the assemblage fails to cohere.