This response to the commentaries on my paper (Briassoulis (2017) Response
assemblages and their socioecological fit: conceptualizing human responses to
environmental degradation. Dialogues in Human Geography (this
issue)) clarifies conceptual, methodological, policy, planning, and politics
issues and summarizes the value of assemblage-based approaches for studying and
intervening in sociospatial phenomena. Assemblage Thinking implies a processual
view of socioecological systems and their associated spatial hierarchy as
multiplicities constituted by assemblages that provide an ontological
alternative either to wholes/essences or to the ontological void of many
empirical studies. It offers a common framework to reconceptualize concepts such
as degradation, responses, and the effectiveness, or fit, of plans, policies,
and management schemes implemented to address them. It views these as constantly
and contingently produced out of relatively autonomous human and nonhuman
components through formal and informal situated practices. It provides an
all-embracing context and apposite integrative constructs for substantive theory
building to address dynamic, socioecological problems. It challenges researchers
to approach and analyze these problems as relational, and therefore through
methodological openness, pluralism, and judicious and masterful synthesis of
both multidisciplinary scientific and traditional/lay knowledge, accomplished
through both quantitative and qualitative techniques. It embeds policy and
planning analysis and practice in the uncertain and unpredictable milieu of
multiplicities and emphasizes morphogenetic processes, nonlinear relationships,
and emergent, situated policy outcomes. It thus keeps analysts and managers
alert and open to all possibilities, prompts a reconceptualization of policy
making and planning as re/de/territorializing processes, and points to
process-based adaptive governance.
