Why I fell for assemblages

Abstract

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.