Assemblage Thinking and Participatory Development: Potentiality, Ethics, Biopolitics

Abstract

The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic of vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates and empowers marginalized people, critics assert that it enacts new forms of control and regulation. This paper reads these debates through the analytical lens offered by assemblage thinking. Assemblage allows us to foreground affective relations between people and things, and the diagrams of power, or ideal sets of force relations, that attempt to direct these affective relations. On this basis, we characterize different participatory approaches in terms of their relation to the constitutive power of affective relations: modernist participation enacts a will to truth that attempts to objectify and control constitutive power through categories such as social capital and vulnerability; performative participation recognizes that participatory activities, while still entangled in power relations, may develop in ways that might challenge existing power relations, and the designs of the project organizer. This characterization helps us identify a politics of life enacted through participatory activities: on one hand, a negative biopolitics that problematizes constitutive power; on the other, an affirmative biopolitics that creates new possibilities for individual and collective life. Assemblage thinking can thus reconfigure participation around an affirmative biopolitics that positions the researcher as one resource among others marginalized people might use in their struggles against insecurity and suffering.

Political Ecology, Island Tourism Planning, and Climate Change Adaptation on Boracay, Philippines

“…This is the most vital process that must be accomplished and requires an honest engagement with the stakeholders, not just the kind of tokenistic public consultation that many stakeholders report having experienced (cf. Pugh, 2013;Grove & Pugh, 2015). Climate change and climate-related disasters will impact the livelihoods of many who are dependent on the tourism industry.…”

Geopower

“…These issues have also been raised recently by geographers taking a Foucauldian approach (e.g. 69 Grove and Pugh, 2015), particularly in relation to climate change adaptation (CCA), which some 70 authors regard as converging with DRR (the main difference being the inclusion of geophysical 71 hazards in DRR; Schipper and Pelling, 2006;Mercer, 2010). For example, Grove (2010Grove ( , 2014a) 72 discussed the framing of CCA as a form of biopolitics.…”

Household self‐blame for disasters: responsibilisation and (un)accountability in decentralised participatory risk governance

“…Endnotes 1 There is a large body of critical literature on participatory forms of development. A small selection of resources includes Williams (2004), Heller (2012), Speer (2012), and Grove and Pugh (2015). 2 It is important to note that the ability of households to (re)construct their houses varies signifi cantly across Cerro Lourdes.…”

“…There is a large body of critical literature on participatory forms of development. A small selection of resources includes Williams (2004), Heller (2012), Speer (2012), and Grove and Pugh (2015). …”