Practices of assemblage and community forest management

Abstract Governmental interventions that set out to improve the world are assembled from diverse elements – discourses, institutions, forms of expertise and social groups whose deficiencies need to be corrected, among others. In this article I advance an analytic that focuses on practices of assemblage – the on-going labour of bringing disparate elements together and forging connections between them. I identify six practices that are generic to any assemblage, whatever its specific contours: 1) forging alignments, 2) rendering technical, 3) authorizing knowledge, 4) managing failures, 5) anti-politics, and 6) reassembling. I demonstrate the power of this analytic through an extended study of community forest…