This blog has been developed from our latest book chapter publication, entitled Change and transformation in international development cooperation: assemblage thinking, transdisciplinary research design and the curious case of localisation, written by Susan Murphy (Geoformations PI) and Ruby Paterson (Geoformations PhD Candidate) and published in How to Organise Transdisciplinary Research for Transformative Action and Knowledge Co-Production, edited by Paul Coughlan, Sheila Cannon, and Davin Coghlan.
Introduction
In Autumn 2024, our research team was invited to contribute a chapter to the above book, which brought together scholars from across Trinity College Dublin, as well as a wider network of experts and professionals across diverse fields, to explore how TDR can respond to societal, operational, and environmental challenges. The process of developing the book also included a collaborative workshop, whose discussions culminated in a synthesis chapter at the end of the volume. This chapter reflects on the diversity of perspectives represented throughout the book, bringing together key insights and learnings.
Drawing on methodological and empirical insights emerging from our study into institutional donors and LLD, our chapter explores how transdisciplinary research (TDR) design, an assemblage thinking approach, and a critical realist framework can enable us to engage with the complexity and dynamism of development cooperation governance. We discuss how this approach offers a way to understand and approach development governance and the diverse, evolving relationships between actors, institutions, forms of knowledge, and lived realities that constitute it.
TDR creates an opportunity to bring academic knowledge together with the knowledge and experiences of development practitioners, affected communities, and scholars beyond our own disciplinary boundaries. Through our engagement beyond the confines of our own discipline, we are able to ground our research in real-world contexts where it is relevant and appropriate.
Geoformations’ Methodological Approach
Assemblage thinking, an integral aspect of our methodological approach across the Geoformations project, has been conceptualised by scholars in different ways. The methodology draws attention to the coming together of different groups, actors and elements in the form of an assemblage. Within an assemblage, these elements retain their own autonomy and agency, meaning that power is distributed differentially, rather than held centrally. Some scholars have explored assemblage thinking as a tool or ethos to examine the relationships within networks of actors and entities. Our recent blog further explores some of the central tenets of assemblage thinking as our methodological approach.
We complement our assemblage approach by adopting critical realism (CR) as a framework for analysis. CR first emerged through the work of Roy Bhaskar and has since been extensively developed and applied to broader studies of socio-spatial relations and critical social theory. Critical realism rejects a flat view of the world and supports a richer, processual-relational ontology, where reality is taken to be layered across three domains: the empirical is our observations and beliefs – i.e. what we perceive; the actual is the events and objects that exist– i.e. what actually happens; and the real is the causal mechanisms and generative structures driving it all. This approach reflects a fallibilist epistemology, where our knowledge of these mechanisms is understood as socially constructed, partial, and ever evolving. In other words, we accept that our understanding is never complete or certain; it is shaped and influenced by people and context, with the possibility to change as we learn more.
Combined, this approach allows us, as researchers, to embrace the complexity and messiness of the world. We are able to move beyond asking simply what is happening? towards asking what relationships and structures make this possible, and why does change occur, or fail to occur?
Our Study: The Curious Challenge of Locally Led Development (LLD)
At the centre of our chapter is a revisiting of our work on Locally Led Development (LLD). LLD (also referred to as localisation), is a process that aims to strengthen local ownership of processes and interventions of development and humanitarian aid. This is achieved through equitable partnerships and the redistribution of funds and decision-making.
Studies into development cooperation and practice have highlighted the need for LLD. Institutional donors, recipient states, agencies, and organisations seem to agree that local voices and leadership are necessary for efficient, effective, inclusive, and emancipatory interventions. However, despite a long history of attempts at participatory approaches to development and donor commitment to the Grand Bargain, which sought to redistribute resources to the local level, donors have shown little enthusiasm for reform or change in practice.
Our specific research question emerged following conversations within the Development Studies Association Group – a transdisciplinary group made up of academics from a range of disciplines, including human geography, heterodox economics, and politics, alongside practitioners working on adaptive development, from NGOs and policy. These transdisciplinary conversations discussed the need for LLD but the lack of consensus on how it should or could work in practice. From these conversations, our study sought to understand: Why does the development cooperation sector seem unable to embrace the opportunities and potentialities of locally led development?
The main findings from the study can be highlighted as follows:
- LLD is presented by donors as a technocratic challenge, depoliticised and devoid of the entangled histories and colonial legacies.
- There is a gap between commitment and operationalisation of LLD, indicating a lack of political will to transform and thus reinforcing structural barriers to change.
- There are multiple and diverse donor conceptualisations of LLD; this makes it challenging to use LLD as a mechanism for driving change within the sector.
- Donors frame the ‘local’ as homogeneous, abstract, vague, and ambiguous; the reductionist nature of key terms such as ‘local actor’ and ‘institutional donor’ hides the radical differences within and between these actors, including their objectives, values, needs, interests, and capacities.
- How the redistribution of resources for LLD should, could, or would happen was not clear; for most donors, it meant the movement of resources – namely funds – between and within the same dominant actors that already held them, rather than local actors.
Reflections on TDR and Our Methodological Approach
Development and LLD are not just technical matters. They are processes embedded in political-economic systems – influenced by social spatial dynamics and historical processes. Our study demonstrated how valuable TDR design combined with an assemblage thinking and critical realist methodological framework can be. Our approach supported us in understanding how international declarations and commitments are translated -or fail to translate – into local realities, where they encounter the complexities of multi-scalar power and politics. Through engaging in the complex local contexts – rather than avoiding their ‘messiness’ – the co-production of knowledge through a TDR process offers the possibility of achieving greater societal impact for all engaged in development by ensuring it is relevant, credible, appropriate, and informed by the lived experiences and situated knowledges of participants and affected communities.
Through our approach, we were able to link the epistemological position of our research team to the social processes through which knowledge is then produced. Instead of reducing and simplifying elements of the complex dynamic context of development cooperation, TDR, combined with critical realism and assemblage thinking, explicitly values many different the many different situated knowledges, practices, and ways of knowing.
In our chapter, we discuss that as researchers in development studies, we need to be attentive and serious in our engagement with the real-world context, moving past reductionist approaches to knowledge production. This is an essential part of being able to understand what does or does not make development intervention effective. TDR becomes a way in which we can approach these challenging and shifting areas of research, offering an approach for navigating complexity in our research.
The complexity, uncertainty, and fragility of our research area – development cooperation governance– was exposed between completing the study and drafting this chapter. In January 2025, USAID – the largest institutional donor in development cooperation was dissolved by the Trump Administration. This dissolution illuminated the vulnerability of the interacting assemblages which are made up of donors, local CSOs, INGOs, development policies, and funding streams. It is through these interactions that these different actors and elements come together to deliver lifesaving services and support to millions of people globally. Within our chapter, we explored the importance of considering geopolitical and international political-economic dynamics when researching development cooperation; this is in order to understand the complex and dynamic system that influences and is influenced by development cooperation. By going beyond the confines of our own disciplines, TDR encourages us to reflect, revise, and adapt, ensuring we are attentive to how the assemblage forms, moves, and reacts as forces beyond development cooperation itself shape the space.
We also reflect on some of the challenges that arise from TDR. The conversations we had with academics and practitioners when designing the study highlighted the importance of recognising the researchers and practitioners as actors within the system with their own experience, knowledge, and beliefs. In TDR, reflexivity is not just something theoretical to consider, but rather a practice that informs which research methods are chosen and how data might be interpreted. We found TDR can be a labour-intensive endeavour with the potential to expose tensions, disagreements, and competing assumptions amongst different participants. These tensions were illuminated in our own study amongst contributing participants with regard to their own individual experiences, knowledge, and beliefs of LLD. As the fragility of the practices and relations within the sector is further exposed, we found that critical realism served as a valuable framework to analyse the assumptions and tensions that exist within the space, whilst our assemblage thinking approach enabled us to embrace the uncertainty and accept fragility.
Conclusion
TDR offered us an opportunity to engage and embrace the complexity of development cooperation governance rather than flattening it. In our approach, we were able to accept the uncertainty that characterises this space of research and embrace the diversity of the many different actors, knowledges, and experiences within the sector. Through TDR design, we were able to bring together academic knowledge with the knowledge and experiences of development practitioners, and scholars beyond our own disciplinary boundaries, enabling us to ground our study in real-world contexts, producing relevant and responsible research.
