This paper makes a methodological intervention in development studies, arguing that assemblage thinking offers a more appropriate analytical framework for studying development governance in a moment of profound global disruption. Authored by researchers from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Natural Sciences, the paper responds to a current conjuncture marked by donor realignment, budgetary retrenchment, multipolar geopolitical competition, and the fragmentation of institutional development actors, conditions that inherited frameworks of linearity, fixity, and hierarchy are ill-equipped to address.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage, understood as a verb, a practice of “co-functioning” through which heterogeneous elements come together in contingent, non-homogenous groupings, the paper demonstrates how this thinking can be operationalised in field-based development research. It does so through two illustrative cases drawn from a multi-sited empirical project examining development governance in Costa Rica and Ukraine. The first explores the localisation agenda in Costa Rica, revealing its “dual character”: while it signals responsiveness to longstanding critiques of donor hierarchy, assemblage analysis exposes how donor policies and practices largely reproduce existing decision-making structures rather than genuinely transferring power. The second case uses participatory network mapping in Ukraine and Costa Rica to trace how development assemblages shift and reconfigure in response to crisis and change, visualising actor repositioning, surfacing absences, and capturing contingency in ways conventional methods cannot.
The paper identifies four methodological dimensions that assemblage approaches contribute: deep contextualisation, an expanded scalar analytic, engagement with uncertainty and conceptual ambiguity, and attentiveness to contingency and change. It is candid about limitations, assemblage research is resource-intensive, rarely tidy, and demands methodological pluralism and acknowledges the researcher’s own entanglement within the assemblages they study. The conclusion calls for a broader methodological reorientation in development studies toward more plural, reflexive, and situated approaches capable of tracking a sector that is fragmented, dynamic, and deeply contested.
