Ruby Paterson

This chapter shares methodological insights from GEOFORMATIONS, a European Research Council-funded project exploring governance relations in international development cooperation. We apply transdisciplinary research (TDR) principles and assemblage thinking (AT) to track and analyse the distribution of power, decision-making, and funding across civil society partnerships involved in development interventions. Since 2016, key stakeholders have committed to fostering localisation, ensuring that local voices and actors are central in decision-making processes and funding allocations in development efforts. However, data show little change in practice, and the underlying structural barriers to transformation remain poorly understood. Through critical policy analysis and stakeholder engagement, this chapter offers insights into the obstacles and opportunities for improving localisation. It reflects on the methodological implications of employing TDR and AT, outlining why and how crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries, along with the active co-production of knowledge, can generate new insights with the potential for broader societal impact.

In the context of interconnected crises and shifting geopolitical dynamics, the imperative to reimagine how development is practiced and studied has grown increasingly urgent. This paper advances a methodological intervention in development research by drawing on insights from multisited empirical work that examines development governance through the lens of assemblage thinking. Using illustrative cases from studies from Ukraine and Costa Rica, we demonstrate how assemblage approaches can illuminate development governance as a dynamic, relational, and multi-scalar field of practice. Assemblage thinking pushes analysis beyond fixed spatial, temporal, and institutional frames by foregrounding the contingent configurations through which development interventions are continually assembled and the shifting relations of power and knowledge that underpin decision-making. The paper highlights both the possibilities and methodological tensions of operationalising assemblage thinking in empirical development research. The empirical cases engaged serve to illustrate how assemblage-oriented inquiry can help trace emergent and uneven forms of coordination and cooperation, while bringing issues of positionality, coherence, and contextuality into view. By engaging assemblage thinking as both an analytic and methodological orientation, the paper contributes to ongoing dialogue on advancing more situated, plural, and reflexive methodological approaches to studying development governance.