Tom Baker

Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research

ABSTRACT Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance. The concept of assemblage has captured the attention of critical social scientists, including those interested in the study of policy. Despite ongoing debate around the implications of assemblage thinking for questions of structure, agency, and contingency, there is widespread agreement around its value as a methodological framework. There are now many accounts using assemblage-inflected methodologies of various sorts as analytical tools for revealing, interpreting, and representing the worlds of policy-making, though few are explicit about their methodological practice. In this paper, we identify a suite of epistemological commitments associated with assemblage thinking, including an emphasis on multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty, and then consider explicitly how such commitments might be translated into methodological practices in policy research. Drawing on a research project on the development and enactment of homelessness policy in Australia, we explore how three methodological practices – adopting an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing labours of assembling – can be used to operationalize assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research.

Policies on the move: the transatlantic travels of Tax Increment Financing

Growing influence of the new mobilities paradigm among human geographers has combined with a long and rich disciplinary tradition of studying the movement of things and people. Yet how policy ideas and knowledge are mobilized remains a notably underdeveloped area of inquiry. In this article, we discuss the mobilization of policy ideas and policy models as a particularly powerful type of mobile knowledge. The article examines the burgeoning academic work on policy mobilities and points toward a growing policy mobilities approach in the literature, noting the multidisciplinary conversations behind the approach as well as the key commitments of many of its advocates. This approach is illustrated using the travels of tax increment financing (TIF) with the role of learning and market-making within efforts to introduce TIF in more cities highlighted. In conclusion, we discuss some of the political and practical limits that often confront efforts to mobilize policy ideas.

Imaginations of post-suburbia: Suburban change and imaginative practices in Auckland, New Zealand

Imaginative practices are central to ongoing transformations in the form and function of suburbia. In recent years, urban scholars have focused increasing attention on the concept and process of ‘post-suburbanisation’ to understand contemporary suburbs, yet imaginaries and imaginative practices have been largely absent in their analyses. This paper examines the role of imaginative practices in post-suburban change. Through a case study of Auckland, New Zealand, the paper examines three key domains of imaginative practice – visions, problems and trajectories – implicated in the production of post-suburbia. It argues that understandings of post-suburbanisation will be enhanced by an appreciation of both the material and imaginative dimensions of suburban transformation.

Beyond failure: the generative effects of unsuccessful proposals for Supervised Drug Consumption Sites (SCS) in Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT Focusing on the 20-year history of unsuccessful proposals for Supervised Drug Consumption Sites in Melbourne, Australia, this paper highlights the generative effects of apparent “failure” in policy-making and policy mobilization. Rather than framing thwarted proposals as categorical failures, we show how they altered parameters of policy acceptability, invigorated policy and practitioner networks, facilitated the development of allied programs, and, recently, inspired a successful SCS proposal. The paper argues that apparent policy failure and the potential for policy change must be evaluated and conceptualised in terms of variously long historical timeframes. In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debate over the conceptual and empirical status of failure in policy mobilities literature.

New Zealand’s social investment experiment

The notion of prioritising ‘productive’ social investments over ‘consumptive’ social spending has long been advocated but only sporadically applied. Since 2011, however, New Zealand governments have implemented an ambitious, multi-agency social investment agenda that promises to overhaul public social spending through analyses of citizen-derived data. This commentary focuses on the development and features of the social investment agenda. In doing so, it discusses the apparent primacy of fiscal outcomes over social outcomes, and the practices and politics of data-driven governance.