Three - Policy Mobilities and Assemblage Theory: A Conjoined Approach

Summary

At the outset, we offer a policy mobilities and assemblage theory conjoined approach (PMAT) to simultaneously access the insights made possible by PM and AT. However, our conjoined PMAT approach is not the mere sum of these respective parts, whereby a dash of PM and a sprinkle of AT provide more than each possibly could in isolation. It is instead something quite different, enabling a new approach that, while at times having features recognizable from PM and/or AT, is patently neither of those individual things. While there is indeed something of an additive effect from deploying each approach in tandem with the other, we see PMAT as providing an analytical, conceptual and methodological approach that is at once comprehensive, systematic, explicit and consistent. We can then, after Deleuze and Guattari, be creative of concepts and produce something that is both (more or less) useful and (more or less) different. We then leave it to the reader, ultimately, to determine whether what we have produced (intentionally and otherwise) is worth the effort as they seek to address research questions or policy scenarios through the lens that our PMAT approach affords.

At the same time, our purpose in bringing PM and AT together in conversation is to open up new lines of flight. While we want to offer something that is comprehensive and systematic, we are equally open to it taking us along paths that we ourselves might not foresee, both now and in the future. It is in this vein that we present PMAT as an approach, not the approach. We are not trying to present it as something that is definitive, fixed and complete, but rather as something that might open up new lines of thinking and questioning for ourselves and others, including in relation to PMAT, and in ways that we are yet to consider.

To this end, we begin this chapter by summarizing the key points of synergy between PM and AT and use these as the basis for developing our conjoined approach. We then delimit the key features of PMAT, presented as four distinct but related orientations for thinking that respond to four fundamental questions: Where is policy? What is policy? Why is policy? and How to research policy? Within each orientation for thinking, we offer some suggested specific research questions to help demonstrate how each might be applied to a research problem.