The increased emphasis on results and evidence in international development has made practices such as planning, monitoring, reporting, and evaluation more important. These practices depend on knowledge production, involving the systematic collection and analysis of data and information. As such, development practice follows a general trend in international politics where problems of global concern are increasingly subject to various forms of knowledge production by expert institutions. However, development research rarely treats knowledge production as a study object in itself. Consequently, this research note proposes a research agenda to open up the black box of knowledge production in international development. This research agenda mobilizes a burgeoning practice-theoretical literature, which international relations scholars have increasingly turned to in order to examine the practices of knowledge production that render problems and objects of global concern knowable and governable. I argue that practice-theoretical scholarship offers a conceptual vocabulary that allows for a systematic and critical examination of knowledge production in international development. Particularly, I contend that practice theory offers the analytical tools to: (1) identify the sites where knowledge production unfolds in international development, (2) analyze the mundane and routine practices of producing and communicating knowledge, and (3) investigate the political nature of knowledge production. This research agenda not only opens up the possibility to examine knowledge production in itself but also enables the deconstruction of its power-laden and colonial underpinnings.

During the last decade, the concept of assemblage has become increasingly popular in the social sciences. Originating in the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the concept aims to describe the world as a collection of unstable wholes – consisting of discourses, practices and material elements – that lack a universal organizing principle. The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept of assemblage in a Swedish political science context and to demonstrate its analytical potential. To fulfil this purpose, the historical background of the concept is described, as well as how it is translated into analytical strategies in current social science research. The article argues that the concept is fruitful for studying the work of stabilization that is required to put together policies, projects and reforms in concrete contexts. To illustrate the concept’s analytical potential, the construction and reorganization of the university hospital “nya Karolinska” in accordance with the model of “value-based healthcare” is used as an empirical example. It is argued that the implementation of the model was dependent on various practices of stabilization, such as translation practices of consultants, inscription in physical objects and organizational structures, and knowledge production. The article concludes with a discussion of the possibilities that the concept of assemblage offers to the development of power-critical analysis in political science. Here, it is emphasized that the concept can be used to capture the complexity of contemporary systems of governing and organization, as well as the power relations that are stabilized and destabilized as these systems are assembled.

Projects are often treated as “black boxes”, meaning coherent and stable standard models that are possible to use in the most divergent of contexts. However, projects are always the result of project making; a laborious process characterized by the reproduction and contestation of power relations. Displaying these characteristics, projects should be understood as political constructions that are built on acts of ordering in contested terrains. In this chapter, I mobilize assemblage thinking to study projects as dependent on the work of assembling heterogeneous components, such as people, documents, expertise, and models, in temporary formations. Taking the empirical example of development aid projects, I argue, firstly, that the assemblage framework can be translated into an innovative methodology of “following” the aid project as a “project bureaucracy” that is present in multiple organizational settings simultaneously. Secondly, I argue that the framework is useful for the analysis of the work being mobilized in order to keep the project bureaucracy together, including the construction and maintenance of cooperation, the activation of expertise, the creation of markets, and the organization of temporality. This analysis illustrates how project making erases political struggles and conflicts, thereby displacing politics to a technical realm of action.

In recent decades, gender equality goals have been adopted widely in global policymaking, creating a demand for specialized knowledge and evidence to support the design and implementation of gender equality policies. Bridging feminist scholar- ship on gender expertise and practice–theoretical literature on knowledge production, this article examines a knowledge production initiative of the World Bank, the Gender Innovation Laboratories (GILs). While research has examined the po- sition of gender experts and the content of gender expertise in global governance, it has overlooked how knowledge about gender is produced. In this paper, we use a practice–theoretical approach—assemblage thinking —to study the practical work mobilized in the GILs to produce, maintain, and disseminate knowledge about gender inequality. Drawing on interviews with lab researchers, documents, and online materials, and focusing on the epistemic practice of impact evaluations, our analysis demonstrates the work invested in assembling them, such as forging alignments with and securing support among stakehold- ers, activating repertoires of expertise, and translating results into material objects. These practices produce gender inequality as a governance object, which is amenable to technical policy interventions, which facilitates certain forms of action to address it. Yet, they simultaneously silence more political solutions to gender inequalities.

As the global climate emergency steadily intensifies, urgent calls have been made for a transition to a more sustainable organization of society. As a result, an ambitious global environmental agenda, that puts sustainability and green transition in the forefront, is actively pursued across different levels of governance. Contemporary systems of governance can be characterized as thoroughly neoliberal, relying on organizational forms that build on market and management logics. A particular form of organization that has grown strong in these systems of governance is the project format. Project systems instituted by actors like the EU or domestic state agencies today proliferate and entail a particular bureaucratic apparatus of applications, reporting and evaluation. As the project format has evolved into a generic and universal form that can be used in a multitude of contexts, it has certainly not left the field of sustainability and green transition untouched. Rather, transition projects abound. This development can be understood in the light of an increasing depoliticization of environmental politics that comes to expression in the dominance of “a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management” (Swyngedouw, 2009: 601). In this paper, I examine how the project format – understood as an expression of a depoliticizing logic in environmental politics – shapes and possibly transforms transition efforts. Empirically, I focus on transition projects implemented in the Northern regions of Sweden, in which large investments in green industries have given impetus to a plethora of transition projects in a wide variety of sectors. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing how the governing implicit in the project format shapes green transition efforts and how it limits the scope for politicizing the power relations underpinning the climate emergency.  

Denna rapport är en populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning av en vetenskaplig artikel vars publicering möjliggjorts av stöd från MUCF. Artikeln tar sitt avstamp i den långtgående ”projektifiering” som präglar styrning och organisering av såväl offentlig sektor som civilsamhället. I artikeln studeras projektifieringens effekter särskilt med avseende på hur kvinnoorganisationer påverkas av att arbeta i projektform. Genom att följa hur ett flertal kvinnoorganisationer interagerar med projektformens livsfaser – ansökningsfasen, implementerings- och rapporteringsfasen samt utvärderingsfasen – framgår hur dessa lägger ned ett omfattande arbete för att anpassa och översätta sin egen verksamhet i relation till projektformens särskilda krav. Detta arbete präglas av en anpassning till en teknokratisk logik vilket avpolitiserar den feministiska aktivism som kvinnoorganisationer ägnar sig åt. Projektformens effekter för hur politiskt arbete i civilsamhället bedrivs bör därför noggrant beaktas.