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. AbstractThe 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 operationalise assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an emerging body of critique of communicative planning theory (CPT). The paper's critiques are grounded in analysis of situated planning practice in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, where planners were 'feeling their way towards' democratising planning practice in line with CPT's normative dimensions. Two critiques are offered. Both are fundamentally concerned with power and the tendency of CPT to operate as if the workings of power can be temporarily suspended through communicative planning practice to produce new consensual planning discourses. Firstly, it is argued that CPT pays insufficient attention to the practical context of power in which planning is practised thereby assuming away, rather than engaging with, the politics-and power-laden interests that infiltrate planning practice. Secondly, it is argued that CPT abstracts planners from their positioning in a nexus of power, knowledge and rationality which validates expert forms of knowing/reasoning/valuing, and thus underestimates the challenges of asserting alternative forms. The paper concludes by suggesting that any theory aiming at the democratisation of planning practice will need to depart from an orientation to consensus, a defining feature of CPT, and instead account for the irreducible nature of power and difference.

This paper argues that neoliberalism should be viewed not as a unified coherent project but as a series of complex and overlapping strategies that produce hybrid and always emergent forms of governance. To substantiate this argument, the paper reflects on the recent history of Sydney's metropolitan planning and rejects any simple characterisation of its having been transformed from a social‐democratic to a neoliberal form of governance. Instead it traces the unevenness with which neoliberalist aspirations and forms of governance have been enacted through metropolitan planning. In particular, it examines the enduring scope of state institutional capacity to pursue desired spatial and distributional outcomes through planning and suggests that the current reinvigoration of Sydney's metropolitan planning is an opportunity to enhance that capacity and to pursue ‘after‐neoliberalist’ planning possibilities.

In this paper I argue that a neo-Gramscian strategic relational approach (SRA) offers the relational and constructivist perspectives necessary to enhance our concrete and theoretical understandings of urban governance. Moreover, I argue for the utility of using discourse as a productive entry point for neo-Gramscian analysis. Taking a discursive approach to a case study of the governance of`global Sydney' since the mid-1990s, I explore how engaging a neo-Gramscian SRA can connect theoretically informed explanation of the practical accomplishment of urban governance to its broader politico-economic embeddedness and to the territoriality of the state. I explore how the activation of Sydney's governance via the hegemonic project of producing the`competitive city' is shaping a contingent and scaled state formöwith a specific (and scaled) institutional form, regime of representation, and range of interventions. Additionally, I consider how counterhegemonic claims and currents shape this process. The relational and constructivist perspectives of the neo-Gramscian SRA ensure that, at all times, urban governance is understood both as a multiscalar production and as a political construction. The result of neo-Gramscian analysis, then, is more theoretically informed and theoretically informative studies of the situated practice of urban governance.

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