Entering the world of project making: Mobilizing assemblage thinking to unpack projects as political constructions

Abstract

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.