Everyday Agri‐Environmental Governance: The Emergence of Sustainability Through Assemblage Thinking

Forney, Bentia and Dwiartama's Everyday Agri-Environmental Governance takes a materialist, assemblage-driven approach to explore the local, micro-and practical underpinnings of agrienvironmental governance (AEG) in action.Drawing on their different international research, the collaborators use AEG case examples ranging from EU soy(a) production to Indonesian environmental management planning to Swiss integrated production (IP) schemes.By mobilizing local case examples, they highlight how assemblage approaches usefully help scholars think across scales and geographies to consider the way differing communities (assemblages) converge, interact and create friction in the process of governing agri-food.Describing how historic and contemporary AEG schemes' effectiveness hinges on complex interactions with a vast socio-material world.The authors' use assemblage (as rooted in the theoretical tradition of Deleuze and Guattari 1987) is, in my view, mobilized in a like spirit to Dewey's (1999) pragmatism: specifically as the authors use assemblage thinking to map multiple organs of planning in a way that creates space to see experimentation in AEG schemes and in the everyday making of governance.The resulting book offers a theoretically rich exploration of the interplay between the imaginaries of AEG schemes and the complex assemblages from which these schemes emerge and over which they govern.It has the capacity to usefully inform a broad range of scholarship in Rural Studies, but also any scholar at the intersection of environment, technology, society and/or policy as they deal with the complexities of a broad range of actors governed in our everyday lives.