Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on the analytical purchase afforded by an assemblage thinking to unpack processes that converge into the making of a policy assemblage that is structured by "global" norms and imaginaries while also remaining entangled within political ambitions and desires of a "local" context.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing upon my research on Pakistan's Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), I reflect on the importance of an assemblage thinking that allows to capture contingent relationalities and variegated rationalities that come together to (re)constitute what can be called a national variation of a global socio-economic inclusion assemblage. In arrogating itself the tasks of reducing poverty and empowering women, the program provides cash grants to over five million poor households across the country. Since its inception in 2008, the program has sought support and approval from power global institutions (such as World Bank) shaping its critical procedures to enhance objectivity and transparency and claiming to learn from, and contributing to, an emerging repertoire of socalled best practices of social protection. But it isn't shaped just by elite rationalities - that might be traced to the elite policy makers in the national capital or global metropoles - its everyday practices are, in much more consequential ways, structured by the very local concerns, ambitions, desires, hopes and frustrations. Today, it works through human and non-human (im)mediations and entanglements that enlist beneficiaries, state officials, Point of Sale retailers, biometric devices, national database registration authority (NADRA), electricity and internet supplies, access to banking systems, software patching, hardware changes, lotions, peeled potatoes, sweat, dirt, queues and long waiting hours, and a general maintenance of bodily cleaning and washing regimes.