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encounters. The global/local concept that I advocate is mutually contingent and can be

understood through the notion of a global assemblage which I described earlier. Collier

argues that the global assemblage is an alternative to the categories of global and local, which

designates the global as abstraction, and defines the local in terms of specificity (2006, p.

399). It is precisely the productive work of categorising the global and local, among other

binaries such as nature/culture and traditional/modern that I would like to question. We can

talk for instance about a global fishery crisis and global fishery management but we are also

talking of heterogeneous components that come together and work to create this crisis and its

response. As Collier puts it, ‘a global assemblage is the actual and specific articulation of a

global form’ (2006, p. 400). Thus a global fishery or a global sustainability crisis, as well as

the global knowledge used to address such a crisis are global forms that in actuality are made

of heterogeneous assemblages. Here I am referring to the global not only as a spatial and

scalar sphere but also as a process of universalising. ‘[T]he “global” is an effect not a

condition, and uneven rather than uniform, perhaps best understood in terms of specific

connections and encounters that work across and through difference’ (Braun 2006, p. 644).

Assemblage is useful not only to understand the different scales on which sustainability

operates, but also to understand better the emergence of markets and products such as a

sustainable tin of tuna. Hawkins et al. (2015, p. xvi) explore the emergence of markets for

plastic bottled water and suggest that assemblage is a term that captures the dynamic process

of markets as tentative and unfolding. That is, the generative capacity of markets as emerging

‘through the process of arranging various sociotechnical, corporeal, discursive, and material

elements’ (Hawkins et al. (2015, p. xvii). Assembling is ‘the ongoing labour of bringing

disparate elements together and forging connections between them’ (Li 2007, p. 263). As

such the process becomes important rather than a final arrangement (Li 2007, p. 263). This

approach directs attention away from use of macrostructures, such as capitalism and

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