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The Biological Economies research project has involved a five-year exploration of new rural value relations in two New Zealand regions. In this paper, we explore what the project has taught us about the need to deploy new conceptual and methodological tools to perform regional development differently. We draw on examples of experimentation in value creation, our own methodological experimentation, and ideas of assemblage to argue that new knowledge categories of capability, platforms, land resourcefulness, experimentation and economic rent open up the potential for a new methodology for stimulating regional economic change that we label 'enactive research'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the implications of assemblage as an analytical framework in the context of regional economic planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of territoriality to examine the efforts to create temporal stability in the emergent regional economy. We focus on the reterritorialisation of Central Otago through the district council's destination management project centred on the collective branding of the region as ' A World of Difference'. The implementation of this programme contends with the diverse, incongruent boundaries of emergent tourism activities. The paper, thus, addresses the potential for state initiatives to manage uncertain and ephemeral assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]