Assembling biological economies: Region-shaping initiatives in making and retaining value

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’.