DOI
10.1111/gec3.12534

Summary
In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more-than-human entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social-ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, despite the success of these conceptual perspectives in their respective research fields, there have been few attempts so far to bring these theoretical strands together to explore their common ground and investigate how they could cross-fertilize each other. This contribution seeks to address this gap, by investigating the ontological compatibility of these two approaches and exploring the potential for meaningful syntheses that could be utilized for integrative research—combining perspectives, approaches, and methods taken from social and environmental sciences for the analysis of human-environmental relations. Based on a comparative discussion of four selected “guiding principles” found in assemblage thinking and complex adaptive systems, namely, socio-nature, emergence/historicity, relationality, and self-organization, we find not only significant common ground between the two perspectives but also discrepancies that may be utilized for cross-fertilization. In particular, we argue complex adaptive systems would benefit from a deeper engagement with society-nature theorizations found in the assemblage literature, while assemblage thinking could borrow from complex adaptive systems to broaden its conception of how elements relate to and co-function with each other.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The article aims at bringing together Assemblage theories AT and Complex adaptive system CAS theories. These two approaches differ in terminology, methods and research traditions. They do share some key principles and, according to the authors the differences in approach may be considered as complimentary and with a potential for mutual improvement.

The common elements are emergence, nonlinearity and historicity and they both emphasize relationality between components of systems/assemblages. The authors open for potential learning between the fields particularly regarding environmental and human histories.

The authors also identify areas of conflict between the two approaches. In CAS there is a persistent society-nature dualism, while assemblage theories reject such division and could contribute with a more rigorous theorizations on social-natural entanglements. On the other hand, CAS has developed thinking on self-organization, which is practically missing in AT. However, there are concepts in AT that could be further explored to and elaborated to understand self-organization.

Further, CAS is mostly a quantitative approach and AT a qualitative. When using mixed methods approaches to socio-ecological issues it would be useful to look for theoretical and methodological foundations in bot CAS and AT.

Point of Strength
The thorough comparison between to theoretical approaches is very useful and would provide a good introduction in a course.