Impact Trust • Working glossary

Bricolage

Making do with what is at hand, improvising from available materials, skills, and relationships. From French: ‘tinkering’.

Details

Our Take
Powerful counterweight to top-down planning assumptions. The point is not that bricolage is always elegant -- it is that communities do it constantly and effectively, and formal systems rarely recognise or resource it. Raised from anthropological fieldwork as a reminder that we underestimate the capacity of people to improvise and learn by doing.
Examples of Use
Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss, Gerry Salole
Synonyms/Variants
Improvisation
Typical everyday wording
Making do with what you've got.