Before the Law. The process of co-construction of Technologies, regulations and local development in the WCO biodiesel production (Southern Buenos Aires, 2001-2010)

GARRIDO, SANTIAGO Y LALOUF, ALBERTO.

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; 9th Globelics International Conference Creativity, Innovation and Economic Development Buenos Aires; 2011

UNGS; UNQ; UNSAM; CIC

In the last ten years, the increasing biofuels crop production has sparked a global debate about the negative effects of this activity. Critics argue that it deepens the capital-intensive monoculture agricultural production, which has increasingly expelled small farmers and peasants from their land. This situation exacerbates social inequality in rural areas, resulting in increase in rural-urban migration, and also threatens food security of millions of people. Paradoxically, as these debates raged worldwide, the Argentinean Parliament passed the Biofuels law (26093), in which biofuels production is seen as a solution to environmental, energy, economic and social problems . The main element supporting this idea is stated in the Article 14 of the law, which mentions the opportunity for promoting and developing local economies and SME enterprises, ensuring at least 20% of the total demand of the oil to be processed for these sectors (República Argentina-Poder Legislativo, 2007). Out of these debates, and before this law was passed, in Buenos Aires province there were some alternative biodiesel production experiences, whose main objective was to provide solutions to social and environmental problems. The aim of this paper is to analyze biodiesel production experiences from waste cooking oil (WCO) carried out since 2001 in southern Buenos Aires province. The analysis is guided by a theoretical and methodological approach based on tools drawn from constructivist sociology of technology. This socio-technical approach allows operating a systemic interpretation of these processes. The approach chosen was designed to generate appropriate responses to explain the processes that build sustainability —and the impracticality— of technology development. The theoretical and methodological option is supported by the finding that in the approaches usually employed in social sciences, the technology-society relationship is presented as//in linear and deterministic views, which claim either that technological endowment determines the social environment (technological determinism), or consider that the social configurations determine the developed technologies (social determinism).