"Access to the water services: social territories and citizenship rights in the Great Buenos Aires "

CRENZEL, EMILIO

Mansfield College, Universidad de Oxford, Inglaterra.

Workshop; "Opportunities and challenges facing public-private partnerships in the provision of water supply and sanitation in developing areas: cases from Latin America and Africa"; 2000

Universidad de Oxford, Inglaterra.

During the 1990s Argentina underwent a rapid and comprehensive process of privatisation in the sector of public services, including water and sewerage. This paper focuses on the main changes introduced in the access to potable water and sewerage services in the Great Buenos Aires since the privatisation. In particular, it highlights the interactions between these transformations and the forms of social struggle over citizenship rights in the social territories affected by the privatisation policies.               The relevance of this case for our research strategy is very clear: the social space defined in our study includes about one third of the country’s population, while in political terms it also concentrates a similar proportion of the national electorate. In addition, the area also clusters the key economic activities of the country, especial in the industrial sector. As part of our initial approach, we make a description of the situation with regard to the access to the services of potable water and sewerage, based on census data from the year 1990s, prior to the launching of the privatisation process in the Great Buenos Aires, and the changes in the water and sanitation provision after the first five years from the  privatisation of the service.               Our research strategy is part of a wider tradition of socio-demographic research that, based on rigorous theoretical and empirical grounds, has challenged during the last decade the juridical-administrative discourse that has dominated the official debate about the conurbated areas of Buenos Aires. In particular, we propose to analyse the heterogeneity’s arising from the concrete social characteristics of this territory, which have been lost in the official discourse that gives centrality to the juridical-administrative dimensions with almost complete disregard for socio-economic and political cleavages. With this purpose, our paper attempts to identify different social territories in the area on the basis of what we called the “predominant social conditions of existence” of the population. Among other empirical indicators and conceptual dimensions, we highlight the unequal forms and intensities prevailing in the access to urban water and sewerage.