Challenges and conflicts in the access to water and sanitation services in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires

TOBIAS, MELINA

San Martín

Workshop; Workshop, "Health, Education and Water- UN Sustainable Development Goals: Perspectives from Argentina, Norway and South Africa; 2017

Universidad Nacional de San Martín

The Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA)1 is located in a territory with abundant water courses. Among them, the Río de la Plata - the main source of fresh water in the region - that acts as a continental limit to the east, and multiple basins, streams and aquifers that cross it, such as the Luján River, Reconquista and Matanza Riachuelo basins; the piped streams that run through the city such as Maldonado, Cildañez, Vega, Medrano, among others; and the Pampeano and Puelche aquifers, used for extraction and water supply (Solo et al., 1990: 14). This "water" scenario allows us to appreciate that, unlike other regions of the country where water is a scarce resource, in Buenos Aires water is present everywhere.However, its abundance does not translate into universal or equitable access to water by the population as a whole: only 73% of the population of the AMBA has access to potable water and only 56% have basic sanitation coverage. public network (INDEC, 2010). What allows us to deduce this data is that access to water, rather than a problem of natural or technical causes (associated with the scarcity or abundance of water), responds rather to political issues associated with its production and distribution (Swyngedouw, 2006).This statement represents the starting point of the present work, which is proposed to be approached from the perspective of political ecology, the form assumed in the last decades by the distribution of a basic and elementary service such as drinking water and sanitation in the the most densely populated area of Argentina (more than 12 million inhabitants), to then focus on the local scale and study there the emergence of territorial conflicts that demand access to these services.For this, the text proposes to work with a diversity of primary and secondary sources that, in their complementarity, allow to reconstruct the objectives of the work. Specifically, for the first part focused on analyzing the evolution of service expansion in the AMBA, we opted to work with statistical data of coverage provided by the Censo Nacional de Población, Hogares y Vivienda (2001,2010), thus being able to detect areas more favored and more delayed in accessing the service. For the second part, which aims to study the way in which local social actors are articulated and organized in front of the water and sewer service deficit leading to the emergence of conflicts over access to water, we chose to work with a study of case focused on the Water Forum of Lomas de Zamora, territorial organization created at the dawn of the XXI century in a party in the southern zone of the Buenos Aires conurbation. In particular, we will study, from in-depth interviews with members of the organization and the analysis of local journalistic sources, the mechanisms with which the organization questions the current management of the service, based on the formulation of counter-arguments that allow expanding the space of discussion about the possible options to solve the problem.