The confrontation of state-society coalitions: native forest protection policy in Argentina

GUTIÉRREZ, RICARDO A.

Lima

Congreso; REPAL 2017 Annual Meeting; 2017

REPAL

In decentralized countries such as Argentina, two major strains usually pervade the making of environmental policies: the disputes between the central administration and the subnational governments around the delimitation of their competences, and the controversies among social and state actors that hold confronting views and interests around the issue at hand. This paper examines how both strains intertwine and bear upon the formulation of the Argentine native forest protection policy between 2004 and 2015.Started in 2004, the formulation process of the Argentine native forest protection policy went (up to 2015) through three different moments: 1) the discussion and approval of the national 2007 Native Forest Protection Law and its enabling regulation, 2) the discussion and approval of provincial legislation in order to comply with the new national law, and 3) the ?accreditation? of the provincial legislation by the former National Environment and Sustainable Development Secretariat. This paper shows that, both at the national and the provincial level, the legislation process and its result are driven by the confrontation between two large society-state coalitions: the protectionist-communitarian versus the productivist coalition. On the one hand, those coalitions come from the intertwining of social distribution conflicts and heterogeneous state agencies, each of them comprising similar arrays of social and state actors. On the other hand, they influence both the policy process and its result. At both government levels, the confrontation between both coalitions manifests itself in a heavy legislative debate and the policy outcome was subject to constant alterations, whereas neither coalition was (fully) satisfied by it (especially at the provincial level). The analysis is based on documental and media sources, dissertation and monographic studies on provincial cases, and open interviews and informal communications with officials from the former National Environment and Sustainable Development Secretariat. Even if it centers on the legislation process at the national and the provincial level, leaving aside the policy?s results and effects (i.e. the implementation phase), the analysis is nevertheless relevant because it helps pinpoint the distributive conflicts and the confronting coalitions that are at work in native forests-related policies.