THE RIGHT TO WATER IN BUENOS AIRES: A LONG HISTORY OF UPS AND DOWNS

MARÍA GABRIELA MERLINSKY; SOLEDAD FERNÁNDEZ BOUZO; CAROLINA MONTERA; MELINA TOBÍAS

Congreso; CLACSO-CROP-MAKERERE-NAI-NBRP; 2011

In the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, about three million people do not have potable water service and six million lack sewerage. In order to face the lack of public services, the state company has designed a ´master plan´ outlining the broadening of water and sewer services to nearly 100% of the population by 2020. In recent decades, various grassroots movements have been demanding sanitation projects, reframing their demands in environmental terms. This process has gained greater public significance in the region of the Matanza-Riachuelo basin. This was made possible, in part, by the enactment of new environmental policy, thanks to a contentious case of great resonance: the ´Beatriz Mendoza case´. This is an action in which the Supreme Court required governments with jurisdiction over the territory to implement a plan for the environmental restoration of the basin. This decision has opened up tensions around the governance of water because a variety of actors ?e.g.: public agencies and grassroots organizations? required environmental remediation measures, but they assigned different priorities to the necessary strategies to achieve this goal. Our hypothesis is that while stakeholders ?such as government actors, professionals, NGOs and grassroots movements? agreed on the need for comprehensive approach to water management and sanitation, when you look closely at the priorities and implementation strategies proposed by each actor, it is possible to detect the construction of different meanings, which are nothing else than the expression of interests and differential access to the resource. Paying attention to all the problematic issues, to achieve the goals of social investment in water and sanitation is not always placed in the list of priority public problems. In this paper, we analyze the point of view of different institutional and non-institutional actors involved in water management and sanitation in the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, in order to point out the major controversies that have been raised in the public sphere from 2006 onwards. Our intention is to compare the conflicting interests in water policy to the water governance as expressed in the ´ideal model´ of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM).