Bringing the State Down There: Welfare Bureaucracy and Territorial Politics in Argentina.

PERELMITER, LUISINA

Chicago

Congreso; LASA 2014, Democracy and Memory; 2014

Latin America Studies Association

Expansion of social provision to informal workers and the poor has been an important feature of Argentinean social policies of the last decade. While a profuse literature has analyses the programmatic evolution involved in this change, less attention has received the ways in which it has been translated into state structures and state agents? practices. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork within the Ministerio de Desarrollo Social de la Nación, the paper shows how and why, between 2003 and 2009, the tendency toward universalization of coverage and impersonalization of implementation of social policies coexisted with an apparently contradictory trend: the territorialization of welfare bureaucracy and the personalization of assistance relationships. By territorialization of state structures, it is meant a set of organizational strategies in order to get autonomy and political visibility at the local level of policy implementation. By personalization of assistance relationships, it is meant strategies in order to increment face to face interactions and personalize responses to demands. The paper argues that, in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis, expanding and institutionalizing social provision to the poor as well as turning faceless welfare relationships into face to face and local interactions, were political imperative for the national government. It proposes that this coexistence can be understood by looking at the spatial politics of welfare provision, that is to say, the forms in which, within certain policies, welfare organizations and agents (state and non-state; national or local) occupy the territory, getting more or less control on the distribution of benefits and making themselves more or less visible to get credits and/or receive complains on social provision issues.