Fostering urban transformations in Latin America: lessons around the ecological management of an urban stream in coproduction with a social movement (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

GRAZIANO, MARTIN; DE GROOT, GRECIA STEFANÍA; PILATO, LAURA DANIELA; SÁNCHEZ, MARÍA LAURA; IZAGUIRRE, IRINA; PIZARRO, HAYDÉE N.

ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY

RESILIENCE ALLIANCE

Año: 2019 vol. 24

1708-3087

Collaborative community-based approaches are proposed as a way to overcome the difficulties exerted by a broad rangeof social-ecological traps that emerge at the reconfiguration of social-ecological systems onto sustainable paths. Despite this, a deepexamination of the social-ecological processes and interactions that constrain these approaches in different urban contexts is stillnecessary to improve their success. Latin American countries have institutional, political, and social characteristics that could constrainthe pathways to sustainability in different ways from countries of the Global North, particularly in their metropolitan areas. Here, wepresent an experience (2015?2018) held in cooperation with workers of a social cooperative framed in an urban social movement fromArgentina, related to the ecological rehabilitation of a highly degraded urban stream through the management of the riparian vegetationand the reintroduction of native macrophytes. The methodology involved a codesign approach based on a set of participatory actionresearchtools, together with resilience system analysis through causal loop diagrams, and three different interventions of a 200-m reachat the upstream area of the San Francisco stream (Buenos Aires, Argentina). The participatory diagnostic showed a strong negativeeffect of the current management guidelines on the riparian and aquatic vegetation, reflecting a positive feedback loop that reinforcesthis negative state, and revealed a hierarchical governance regime associated with the management of the watershed. Furthermore, itdetected a strong motivation of local workers to generate transformative actions in terms of the sanitary and social-ecologicalimprovements of the local habitat. The management actions showed a relatively high short-term survival of the macrophyte transplants(30?60% in a period of 2?4 months), displaying a strong spatial structure of the survival units, and downscaling to about 10% in thelong term (6?12 months after interventions). A combination of biophysical and social processes related both to institutional and rigiditytraps affected the survival of the transplants, reflecting the inertia of the current management programs to ecological improvementsof the stream. In summary, the present work highlights the social-ecological constraints arising from transformative collective actionstoward the ecological management of a stream at a highly vulnerable and bureaucratic urban context, with implications for socialecologicalurban transformations in Latin America and the design of effective participatory governance actions in alliance with localsocial movements.