Construcción y estabilización de políticas de gestión de residuos en gobiernos locales : las experiencias de Almirante Brown y Morón (2007-2015)

Merlinsky, María Gabriela

Fernández Bouzo, Soledad

2007-2015

spa

290 p.

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

application/pdf

1019783

Morón (inhabited place)

1019142

Almirante Brown (inhabited place)

2007-2015

This thesis addresses the processes of construction and stabilization of urban solid waste management policies in two districts of the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires between 2007 and 2015. The districts, Almirante Brown and Morón municipalities, developed innovations that go beyond the usual practices of management and urban environment protection. Morón was a pioneer in implementing a differentiated collection service with social participation, while Almirante Brown was the only one to promote mitigation measures for open dumps. Both innovations took place in a context of problematization of metropolitan waste management. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the emergence of the cartonero´s phenomenon, the social demands for the closure of the landfills and the lawsuit for the contamination of the Matanza-Riachuelo River led to questioning of a system that had been ensuring the indiscriminate burial of waste for more than thirty years. The confluence of these three processes led to the transformation of the political-institutional framework through the enactment of regulations aimed at promoting waste recovery, reduction of waste sent to final disposal and the inclusion of recycling workers of the informal circuit; and the resulting reconfiguration of local administrations. As primary administrators of waste management, the municipalities adapted the administrative organization, the working methods and the fields of intervention to respond to the new political and social scenario. Faced with this context, the questions that guide the research are: what is the institutional agenda for waste of local metropolitan governments like? To what extent are innovation processes in terms of waste management registered during the study period? What changes are there in the narratives associated with waste management? What social, political and environmental issues appear as relevant in the configuration of the new intervention devices? Who are the key players in these processes? What tests must be passed to carry out these actions? What factors contribute to maintaining these policies over time? From a theoretical point of view, the thesis belongs to the public action sociology field. More specifically, it articulates four approaches that are not usually put into dialogue with each other (we refer to the public problems sociology, the interpretivist analysis, the actor-network theory and political studies) in order to understand the processes for defining policy problems; as well as the dynamics of interaction, negotiation and mobilization of the elements that make up local waste policies. In methodological terms, a qualitative approach based on the case study is adopted. The focus of the analysis is placed on the landfill mitigation program implemented by Almirante Brown between 2009 and 2013, called Eco-puntos, and on the differentiated collection service that Morón launched in 2013 under the name Tu Día Verde. The corpus was formed by integrating data produced through in-depth interviews, participant observations, and document analysis. The main findings of the thesis are organized in two lines of research. The first refers to institutional agenda for waste. In this regard, it is observed that between both municipalities are differences in the moment in which they introduced innovations in waste management; in the degree of stability that innovations exhibit during the study period; and in the type of social narratives linked to them. We argue that these differences are explained both by the characteristics of the local political project, and by the way in which the problematization of waste management at the metropolitan level resonated on the local scale. Second, the detailed analysis of both programs made it possible to identify three recurring processes in the construction of local public actions, namely: the adoption / adaptation of previous initiatives, the creation of common interests, and the coordination of elements (human and non-human) to try to make policies survive the test of time. Along with this, the idea that certain actors are key cogs of the bureaucratic game is corroborated, in the sense that local public action becomes unintelligible without studying their movements and interactions.

Doctor de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales

Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales