Abstract

AVILA TULIAN, Candela de la Vega. Environmental institutionality and social conflict processes: a political perspective about the cases of Cordoba and La Rioja provinces in Argentina. E&c [online]. 2017, vol.2, n.5, pp.63-92. ISSN 2477-9245.  https://doi.org/10.37228/estado_comunes.v2.n5.2017.53.

This article considers that processes of environmental struggles have positively influenced the creation, updating or transformation of current institutionality, in pursuit of what is considered a higher level of environment protection or compliance with rights and guarantees associated with it. Hence, it has been undisputed the academic interest to observe the institutional inflection points generated by environmental conflicts. Based on a study about the changes in the prohibitive or permissive legislation of large-scale mining activity in two Argentinian provinces, the present article supports two theses: the first one, holds that reforms or new institutions on environment protection, many of them, driven from collective actors such as “citizens’ assemblies”, are always inscribed within an already settled platform of hegemonic meanings; they are, in large part, opposed to those that sustain the claims of assemblies when they defend, for example, the right to access or enjoy a healthy environment. The second thesis argues that the materialization of these new meanings in practices, orientations or specific directions of law or environmental public policy, is decided as a result of an always-mobile force relations field; the “citizens’ assemblies” are part of this field, but also are other political actors. In other words, the type of translation that public policies make of a set of meanings about the environment is never linear, automatic or permanent.

Keywords : environmental conflict; public policies; hegemony; environment; open-pit mining..

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