Impact of environmental conflicts on subnational party systems. The Río Negro, Argentina (2017-2019) case study

Abstract

The impact of environmental conflicts on Argentina's subnational party systems was addressed through a case study: the rejection of the policy of installing a nuclear plant in Río Negro and its political effects (2017-2019). A heterogeneous variety of social, political and state actors with capacity for representation and circumstantial collectives positioned themselves antagonistically in the public sphere in the dispute over the thematization of nuclear policy as an environmental problem. The process led to the emergence of a new contentious actor, the Movimiento Antinuclear Argentino (MAR) with veto capacity over nuclear policy and a provincial party with an environmentalist slogan, Rionegrinos por la Igualdad (RIO) with members of the former. Around the public theming, a process of identification and differentiation was deployed between those who assumed themselves as injured parties of the project and those who promoted it. This was expressed in environmental terms and took the form of a sociotechnical controversy shaped by discursive coalitions (one pro-nuclear and one anti-nuclear). The publicity of the rejection of the policy of installing a nuclear plant as an issue that affected the environmental and political rights of citizens operated as an element for a democratizing moment. The environmental conflict that arose had multilevel effects in arenas of public deliberation, both civil and social, as well as political-institutional. The effects on this last plane can be synthesized in three dimensions: normative, partisan and electoral. I conclude that: the environmental conflict affected the territorialization of intraparty and interparty competition and the structure of social conflicts on which the provincial party system develops. This dynamic was the product of the expanded political participation of citizens and the stabilization of the environmental issue as an element of public culture within the framework of the cycle of environmental conflict in Argentina in the twenty-first century.