Transnational circuits of policy knowledge and discursive migration. The formation and transformation of planning policies in Argentina

Abstract

We analyse the migration of academic and policy discourses that contributed to (de)legitimise the formation of planning policies in Argentina since the 1950s. We focus on the communicative/collaborative rationality discourses emanating from Anglo-American academic circles that played a role in the revival of the Argentine planning system between 2004 and 2015. We adopt an evolutionary approach to policy travel and policy learning, deploying the concepts of discursive migration and discursive configuration to better understand how ideas, people and goods/resources reinvent themselves when transnationally circulating policy knowledge takes root locally. The migration process in Argentina led to the reinforcement of prevalent coordination mechanisms, redirecting concerns and conflicts into governance structures already existing, involving players already present and forms of expertise already dominant. The migrating collaborative discourse (self) transformed in relation to the receiving governance environment, becoming an effective compliance-gaining technique, while national actors found ways to engage and discipline provinces they depended on more than before.

Keywords

Argentina discursive migration discursive configuration planning policies travelling ideas

Introduction

Argentina, and planning in Argentina, was shaped by ideas, people and goods coming from abroad (Müller and Gómez, 2013). Local researchers were not too interested. The few studies available observe the transfer of building forms – large urban projects – as models of ‘best practices’ (Paz Jajamovich, 2012, 2013, 2016) and trace the international flows of experts, practices and ideas (Novick, 1992, 2003, 2009), focussing mainly on the periods 1850–1930 (Hardoy, 1987) and 1930–1970 (Gorelik, 2017). This paper enriches the universe of case studies based in Argentina by analysing the migration of academic and policy discourses that affected the formation and transformation of national planning policies since the 1950s onwards. Argentina, and its ongoing absorption and modification of policy and planning ideas, is instructive however in a broader sense. Its ongoing processes of policy learning, with international input, in a context of repeated shocks yet strong path dependencies, can deepen the insight in policy learning, policy transfer and mobilities more generally.

Much of the foundational research on the migration of policies has been devoted to studying ‘the diffusion of policy innovations within and between particular federal states and cities’ (Benson and Jordan, 2011: 366). However, in recent years, the literature increasingly recognises different streams of thought (for a synthesis, see: Porto De Oliveira and Pimenta De Faria, 2017). This expansion echoed technological advances that took place since the 1990s, facilitating the circulation of information and creating opportunities for communication between experts and decision-makers on a global scale (Harris and Moore, 2013). A significant part of the field is now concerned with the abstract dimension of travelling policies, incorporating the dynamics and effects of the exchange of ideas, concepts, metaphors, principles, world-views and other discursive aspects of transfers (Béland, 2009; Campbell, 2004; Goldstein and Keohane, 1993; Hall, 1993, 2020; Howlett and Rayner, 1995; James and Lodge, 2003; Kingdon, 2003; Surel, 2000). Thus, policy analysts, political scientists and geographers, among others, added new layers to the study of policy transfer, which can now be understood as: ‘(...) a complex process that reworks places and policies in heterogeneous ways’ (Frisch, 2019: 14). The field has become more attentive to the relational connections of the evolving socio-institutional environment in/through which ongoing reinterpretations of policies take shape (Peck, 2011; Stein et al., 2017), ranging from a complete mimetic emulation to a loose inspiration and involving a wide set of actors.

In the research on policy transfer, the circulation of knowledge, the processes of policy formation and the practices of policy implementation are no longer considered a monopoly of nation States, but an interest shared by a much greater variety of ‘transfer agents’ (Stone, 2004). In line with this, an emerging body of work focusses on policy migrations from and within the South (see Stone et al., 2020). This literature has allowed us to overcome the consideration of the Global North as the only reference from which policy solutions emanate (Porto De Oliveira et al., 2019). Latin American researchers have been particularly prolific in this regard, like Osorio Gonnet (2015) in Chile; Milhorance (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020) in Brasil; Montero (2017a, b, c) and Silva Ardila (2020) in Colombia and, from Mexico, Pacheco Vega (2012). However, in spite of this profusion, the North continues to be looked at when it comes to valuing intellectual authority and professional expertise, legitimating normative standards, identifying key notions and selecting transferable policy models (Dezalay and Garth, 2002; Friedmann, 2011).

Against this background, in this paper we analyse the migration of academic and policy discourses that contributed to (de)legitimise the formation of planning policies in Argentina since the 1950s. Our aim is to grasp how inter-dependent dynamics of ‘discursive migrations’ and ‘discursive configurations’ contribute to giving new shapes, orientations and meanings to travelling knowledge. The paper is structured as follows. In the next sections, we present our evolutionary perspective on policy travel and introduce the analytical tools and methodological strategy used in the article. Then, we trace key discursive migrations that enabled and constrained different attempts for State-led planning in the country. We then explore how, at the turn of the century, a particular understanding of collaborative planning took shape around the formation of the Strategic Spatial Plan ‘Bicentennial Argentina’ (hereafter PET, its Spanish acronym) and within the Argentine governance context, in order to facilitate compliance with the reinvention of planning policies as a central governmental programme. Finally, we explain how an approach to policy travel through the lenses of discursive migrations and discursive configurations can help us to rethink the productive role of the wider governance environment in/through which the generation and sharing of policy knowledge develop.

Discursive migrations and discursive configurations

The term discursive migrations refers to ‘the dissemination of concepts, images, narratives and narrative fragments to new contexts’ (Beunen et al., 2015: 338). This does not suggest a linear spreading of ‘best’ available options, streaming from one institutional and political setting to another in an oversimplified replication process, which rarely occurs (Peck and Theodore, 2010b; Porto De Oliveira and Pal, 2018). On the contrary, a focus on discursive migrations entails observing the selective reinforcement of certain assemblages of concepts, objects and policy actors as they co-evolve together with the policy landscapes through which they move (McCann, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2012; Peck, 2011).

Discursive migrations are entangled with the mobility of people and goods/resources and their inter-dependent relations need to be acknowledged to better understand the broader movements of circulation policy knowledge is placed in (Ward, 2002). People moving between organisations or holding meetings and goods/resources (from money to building forms) circulating from one place to another may create channels for introducing new elements that will affect the discursive configurations: collections of connected concepts and ideas hanging together through supporting semantic structures and forming networked structures that tend to (self)reproduce over time (Allan, 2018). Changes in discursive configurations and configurations of governance are not only triggered by discursive migrations but also by interactions, internal discussions, comparison with others, couplings and frictions with context.

These conceptual bases help us to notice that knowledge circuits do not take shape in a socio-historical vacuum but in a context of cultural values, social norms, formal rules and established routines (Afforlderbach and Schulz, 2016; Othengrafen and Reimer, 2013; Park et al., 2016). The local background, its perceived social problems, dominant political culture and institutional settings constrain and enable the adaptation of these transnational circuits and thus need to be adequately weighted and scrutinised (McCann and Ward, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2015). Policy travel and transformation takes place in a context of always shifting combinations of actors and (in)formal institutions, which then modifies what can be received and how it can be learned (Kooij et al., 2014; Van Assche et al., 2014).

Addressing this evolving context of governance configurations implies, in turn, recognising that new actors, institutions, power relations, arenas and discourse can affect the mutation of existing discourse and its effects (as governance amplifies the effects of discourse through collective decisions). In this way, inspired by critical policy studies (Peck and Theodore, 2010b, 2015; McCann, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2011; McFarlane, 2010, 2011; Temenos and McCann, 2013), we assume a position sensitive to the politics of knowledge flows (Carolini et al., 2018; Stone et al., 2020). Thus, by illuminating the shift from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ powers – and stressing the latter – in the sense-making process around the formation of Argentine planning policies, our perspective better elucidates how policy meaning is constantly being (re)negotiated. We reveal how it happens in selective, contingent, socially constructed and politically embedded relations. Building on these basic insights, we provide a new understanding of the patterns of continuity and discontinuity in governance, where the Argentine combination of disruptive shocks and strong path dependencies proves most revealing about transformation mechanisms in governance, and how they relate to openness for learning.

The scope for discursive migrations needs to be evaluated against the backdrop of the institutional structures in/through which the trajectories of mobilising agents develop, including the collection of interests at stake in the sense-making process (Stein et al., 2017).

Four dimensions of discursive migration for understanding the effects of policy travel

The basis for understanding the effects of policy travel, in our view, is the transformation of discourse and the additional changes it can trigger at the level of discursive configurations. These discursive configurations are partly influenced by discursive migrations and partly a result of the configurations changing themselves. We distinguish four dimensions of discursive migration of special interest in planning: ideas, problems, methods and solutions.

1. Ideas refer to general planning discourses, often linked to broad political changes, which become noticeable when spotting the reference to similar notions, labels or conceptual frameworks for steering interventions. Written reports, published papers, academic programmes and conferences can be regarded as the most common examples in which this migration takes shape.

2. The dimension of problems addresses situations regarded as unwelcome in the domain of academic and policy discourses and that, therefore, need to be dealt with, which have been observed to travel across the world although they are context-specific (e.g. ‘sprawl’).

3. Methods are the systematic procedures constructed for accomplishing specific objectives. Among the specific ways of doing things that are deemed important in planning, we highlight the recent hegemony of social participation since this procedure has become widespread and is generally wield to try to manage what are basically political problems.

4. Solutions are the discourses that bring up means of overcoming a situation perceived as problematic. This can imply either a change at the level of broad planning ideas or in the methods dimension (e.g. bottom-up decision-making). At this level, perceived successful results in other contexts become the images and hopes that structure the discursive worlds of transfer agents.

We will use these four dimensions of discursive migration for analysing national-level planning policies deployed in Argentina.

Methods

To trace the trajectory of ideas and representations about planning and monitor the changing planning discourse in Argentina we first used discourse analysis and historical analysis. The collection of empirical evidence was initially based on a re-mining of the historical planning literature produced in the country. We reviewed plans, programmes and projects promoted by the national State since the second post-war period in which we identified prevailing planning ideologies, dominant expert profiles and main spatial outcomes of policy implementation. Then, we delved into the compendium of seven volumes produced between 2004 and 2015, where the Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment (hereafter SSPTIP, its Spanish acronym) organised the progress reports of PET: First advance report (2008); Bicentennial Edition (2010); Second advance report, books 1, 2, 3 and 4 (2011); Third advance report (2015). Related official reports, scholarly articles and other documents pertaining to the Argentine case produced by various planning professionals nationally recognised were also scrutinised.

Following the logic of process tracing (Bennett and Checkel, 2015), in these sources we sought to identify key agents operating at different scales, their evolving agendas at the local level and accompanying socio-political circumstances affecting the formation of plans, programmes and projects. We have complemented these sources with participant observation in workshops and technical meetings where new policy orientations were debated and by turning to a series of 23 semi-structured interviews with key informants (technical consultants, external advisers, planning scholars and local planners). In this sense, our approach dialogues with the ‘political ethnography of international diffusion’ proposed by Porto de Oliveira (2017). We add here that many of the coordination problems facing policy-makers in the past, problems for which the revival of national-level planning is one of the perceived solutions, result from a history of repeated socio-economic shocks. Our focus is not the shocks themselves, but the unique combination of continuity and discontinuity in Argentine policy and planning that creates the governance landscape in which policy learning takes place and where migrating discourses are transformed.

Discursive migrations and discursive configurations in the history of Argentine planning

Although our main interest is in the discursive migrations and discursive configurations that shaped the formation of national planning policies in the new millennium, the complexity of these processes cannot be understood without considering the history in which they develop. Therefore, before delving into the specifics of PET, we will trace the network of concepts and key narrative fragments that contributed to (dis)empower different State-led planning attempts in the country since the 1950s.

From importing the prestige of Paris as a ‘model city’ to emulating theories of North American economic development

Discursive migrations have a long-standing dynamic in the field of planning policies in Argentina. Many foreign urban planners and landscape designers, mainly French, settled in Argentina (Thays) or visited it frequently (Bouvard) since the late 19th century. In other cases, they were invited by local colleagues to give lectures or by municipal governments to participate in the elaboration of urban plans. Forestier (1924), Poete and Jaussely (1926), Lambert and LeCorbusier (1929), Agache (1930), Hegemann (1931) and Bardet (1949) are just a few examples. The most remembered of these exchanges is that of LeCorbusier and his Plan for Buenos Aires outlined in 1929, that two of his disciples (Ferrari Hardoy and Bonet) would try to implement, although without success, some years later. The Urbanisation Plan for Rosario – a port city located 300 km north of Buenos Aires – was also influenced by notions and procedures forged in France and the United States. The idea of expanding beyond the administrative limits of the city was inspired by the suppression of fortifications in the plan for the extension of Paris by Henri Prost and Eugène Hénard (Rigotti, 2014). The proposal for a central train station as a great gateway to the city resembled New York’s Grand Central Station. Hegeman’s project for the San Francisco Bay also influenced the design of the highway system, watershed sanitation, the delimitation of industrial districts and building regulations in Rosario (Crasemann Collins, 1995). At the broadest metaphorical level, the city was understood as a complex organism subjected to permanent and changing demands. The Urbanisation Plan for Rosario was understood as the scientific operation that would allow a continuous monitoring of the evolution of that organism.

At the national level, planning policies would initiate a phase of technocratic consolidation – as an important governmental ideology to guide the spatial organisation – in parallel with local expressions of the Keynesian-Fordist economic paradigm and under the procedural influence of the rational school of decision-making (Telechea and Zeolla, 2014). In order for this paradigm to function, a set of customs, internalised rules, technological resources, productive practices and socially accepted procedures were articulated with a strong belief in the steering capacity of the State. Industrial promotion and urbanisation went ‘hand in hand’ as both demanded the modernisation of economic, social, cultural and political structures and such complex transformation could only come from governmental initiatives. On the one hand, the industry was considered the only economic sector capable of improving living conditions by providing a salary to a growing mass of urban work seekers (Muzzini et al., 2016). Cities, on the other hand, were metaphorically compared to machines which could be regulated to perform more efficiently through planning.

Thus, moved by the successful reconstruction of post-war Europe, the formation of policies during the ‘golden years’ of planning in Argentina (1945–1975) was focused on ‘efficient’ and technologically ‘rational’ urban projects, aimed to organise the rapid urbanisation process (Friedmann, 1969). The creation of an internal market and the income redistribution strategy, both necessary for the consolidation of the industrial activity, legitimised the Keynesian State as an institution par excellence for the regulation of the development model (Gatto, 1989). In that model, the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires would prevail as a primary space for the concentration of industrial production, financial services, commerce and therefore people. This scheme was reproduced in the provinces, configuring a national urban hierarchy based on one – or two at most – main urban nodes and a constellation of satellite towns, functionally dependent on the former (Linares et al., 2016). The expert role of José Figuerola, a former member of the dictatorial government of Primo de Rivera in Spain, would gain relevance in the shaping of a new discursive configuration around planning in this period (Rein, 2008). He is considered the main author of the first Five-Year Plan (1947–1952), formulated as a development and modernisation strategy to increase productivity.

In those years, international scholarship programmes provided a strong stimulus for scientific exchange, encouraging the mobility of Argentine technicians who would then officiate as mediators and translators to make the initiatives and doctrines developed in the United States viable at the local level (Rigotti, 2014). As early as in 1932, the engineer and architect Angel Guido was granted a scholarship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to conduct research on art and architecture in the United States. He contributed to the incorporation of principles and standards of North American normative planning into Argentine urbanism. Another prominent expert is Jorge Enrique Hardoy, who studied at Harvard and used the Chicago education and research programme, and the experiences of the Puerto Rico Planning Board as a reference to introduce new ways of seeing the territory in Argentine universities (Rigotti, 2014).

The conferences of the Pan American Union and the Pan American Congresses of Municipalities were key in the signing of agreements for the creation of planning boards in all the countries of the continent, which would take the strongly centralised policies and institutions of the ‘New Deal’ as a model (Ardao, 1986). The Inter-American Planning Society (SIAP), created in 1956, also played a fundamental role in expanding the assumptions and norms of the ‘democratic conception’ of North American planning in the rest of the continent. This society established its own Centre to promote the exchange of planners and students within the Americas with the intention of facilitating the social acceptance of planning and the recognition of the planning profession. In this context, in Rosario, the Institute of Architecture and Planning – IAyP – (1957–1961) was founded and later replaced by the Institute of Regional and Urban Planning of the Litoral – IPRUL – (1962–1965). The former was directed by Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, the latter was headed by Jorge Hardoy.

The rise of neoliberalism and the neoconservative disdain for planning

The period between mid-1970s and until the social, political and economic breakdown of 2001/2002, was marked by the 1973 International Oil Crisis, the military coup of 1976 and the fall of the Keynesian-Fordist economic paradigm. The incipient rise of neoliberalism that followed was ideologically leveraged by the de-legitimisation of the role of the State, seen as a bureaucratic, inefficient structure, distant from the everyday life of the citizens and with slight capacity to boost economic growth and social development (Cristobo, 2009).

In this period, the discursive configuration that had for long portrayed planning as the perfect solution for the socio-spatial problems associated to industrialisation dynamics and urbanisation trends began to lose political support and explanatory power. Thus, while claims for a smaller State expanded from both extremes of the political spectrum, a strong ‘neoconservative disdain for planning’ (Albretchs, 2006: 1149), dominant in the Europe of the 1980s (Van Assche et al., 2014), also spread to Argentina. In view of the foregoing, planning policies, understood as a lawfully-begotten government instrument to intervene in the organisation of the national territory, would be virtually absent until the end of the 20th century.

The withdrawal of the State from its role as the main organiser of the spatial organisation of the country led to define the allocation of public investments in accordance with the demands from market-oriented actors (e.g. investors and urban developers). Complementing the expansion of the set of actors involved in planning, international financial organisations (e.g. World Bank and IMF) also strengthened their position as key transfer agents during this 30-year period. One of the scholars consulted describes their influence on agenda setting in this way:

‘In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the IMF and the World Bank, together with the US Department of Treasury and the Wall Street financial complex, among others, set out an “adjustment for development” programme. The basic guidelines included a reform of the tax pressure (…) de-industrialisation, reduction of the State personnel, disinvestment in substitutive activities (…) the opening to foreign goods, foreign direct investment, and financial capitals (…) access to agricultural land to local and foreign capitals, generating a concentration of land on large farms’.

By the turn of the century, the new paradigm of economic geography supported the idea of a globally consolidating knowledge-based economy (Hidalgo, 2004; Chen and Dahlman, 2005; OECD, 1996; World Bank, 1998, 2004) whose spatial dynamics would be better understood in relational terms. The migration of concepts and narrative fragments resonating with this discursive configuration into the Argentine governance context led local planning experts to embrace a conception of the world as a fragmented competitive space.

Urban districts had always been considered favoured compared to rural spaces, but now they were also forced to compete and excel over others in order to attract international capital investments. In this light, increasing the ‘competitiveness’ and ‘innovation capacity’ of the national network of towns and cities became key drivers for the new territorial development strategy of Argentina. The consolidation of a supranational economic space (MERCOSUR) generated a new system of relations both within the country and with the rest of South America and, therefore, significant transformations in the logic of territorial organisation. In this new scheme, the gradual modification of the role of the regions and the mutations in the morphology and hierarchy of the national urban system stand out. The decentralisation of activities from Buenos Aires strengthened regional (Rosario, Bariloche, Comodoro Rivadavia) and provincial (Cordoba, Mendoza) capitals and enabled intermediate cities – between 20,000 and 200,000 inhabitants – to perform new functions as distribution and supply centres at the regional level. The revival of national planning policies at the beginning of the 21st century was partially nourished from this discursive configuration and, expanding and adapting some of its key concepts, soon resulted in the publication of PET (García, 2018).

The revitalisation of national planning policies in Argentina at the beginning of the twenty-first century

The reinvention of state-led planning in a context of higher complexity, knowledge demand, competition, uncertainty and fast institutional change required ‘for the territories to become increasingly open and decentralised’ (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2008: 34). It was in this scenario that ‘mobility’, ‘accessibility’ and ‘urban connectivity’ grew into central concepts for re-organising a discursive configuration around Argentine planning policies and development strategies. Consulted about the role of transnational financial organisations in endorsing the migration of these conceptual structures, a planning professor from the University of Buenos Aires responded:

‘(…) the 2009 World Bank report called “A New Economic Geography” recommended that poor States should be encouraged or allowed to move towards higher population and business density. (...) what it is proposing is to let the migrations flow from the countryside to the cities, as the best suggestion for development. [In addition,] the opening of economic frontiers, greater international economic integration, (...) connective structures destined to transport, energy, pipelines, etc. [were also promoted]’.

In line with this economic and productive narrative, a significant emphasis was put on the creation of new networks to attract globally circulating capital. Hence, the configuration of ‘a polycentric urban system that guarantees access to goods and services to all citizens, as well as the conditions for economic development in all regions of the country’ (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2008: 27) became a main goal of PET. Following the European tendency towards competitive city-regionalism (see Brenner, 2004), the desired model for the future organisation of the country represented the Argentine territory as a set of urban nodes of different hierarchy and the corresponding networks and corridors that articulate them. This constellation of urban nodes was considered a key driver of the re-shaping of subnational State geographies, promoting the reconfiguration of national development through connections that would integrate Argentina into the ‘global’, ‘on the basis of the guiding ideas of national and international integration, productive strengthening and reconversion, connectivity and polycentrism’ (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2015: 25). However, the making of a planning policy for an integrated urban system required the political proclivities to be channelled into a constitutively politicised decision-making mechanism that was not there.

Timely migration of ideas, problems, methods and solutions based on collaborative planning

Using the four dimensions of discursive migrations previously introduced, in this section we will first describe the discursive embedding of a collaborative perspective in the formation of the national planning policy at the beginning of the 21st century. Then, we explore how the migrating collaborative discourse (self)transformed in relation to the receiving governance environment, looking at how it actually kept some power positions in place by re-shaping some roles and not others.

The discursive embedding of a collaborative perspective in the formation of PET

During the 20th century the criteria for assessing performances of success and failure in the Argentine planning system were perceived as pertaining only to the technical facet, thus hampering the recognition of planning as an arena of political deliberation and knowledge creation (Garay, 2004; Szajnberg et al., 2010). However, in line with the growing criticism raised against technocratic rationality in both the academic literatures and the self-definitions of different planning systems around the globe, the separation between the technical side of plan-making and the political aspects of decision-making began to lose consistency at the beginning of the 21st century (Ligier, 2011). Animated by this change of ideas at the level of broader planning discourse, the Ministry of Planning – through the SSPTIP led by architect Graciela Oporto – initiated a change in hosting discursive configurations to ensure that the citizenship could take part on an equal footing to the most qualified experts.

The first book of PET, published in 2008, made these changes explicit as it questioned the ‘limited effectiveness’ of traditional planning, defined as ‘deterministic “cascade” planning, which moves hierarchically from general to particular issues and presupposes the possibility of conducting territorial processes based on the information provided by technical State cabinets’ (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2008: 23). Thus, in line with the global flow of political changes affecting the transformation of current governance discourse, an Habermasian communicative rationality in which power is supposed to lie in ‘the force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1984: 24) gained adherence among the members of the technical team of the SSPTIP. In this move, travelling ideas that served as a foundation to oppose classical rationalist approaches would also facilitate the modification of a discursive configuration hitherto sustained in the supposed superiority of expert knowledge and in the clear-cut distinction of technical and political roles and functions. Hereafter, planning would be conceived as the product of a collective elaboration ‘for which the national government assumes leadership, accepting its political responsibility, and (...) the formation of cross-wise consensus’ (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2008: 24).

The migration of these ideas and the changes in Argentine planning configurations illuminated the supposed lack of democratic legitimacy of the centralist and top-down logic in decision-making as an explanatory problem for the historically perceived failures in policy implementation. The identification of this problem, in turn, allowed Oporto and her team in the Undersecretariat to encourage discursive changes at the level of methods. This change was based on social participation, expressed in the proposal to include ‘various social sectors - public entities, private sector and civil society - in every stage of development of the plan’ (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2008: 23). The recognition and valorisation of different forms of knowledge and reasoning also had an impact on the solutions dimension. Hence, in order to go beyond the conventional technocratic perspective focused on expert knowledge, SSPTIP proposed the strengthening of cooperation between the different levels of government and consultation with local actors as the most suitable solution.

The perceived effectiveness of the collaborative planning approach in more developed countries made building localised rational consensus around a common understanding of the spatial problems a key goal pursued by the SSPTIP. However, the migration of the communicative discourse positioned consensus-building as an outcome in itself and implied unprecedented deliberative efforts to articulate opposing views around spatial problems and agree upon available policy options (see Erbiti et al., 2005). Furthermore, the negotiation of collective meaning-making processes required policy-makers and planners to play a new role, in addition to the creation of new governance structures. These actors were now expected to perform as ‘knowledge mediators’, willing to postpone any attempt to realise their own interests and desires in order to build a politically agreed agenda, facilitate deliberative interactions in participatory sessions and strive for the ‘common good’ (see Cravacuore., 2006; Tauber et al., 2006). By the same token, and consistently with communicative planning reasoning, they were assumed to be naturally inclined to understand and respect the viewpoints and interests of others and advocate for consensus-building based on a symmetrical dialogue. Behind such expectations lies an assumption of Argentine policy-makers and planners as intrinsically imbued with democratic ideals.

Effects of the new discursive configuration on existing power positions

The 2001–2002 crisis revealed a political, economic and social scenario in which cooperative practices among political actors had for long been discouraged, leading to a decision-making paralysis and, ultimately, to a crisis of governance (Llanos and Margheritis, 2006). The undermined credibility of Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) and Partido Justicialista (PJ), the two largest political parties in the country, in parallel to the deep social disappointment with the government of President Fernando De la Rúa (1999–2001) led to the empowerment of provincial governments. Since the implementation of decentralisation policies in the 1990s, these governments had already been performing more functions and, in light of the convoluted national political scene, they were perceived as more stable. Thus, provincial representatives – mainly ministers of public works – would gain prominence as key actors to steer the new planning process under the administrations of Nestor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández (2007–2015). However, the involvement of provincial representatives in federal planning decision-making was not a straightforward process; it followed a fluctuating course with complex political effects.

Embedded in the discursive configuration that sustained the potential for collaborative work between decision-makers, the Ministry of Planning channelled negotiations with the provinces through a new steering organisation, the Federal Planning Council (COFEPLAN). The field-specific knowledge and technical skills of the provincial representatives to the Council was (and still is) quite varied. Engineers, architects and public accountants were among them, representing offices as diverse as Public Works and Services, Urban Planning and Housing, Environmental Planning or Development, Science, Technology and Public Management. The selection of these representatives is then explained not only based on their professional expertise, but based on their political ability as coordinating mediators. This is so because, beyond any thematic affinity, they had to perform a new role as political nexus in order to accomplish inter-jurisdictional policy implementation. In a similar vein, despite the announced openness to local knowledge and civic engagement, the Ministry of Planning entrusted the task of generating new data and managing the linkages for implementation to the Information, Linking and Technical Assistance System (SIVAT), under its own organisational structure (see Figure 1). Thus, consulted about the actual crafting of decision-making arenas for the renovated Argentine planning system, one of the planning scholars interviewed alleged:

‘It has been a network of [State] organizations that did not get anywhere. They [the Ministry of Planning] began to build it but there was no decision, there were no signed agreements, much was said but little materialised. (…) If that decision does not exist, whether in the handling of the information or in the implementation process, the plans are going to sleep on a bookshelf, nothing else’.

Figure 1.

Network of state organisations involved in national planning policies (2004–2015).

Thus, the travelling discourse that promoted participatory decision-making as a prime method and solution to overcome perceived failures in policy implementation was transformed in and by the receiving governance configuration into sectoral negotiations with a reduced set of stakeholders (Berros, 2015; Guardamagna and Reyes, 2019). In the same vein, the construction of a ‘shared interest’ capable of summarising the ‘wishes and feelings’ of the community (Undersecretariat of Territorial Planning of Public Investment, 2015) was restricted to members of the political State apparatus. Although this strategy facilitated the creation and consolidation of links within government organisations, it did not contribute in the pursuit of social legitimacy and public acceptance of State-led planning policies. This explains the comments of one of the planning scholars consulted, for whom the bottom-up path of decision-making seems to have seldom been explored:

‘I do not see social participation, (...) I see a lot of movement in all these issues, but focused on the point of view of institutions at the governmental level, not at the level of citizen participation’.

In the same vein, the elaboration of a ‘Desired Territorial Model’ synthesising widely held expectations remained limited to a ‘collaborative process between different levels of government’ (SSPTIP, 2011: 55). The rationalising power of the bureaucratic agencies of the State, the political capacities of provincial representatives and the knowledge of the Ministry of Planning and other State cabinets imposed themselves against grass-root strategies for civic engagement. Not surprisingly, when we consulted one of our qualified informants about her experience in the process of elaboration of PET, she said:

‘I was invited to one or two workshops, where there was no citizen participation, only some technicians were called. I made my contribution in the sense that this vision had to be changed, but (...) if they have previously reached an agreement that this plan has to have a very strong emphasis on infrastructure, it will come out like that, regardless of the imbalances generated by that infrastructure in the territory’.

Thus, the migrating collaborative discourse self-transformed in relation to the possibilities and limits of the receiving governance environment, leading collective decision-making to become an effective compliance-gaining technique which served to strategically confront contrasting views. Even when the migration proved itself useful in helping to revive a ‘developmental socio-spatial imaginary’ (Sheppard and Leitner, 2010), consensus building remained a highly technocratic, top-down practice, undermining the legitimacy and trust in the State to lead large-scale infrastructure projects. Consequently, the policy options envisioned in PET were not socially embraced and partially disappeared when a centre-right coalition (Cambiemos) assumed power in December 2015 and brought its own policy ambitions to the table. The discursive configuration that underpinned the migration process shifted in such a way that the Ministry of Planning as well as its embedded organisations were erased from the structure of national administration. The administration of Mauricio Macri (2015–2019) partially reassigned planning powers to the Ministry of Interior and encouraged regional projects (e.g. Plan Belgrano, exclusively oriented to the north of the country) and localised infrastructure investments, through public-private partnerships.

Conclusion and discussion

Our historical analysis of transnational circuits of policy and academic knowledge (de)legitimating the formation of State-led planning policies in Argentina has delivered a sound explanation of the narrative supports that constrained and enabled recent policy decisions in the country. We focussed on discursive migrations and discursive configurations and this has helped us to stress on the dynamic articulation of institutional inheritances and mobile ideologies, problems, methods and solutions that shape the emergence of new roles for policy actors and new rules for coordination. We were able to grasp the influence of collaborative ideas travelling from Anglo-American academic circuits on the creation of a ‘new common sense’ around planning policy-making in Argentina and its effects on the broader governance context.

In the first place, we observed that, to impose itself, the migrating collaborative discourse did not require coercive actors to enact a ‘hard’ transfer of policy instruments, institutions and programmes through financial incentives and constraints, as it was common until the 1990s. On the contrary, building on the ‘soft side’ of policy transfer (Stone, 2017), SSPTIP strategically adjusted and re-projected this discourse as a ‘normative power’ to legitimise a new attempt at State-led planning on a national scale. Furthermore, the adapted version of the collaborative planning discourse provided by SSPTIP shaped the new planning policy arena. For this, the Undersecretariat relied on inherited policy concepts (e.g. federal partnership), refurbished decision-making strategies (the involvement of civil society in policy formation, common in Peronism, see Elena, 2005), institutional goals congruent with deep-seated beliefs (bottom-up decision-making) and the political needs of the time (inter-provincial coordination). Thus, the migrating collaborative discourse became co-constitutive of a new planning ideology without being explicitly mentioned in any policy document officially published.

A second finding derived from the previous is that migrating collaborative ideals self-transformed as the planning process unfolded, creating a more diluted participative scenario in which decision-making was regulated through the re-signification of former governance systems. Although COFEPLAN was intended to be a novel solution to the perceived failure of centralised steering, its design was constrained by an institutional structure already regulating and organising itself through the formation of politically-based councils to legitimise decision-making. Thus, the discursive shift from a rationalistic search for ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ towards the construction of negotiated solutions for the ‘common good’ implied an ambiguous change in the governance context. On the one hand, the new discursive configuration facilitated the empowerment of provincial representatives (mainly, Ministers of Public Works) as potential transfer agents at the expense of transnational financial organisations, highly influential in previous periods. On the other hand, it aimed at a new role for traditional expertise (namely, architects, engineers and urbanists) without diversifying its base. So it is not surprising that both the Minister (Julio De Vido) and the Undersecretary (Oporto), as well as the core of the SSPTIP team, were architects. The alleged engagement between local communities and national decision-makers and new allegiance to consensual policy thinking, did not adequately describe old and new. The Argentine planning system went through a constant process of negotiation and reconstruction of its identity. Old power structures were recreated, affecting the functioning and scope of arenas for consensus-building.

Our evolutionary perspective applied to planning policy formations in Argentina has proved well suited to appreciate how the generation and sharing of knowledge across planning systems is constrained and enabled by the wider governance environment in which planning is embedded (Nadin and Stead, 2008; Van Assche et al., 2020). Mapping the evolutionary path of these broader governance contexts, in turn, illuminates new facets and directions for a political history of the circulation of planning knowledge. In this sense, an increased reflexivity on the dependencies in self-transformation that shape the unique capacities for learning and adaptation of each governance path contributes to further grasp logics of appropriateness and processes of policy indigenisation (Stone, 2017; Van Assche et al., 2014). Performing such endeavour entails, in turn, to reaffirm discursive policy migrations as acutely political (Peck and Theodore, 2010a). They reconstruct the social space through which they travel (McCann, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2012) and constantly reconfigure themselves in response to the discursive configurations, institutional path dependencies and the changing multiplicity of interests at stake in the local environment (Peck, 2011; Stein et al., 2017; Van Assche et al., 2017).

Our focus on the co-evolution of discursive migrations and discursive configurations sheds new light on the ever-mutating character of academic knowledge and policy discourses in motion as well as on the mutually influential relationship they stablish with the governance environment in/through which they develop, qualities that remained insufficiently explored (Peck, 2011). The evolutionary perspective helped us to elucidate the possibilities and limits for discourses travelling across scales to trigger new expectations, inspire policy options and influence new rules for coordination (Van Assche et al., 2014). On this basis, we linked up with recent literature on travelling ideas that, moving away from the boundaries of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Stone, 2004; cf Bourdieu, 2002), offers a more nuanced perspective on institutional mechanisms for local modification of policy. From this analytical vantage point, we expanded our understanding of the mutations of migrating discourse during the circulation process, while enhancing the relevant role of the receiving governance environment.

The customisation of migrating discourse and its effects on the receiving discursive configurations were scrutinised on four interrelated dimensions: ideas, methods, problems and solutions. In the dimension of ideas, we have seen a continuity of influence from the North but, at the same time, a slide towards subtler forms of relationship. If, in the past, policy-making was shaped largely through flows of funds and experts, this partially gave way to the mobility of open concepts, policy principles and supposedly successful narratives. The related dimensions of problems, methods and solutions were reconfigured along with this shift. Thus, the hitherto unnoticed lack of social control over public policies was turned into a problem that required State action, in the belief that, with more actors involved, the obstacles to effective implementation could be overcome. Correspondingly, bottom-up policy-making became the preferred method through which the State would address the problem, although, as we have seen, in practice this was limited to the inclusion of political representatives already involved in planning policies in their own provinces. Finally, COFEPLAN, which would initially represent the solution to the aforementioned problems, set itself the goal of building consensus among those provincial representatives and linking up with other similar State bodies, but it did not broaden the base of decision-makers to include more experts or the civil sector. The reconfiguration of governance was de facto a reshuffle and the multiplication of perspectives in more inclusive and deliberative governance did not take place.

The shifting connections between ideas, methods, problems and solutions, affecting their stability and propensity to travel, or to be replaced by a travelling alternative, render the pattern of travelling elements, and the pattern of transformation of policy discourse and governance context more complex, and multiply the possible forms of and explanations for travel and its impacts. Those flexible connections can at the same time be understood, as Argentina demonstrated, as adaptation options and mechanisms in the receiving context. Argentina also showed us that a history of shocks does not preclude path dependencies in governance, nor the maintenance of learning modes, and that transnational policy discourses entailing long-term and large-scale coordination in such context can become both more desirable and harder to implement.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Institute of Agricultural Technology of Argentina and grand number is 1177/14.

ORCID iDs

Rodrigo Alves Rolo

Martijn Duineveld

Rodrigo Alves Rolo is a human geographer, planning researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (Argentina) and PhD candidate at the Cultural Geography Group (Wageningen University). His research interests include democratic planning, policy formation in contested spaces, multi-level governance and the limits to consensus-building in decision making. His current project observes the rise and fall of spatial planning as a dominant state discourse to govern in Argentina since the beginning of the 20th century. He is particularly focused on elucidating the role of path, inter and goal dependencies as catalysts for governance evolution.

Martijn Duineveld is Associate professor at the Cultural Geography Group Wageningen University and co/director of the Centre for Space, Place and Society. His research programme is named Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning and Design. He is co-founder and active contributor to the emerging body of literature on Evolutionary Governance Theory. Martijn has been involved in many international research and consultancy projects situated in Argentina, Uganda, Georgia and Russia.

Kristof Van Assche is Full Professor in Planning, Governance and Development at the University of Alberta, department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He is also affiliated with Bonn University, Centre for Development Research (ZEF) as Senior Fellow and with Memorial University, Newfoundland, Harris Centre for Regional Policy, as Research Fellow. With colleagues he has developed Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), which aims to discern realistic modes of transition and reform, between social engineering and laissez faire. He is interested in evolution and innovation in governance, with focus areas in spatial planning and design, development and environmental policy.

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