Performing Environmental Governance: Cultural Pragmatics of Waste and Water Management in Buenos Aires

This study explores the cultural and performative dynamics of environmental action in Buenos Aires, focusing on waste management, water resources, and informal settlements. Through the lens of cultural pragmatics, we examine how environmental issues emerge in the public sphere and how actors navigate urban environmental governance in the absence of cohesive metropolitan institutions.

Our research investigates:

1. The framing of waste and water pollution in the Reconquista and Riachuelo rivers as urgent public issues.
2. The evolution of community practices in response to environmental challenges, including informal settlers' improvisational tactics and official interventions.
3. Cultural enablers and disablers in environmental action, examining interactions between local survival strategies and top-down governance attempts.
4. The circulation of ideas and action repertoires across scales of environmental governance.

Through ethnographic observation, interviews, and discourse analysis, we reveal the complex performances constituting environmental governance in Buenos Aires. The absence of formal metropolitan institutions creates a stage for diverse, often contradictory performances of environmental stewardship. Informal settlers engage in "survival urbanism," adapting to and transforming polluted environments, while official actors perform intermittent top-down interventions that often fail to address root causes of degradation.

Our analysis highlights creative tensions between structured performance and improvisation in environmental action. We argue that Buenos Aires' environmental governance is best understood as interconnected performances where actors negotiate roles and responsibilities through scripted and spontaneous actions.

This research contributes to cultural pragmatics in environmental sociology by demonstrating how performance theory illuminates complex urban environmental dynamics. By focusing on performative aspects of waste and water management, we offer new insights into how environmental problems are constructed, contested, and potentially resolved through cultural and social processes.