Anticipatory Knowledge in the Construction of a Public Problem: Imaginaries, Narratives and Futures in the Argentine Energy Transition

Public issues become objects of intervention because certain actors build a cognitive order around that issue: a cause-effect relationship -if we execute A, then B will occur- that shows how a situation can be transformed by means of some action. Also, some problems are especially future-oriented, that is, this cognitive order is based on projections, inferences, and is related to different imaginaries about the alternatives of possible futures.

The energy transition in Argentina is a case in point of these two qualities. There, the National State and Science and Technology institutions, through normative documents and promotion of public discourses, produced a cognitive order and expectations of the future. In this paper, I explore how their arguments are supported by different knowledge, which are presented under certain order and hierarchical relations. Thus, I ask what imaginaries about the future influence the processes of selection, construction, and hierarchization of this knowledge? From the identification of some existing imaginaries, I propose to look for affinity between these and the type of knowledge used in the construction of the public problem, its mode of selection and production.

The work articulates qualitative techniques: documentary analysis, observations and interviews. Among the materials used, stand out the Guidelines for Energy Transition and the series of Encounters for Energy Transition, both developed by the National State. The main finding is that both in the policies and in the narratives, the actors subordinate environmental issues to the development issue, and even use the imaginaries of environmental catastrophe as a reinforcement of the argument referring to the economic opportunities. Thus, visions based on anticipatory knowledge prevail, which constitute the main arguments of the problem and promote perceptions of urgency both in the construction of the cognitive order and in the recommendation for decision making.