They have taken over the back part: The territorialization of Patagonia National Park, Santa Cruz (Argentina)

Abstract

Historically, the Administración de Parques Nacionales (APN) is the Argentinian state body in charge of designating and managing the environmentally protected areas (AP) under its jurisdiction. However, in the last decades, the emergence of new agents has generated a dramatic change of this pattern, as well as the dispute of the State’s hegemony in the creation of the National Parks (PN). The project of these new conservation agents confronts with other plans for the northwest of South Patagonia, turning the construction of a specific protected area, the Patagonia National Park, more complex. They develop a number of strategies in order to territorialize their own protection project, challenging the power of APN on its own AP.

The aim of this article is to identify the agents and projects that are related to the creation of the Patagonia National Park, as well as the strategies that they develop in their territorialization process in order to understand the new dynamics that feature the creation and management of the AP, of national nature. To this aim, in a first stage, the concepts of territoriality and territorialization will be defined. In a second step, the different plans that have developed the northwest of the province of Santa Cruz, as well as the description of the agents that carried them out and the identification of some of their strategies will be dealt with. Finally, in an attempt to understand the territorialization and the power of the agents that take part in the creation of the Patagonia National Park, the relationship established among them, the approach of some material, relational, and prescriptive strategies that they follow, the outlook on nature that they have, and the projects that they contrast against the creation of the AP will be studied in depth. Methodologically, this paper corresponds to a typical case study, using qualitative tools to generate and analyze data.