Socio-technical alliances and drug policy: perspectives from the Argentinean Crisis of 2001

• Autor: Santos, Guillermo
• Formato: artículo
• Fecha de Publicación: 2024
• Institución: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• Repositorio: Revistas - Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• Lenguaje: español
• OAI Identifier: oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/29578
• Enlace del recurso: http://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/politai/article/view/29578
• Nivel de acceso: acceso abierto
• Materia: Medicines; Public policies; Functioning/non-functioning; Socio-technical alliance; Medicamentos; Políticas públicas; Funcionamiento/no funcionamiento; Alianza socio-técnica

The aim of this article is to analyse the problem-solution dynamics linked to the availability of and access to medicines for the Argentine population as a result of the social, economic, political and health crisis that affected Argentina in 2001.It is interesting to analyse the scope, characteristics and limitations of the public policies implemented by the Argentinean government between 2002 and 2008, whose objectives were to solve the problem of the lack of access to medicines that affected the most vulnerable sectors of the Argentinean population.The analytical reconstruction of this socio-institutional dynamic will provide a better understanding of the process of co-construction of public policies, regulations, artefacts, economic interests, ideologies and inclusive techno-productive development dynamics, and will offer new explanations about the functioning/non-functioning of the public policies implemented to solve social problems linked to the population’s access to medicines.This article argues that public policy is not only the exercise of a vertical and centralised will, but rather the result of the alignment and coordination of a heterogeneous set of elements that are horizontally linked and that allow public policies to consolidate or destabilise.This article is framed within a socio-technical approach (Bijker, 1995; Pinch y Bijker, 2008; Thomas, 2008, Santos y Thomas, 2016), which combines analytical tools from constructivist sociology and public policy analysis. The descriptive and explanatory capacity of such an approach derives from the possibility of generating an analytical reconstruction of the complex relationships between users and tools, actors and artefacts, institutions and normative systems, ideologies and economic interests, where in the same act in which public policies are designed and implemented, legal-political orders, social organisations and techno-productive systems are constructed.Two key concepts guide the analysis of this article: ‘functioning/non-functioning’ and ‘socio-technical alliance’. The former is the result of a process of social and normative co-construction in which heterogeneous elements intervene, usually in a self-organised way: material conditions, systems, knowledge, regulations, financing, benefits, etc. It involves complex processes of tailoring responses/solutions to specific and particular historically situated socio-institutional articulations. The second concept, the socio-technical alliance, is an analytical reconstruction of a coalition of heterogeneous elements involved in the process of constructing the functioning/non-functioning of a public policy. In other words, a socio-technical alliance constitutes a movement of alignment and coordination of: artefacts, ideologies, regulations, knowledge, institutions, social actors, economic resources, environmental conditions, materials, etc. that make possible or impede the stabilisation of the socio-technical adequacy of a policy and its functioning.