Petrochemical development and water dispossession in Bahía Blanca, Argentina

Abstract

During the second half of the 1990s, the Bahía Blanca petrochemical complex underwent a process of privatisation, foreignisation and expansion through which, while its production volume increased by 450%, the complex's water consumption more than tripled. In this paper, we propose to trace a political ecology of the appropriation and distribution of this vital common good in the face of the expansion of the industrial pole, as part of the neoliberal re-ordering of the territory during the 1990s. The theoretical approach of the research is constructed with the conceptual tools forged in the heat of the relationship between political ecology and the water question, forming the field of studies of the political ecology of water. At the same time, the methodological strategy focuses on the qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources, while the information gathered is organised and systematised through a narrative-historical scheme, where history refuses to be defined by its exclusive reference to the past and is instead (re)created as a way of accessing social problems of persistent relevance.