(The institutional management of public conflicts for the (no) access to the habitat. The case of the ombudsman of the province of Buenos Aires)

Abstract

The article seeks to contribute to the production of social knowledge about conflicts that originate around the (non) access to the habitat and its forms of administration by the Argentine State, taking as reference the actions of the Ombudsman of the Province of Buenos Aires. For this reason, at first, a general reconstruction of those theoretical approaches is carried out that from the Social Sciences, and particularly from Social Anthropology, allow us to think about the production and administration of conflicts and then delve into the specificities of the Ombudsman’s Office. in the state field of conflict management.
Based on the ethnographic work carried out, the ways in which the aforementioned organism constructs and intervenes on conflicts due to (non) access to the habitat are problematized by deploying a set of representations, values, legal sensitivities and practices that seek to achieve the so-called access to rights and justice. Thus, in its attempt to legitimize and differentiate itself from other state organisms, the adoption of a rights approach, the generation of instances of dialogue and mediation, the articulation between various organisms and social actors, the construction of close social relations with those who process a conflict, the formalization of the bureaucracy, among other aspects that will be mentioned in the course of the article and that allow delimiting and think, in a situated way, the actions of the Ombudsman’s Office.