Steps to a research of the possible futures of a public policy. A (provisional) analysis of the implementation of the Tarjeta Alimentar program in Argentina

Abstract

In January 2020, the Argentine government announced an emergency program called Tarjeta Alimentaria which would imply the disbursement of a fixed sum per month, in order to facilitate access to food. However, the program would unleash a series of criticisms not only from public opinion, but also within the governing coalition itself, with a consequent impact on the legitimacy of action of the state agencies. Even though the corpus of specialized literature maintains that making a provisional evaluation, a few months after the implementation of a public policy, invalidates a large part of the hierarchy of issues to be assessed, the paper at hand seeks to offer a model for the provisional analysis of the possible futures of the above-mentioned public policy. It will be argued that the model developed will make it possible to avoid the limitations imposed by the short time that has elapsed the program implementation, with the aim of providing a provisional cartography that allows us to reconstruct the possibilities yet to be realized, based on similar trajectories and worlds of public policies already spoken. In this way, the capacity of agency could be restored to state actors of the present, preserving the legitimacy of the state agencies in their social interventions.