Local Government Cooperation against Climate Change in Argentina

Argentina is a federal country with 23 provinces and the capital city of Buenos Aires as a federal district. The provincial autonomy is enshrined in the Constitution of 1853. According to this, provinces can vote for their own constitutions and laws and they have the power to elect their own authorities and organize their own administrations. In addition, provinces have broad constitutional autonomy in fiscal and spending functions. The delimitation of powers between the central government and the subnational states is founded on the principle that all provinces have the power of those competences not expressively delegated to the federal state in the Constitution.

Local governments are the third tier. As the provinces have a political, administrative, judicial, and financial autonomy, the scope of municipal autonomy is determined by the province in which they are located. That translates into a wide range of definitions and configurations for each of these local governments. Several municipal governments, have the authority to draft municipal charters which clearly results in a progressive increase in their decision-making capacity. But this contrasts with limited administrative capacities in terms of the provision of services since many of them become decentralized at the provincial level and, scarce public resources and tax powers to finance their expenses since these are mostly concentrated at the national level.

This means that, although local governments have crescent autonomy, most responsibilities fall to the provincial levels and the revenue collection is located at the national level. Specifically for climate action this again means that although local governments are on the front line in terms of facing the impacts of climate change and having to deliver efficient responses, they neither have the responsibility for service provision nor do they collect revenue, so their margins for action are quite restrained.

In this scenario, local governments came together to create a coalition of municipalities to enhance their capabilities for climate (?) action. In 2010, the Argentine Network of Municipalities against Climate Change (RAMCC, by its acronym in Spanish) was created. RAMCC is a coalition of 222 Argentine municipalities that coordinates and promotes strategic plans to tackle climate change. The Network was formed in November 2010 and became an instrument for coordinating and promoting local public policies to face climate change in cities and rural areas in Argentina.

The municipal members of RAMCC represent eighteen provinces, a great diversity of regional differences, and encompass both large cities with more than 1 million inhabitants as well as small rural towns. This diversity constitutes an enormous challenge, but at the same time it allows RAMCC to address a heterogeneous variety of environmental challenges.

The network’s main goal is to promote and execute municipal, regional and national projects or programs related to mitigation and/or adaptation to climate change, based on the mobilization of local, national, and international resources. The tools generated in RAMCC aim at: (i) socializing good practices, tools, and training programs; (ii) supporting the development of specific Local Climate Action Plans for each city and (iii) providing access to financing through a trust fund.

A group of local government members of RAMCC created the first Argentine trust to manage, support, and implement projects, programs, and policies related to adaptation and mitigation of climate change: the ‘RAMCC Trust’. The trust fund was created to overcome the several obstacles local governments face when they need to access funds to carry out actions against climate change. These challenges are a combination of lack of information, insufficient technical capabilities of their human resources, lack of articulation between jurisdictions, among many others. The Trust constitutes an economic, administrative and financial tool available to member municipalities that enables them to make investments that would not otherwise be possible if done by an individual municipality and allows the inclusion of all municipal governments that wish to contribute resources to target climate change, as well as allowing them to also be beneficiaries of the resources, funds, and services that the RAMCC Trust manages.

Another example is the implementation of Climate Action Plans in the Province of Mendoza. This is a cooperation between the provincial Secretary of Environment and the RAMCC to design and implement the Provincial Program of Local Climate Action Plans in the municipalities of the region. In this scheme, each locality presents a Local Climate Action Plan with the coordination of the provincial government, open to citizen participation to incorporate sustainable practices.

The main difference between urban and rural local government’s Climate Plans is on what issues they focus. The City of Mendoza works primarily on energy efficiency, sustainable constructions and transport, efficient waste management, urban biodiversity conservation and disaster risk management programs. In contrast, rural municipalities are still working on their plans and focus much more on adaptation and risk management, than mitigation.

In this way, the RAMCC as a space for cooperation of local governments becomes a very interesting tool to respond to the challenges presented by small scale and the scarcity of resources and thus be able to strengthen action against climate change, and, ultimately respond faster and better to the its challenges.