Since the crisis of 2002 and the elections of 2003 the Argentinean government has embarked on a wave of institutional reconstruction which has affected all the dimensions of the state. The current administration is working on both, modernizing the existing institutions and creating new ones in order to cover some policy gaps that were not dealt with up to this moment. The main state institution that covers environmental issues is the Department of Environmental and Sustainable Development, which falls under de jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health. Within this department a number of sub-departments have been created recently.
These sub-departments cover a wide range of environmental related issues such as climate change, biodiversity protection, or commerce and investment. Two of these sub-departments are of special relevance for this essay. These are de Unit for Climate Change and the Unit for Commerce, Investment and the Environment. Special attention will be given in following sections.
These institutional governmental reforms cannot be understood without taking the environmental discourse of the present administration into account. This discourse deals with sustainable development and economic growth as interrelated goals and uses state regulation (taxing environmental unfriendly behavior) together with market instruments in order to reach environmental sustainability and economic growth ( Bases para una agencia ambiental nacional 2005: 7).
The governmental agenda affirms that the Argentinean national economy is experiencing an intensive economic recovery and that the adopted growth path is that of sustainability. That Argentina indeed has chosen the path of sustainability can be extracted from the following findings:
-National and international pressure: the public awareness generated by the Rio Summit and the geographical proximity of the event enabled many Argentinean NGO's to fully participate in the summit. This resulted in the inclusion of the right to a sustainable environment in Article 41 of the constitution during the constitutional revision 1994 (Aguilar 2003: 227). At the same time Argentina has signed many transnational agreements that stimulate environmental sustainability such as the Kyoto protocol.
-The moderate leftist orientation of the current administration is more likely to adopt such an environmental discourse than a conservative administration.
