Santa Fe is getting ready to rewrite its provincial Constitution after six decades. A group of social and environmental organizations consider it urgent that this reform includes rules addressing the ecological and social crisis.
The Santa Fe Charter was last modified in 1962. While the national constitution was amended in 1994 incorporating clauses and articles related to the right to a healthy environment, the environmental protection recourse, and the situation of indigenous peoples, these changes were not adopted in the provincial law.
“There is a very serious delay in social and environmental matters that needs to be addressed,” says Lucas Micheloud, executive co-director of the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers.
An ecological and social perspective to reform the Constitution
On July 14, the Constitutional Convention will be installed with the 69 elected convention members leading the reform. In advance, 15 organizations presented a document with 18 specific initiatives to promote the first Ecosocial Constitution of the country.
“We are talking about a new ecosocial constitution because we link ecological issues with social justice. There is no environmental justice without social justice,” says Micheloud.
One of the main proposals of the environmental collective is the recognition of nature as subject of rights. “We want this reform to break the anthropocentric bias of 20th-century constitutions,” mentions the spokesperson for Environmental Lawyers, one of the organizations signing the document.
Among the proposals, there is mention of creating public-social management entities to prevent river privatization or water commodification. This formulation adds to the current discussion on the future of the Paraguay – Paraná waterway.
The document presented by the organizations also proposes incorporating mitigation and adaptation to climate change as a duty of the State and individuals. Likewise, it calls for: the recognition of science and ancestral knowledge as a common good; access to environmental justice; guarantees for the right to protest in defense of the environment, among other proposals.
Challenges for the environmental agenda in Santa Fe
Micheloud points out that in times of climate denial and dismantling of environmental public policies, it may be more difficult to promote an ecosocial agenda within the framework of a constitutional reform. “The national context, which also has echoes in the province, makes the debate more challenging. Therefore, it should not be a debate among politicians but with society.”
Faced with possible lobbying from agribusiness and port activities, two relevant activities in the dynamics of Santa Fe, environmentalists demand that the call for open sessions of the Convention be broad and include unions, students, indigenous people, and ecologists.
The Necessity of Reform Law establishes that the Constitutional Convention will only have a 60-day deadline to make the changes. “It is a short time. It raises suspicions if they really want it to be a debate to thoroughly discuss certain points, such as the socio-environmental agenda,” says Micheloud.
In addition to circulating their proposals on social media, the environmental collective has already been coordinating dialogues with the elected convention members to review the proposals and develop mechanisms for citizen participation.
