Strategies, uses and skills:

State and NGO in social field in Argentina

Abstract

This article analyzes the plot that brings together the large NGOs and the State in the management of the social in Argentina from the 90s to the Cambiemos’s government. It examines the ways in which the relationship between referents from both worlds is configured by documenting the links they maintain and the disputes they sustain in shared workspaces. It is argued that the classic dichotomy between State and civil society crosses that field of practice in which a “moral economy” is formed from where organizations dispute their place and legitimacy as suitable agents to intervene in the social field. Based on a research work with executives of the largest NGOs in the country - the "élite of the sector" - and with senior state officials, the article shows how a plot full of suspicions, instrumental relationships and difficulties of understanding emerges that update the founding dichotomy. At the same time, we illuminate the skills, learnings and strategies forged throughout a journey of decades of joint work between the State and the organizations that show the porosity of these spaces and the circulation of their agents.