In July, Santa Fe officially presented its Provincial Climate Change Response Plan, a tool comprising 35 measures across 9 sectors and supported by 139 indicators for monitoring and tracking results. More than the culmination of a process, the presentation marks the beginning of a new phase in which the main challenge will be transforming planning into effective implementation capacity.
The Plan is, in reality, the result of a process that began several years ago. Its development spanned different administrations and combined regulatory frameworks, technical cooperation, sectoral participation, and coordination with the national government. Provincial Law 14.019, enacted in 2020, and its subsequent regulations laid the foundation for a climate policy that has managed to endure despite political changes.
Its presentation also takes place within a particular national context. While the institutional framework established by Law 27.520 remains formally in force, national spaces for coordinating climate policy have lost activity and centrality. This situation poses a significant tension for a policy that, by its very nature, requires coordination among different levels of government.
In this context, the case of Santa Fe reveals a broader trend: faced with less dynamic national coordination, provinces can acquire an increasingly relevant role in building local climate capacities. But what does it mean to plan climate action from a provincial perspective when national coordination mechanisms have lost their centrality?
