Easier said than done: Shifting social imaginaries of rural landscapes of the Chaco-Pampas plain, Argentina (1996–2020)

Abstract

“Slow” socio-cultural variables indirectly driving changes in rural landscapes, such as social imaginaries, are proposed to act as strong leverage points toward sustainability. Social imaginaries are systems of practices, discourses, and institutions that create meanings and expectations about how the world works. Here we analyze the way in which one of the bestselling newspapers of Argentina has framed articles with references to rural landscapes of the Chaco-Pampas Plain published between 1996 and 2020. We do this to assess the relative dominance of three social imaginaries of rural landscapes present in modern societies (i.e., productivist, sustainability, and conservationist). To do this, we selected 961 articles published in this newspaper and period, from which we extracted 1884 references containing ideas, beliefs, and visions about “how (rural landscapes) ought to be” or “what (type of landscapes) is worth struggling for”. Such references were codified using NVivo based on the landscape aspect that they referred to, and the type of manifestation (practice, discourse, or policy) and social imaginary that they expressed. The prevalence of the productivist imaginary decreased almost proportionally to the increase in the prevalence of the sustainability imaginary, with a displacement of the latter with respect to the former between 2006 and 2010. This dominance shift was manifested much earlier in discourses than in practices. We identified an early period dominated by the productivist imaginary (1996–2003), a transition period co-dominated by the three imaginaries (2004–2013), and a contemporary period co-dominated by the sustainability and conservationist imaginaries (2014–2020). These results suggest that ideas, beliefs, and visions of more biodiverse rural landscapes with lower negative externalities have gained strength in the last two decades. Nevertheless, there is a long delay between the moment when these ideas are expressed discursively, and the moment when they translate into the diffusion of practices, whose adoption will ultimately transform rural landscapes.