MOBILIZING SUCCESS AND FAILURE: Strategic Ambivalence in Policy Mobility—Brasília and Argentina's Capital Relocation Debate

Abstract

Drawing on debates in policy mobility and relational urbanism, this article examines the proposal to relocate Argentina´s federal capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma–Carmen de Patagones in the mid-1980s. It analyzes how external references were strategically mobilized across political and scalar arenas, focusing on the heterogeneous uses of Brasília during the debate. Rather than treating success and failure as opposing evaluations held by different actors, the article advances the concept of strategic ambivalence to capture the simultaneous mobilization of the same reference by the same politically powerful actors across different audiences, scales and moments of contestation. Brasília circulated at once as a successful model of territorial integration and as a cautionary example associated with urban, fiscal and planning failures—not as competing readings advanced by opponents, but as coexisting framings actively governed by proponents. This simultaneity, the article argues, is not inconsistency but a constitutive political practice. The article contributes to policy mobility scholarship by moving beyond accounts that locate divergent framings of success and failure in actors or coalitions and by showing how the politics of comparison itself—its connections, disconnections and deliberate instability—is strategically governed by state elites in contested territorial projects.