Participation Between Rhetoric and Redistribution
Floreal Ferrara and Community Health in Neoliberal Argentina
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24217661 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Clémentine Martinez-Perez |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | IdeAs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1950-5701 • E-ISSN: 1950-5701 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/16wwh |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
The article examines ATAMDOS (Atención Ambulatoria y Domiciliaria de la Salud), a community-based health programme implemented in the Province of Buenos Aires in 1987-1988 under the leadership of physician and Peronist Minister of Health Floreal Ferrara. Designed in the early years of Argentina’s restored democracy, ATAMDOS sought to reorganise healthcare around neighbourhood-based teams and to institutionalise popular participation in planning, management and evaluation of health services. While international health institutions increasingly reframed primary health care in selective and cost-effective terms during the 1980s debt crisis, Ferrara proposed a more radical approach in which communities would exercise forms of co-governance over health policy. Based on personal archives and contemporary press coverage, the article traces the evolution of his reformist thought, first advocating a strong, coordinating state in the 1970s and then embracing community co-governance in the 1980s. It argues that ATAMDOS became politically intolerable not because of technical failure or excessive idealism but because it redistributed authority away from medical corporations, provincial elites and technocratic actors, revealing the structural limits of participatory reform in neoliberalising post-authoritarian democracies.
Selective Primary Health Care
Le paiement des soins par les usagers dans les pays d'Afrique subsaharienne
Participation communautaire et programmes de santé
The stages of international (global) health
The participatory democracy turn
Hegemonía y discurso en la Argentina contemporánea. Efectos políticos de los usos de "pueblo" en la retórica de Néstor Kirchner
L'essentiel, c'est de participer. «Démocratie locale» et «santé communautaire» dans les villes du tiers-monde
The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Health Care
Health Care as Commons
From Populism To Neoliberalism
Desregulación y equidad
Ideological dimensions of community participation in Latin American health programs
Structural Adjustment and the Globalization of Social Policy in Latin America
Can society be commodities all the way down? Post-Polanyian reflections on capitalist crisis
| Highly cited | No |
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