The present work analyzes the effects of the 2001-3 crisis in Argentina - considered as a result of a set "accumulated insufficiencies" that got entangled in between economy and politics - in the country's sanitation policy. Differently from what was occurring in other sectors, the expression of the crisis in the health sector was more linked to the demands of people responsible for health services management than to collective actions. Both the peculiarity of being an agenda "mediatized" by distinct governmental actors and the health sector management demand focusing on the intergovernmental relations plot resulting from Argentina's institutional organization. The present work aims at understanding how the challenge of rebuilding State legitimacy during the crisis affected the governmental actors position within the institutional framework where Argentina's sanitation issues are dealt with, beginning with the reconstruction of dynamic and logical processes that coexisted in one intergovernmental coordination area: the Federal Health Council (Cofesa, in Spanish). From such perspective and focusing the analysis on a paradigmatic example such as financing of drugs, Cofesa became a touchstone of such processes, where distinct logics of the health sector, some general and some particular, coexist.
sanitation policies; intergovernmental relations; federalism