Everyday practices in Chilean neighborhood health clinics during La Concertación: 1990-2010

• In Event: The Politics of Health, Science and Gender in late 20th and 21st Century Chile

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project that uses Chile´s state milk program as a prism to map the trajectory of Chile´s social state through three combinations of political, economic, and welfare regimes between 1954. It traces the informal strategies deployed by citizens and local service providers and presents a historical typology of these encounters between 1954 and 2010. This paper focuses on changes and continuities between the previous periods and the everyday workings and politics at neighborhood clinics of the 1990-2010 center-left coalition Concertación period. It finds that though the end of the dictatorship brought a sense of relief to public health workers in their daily practices, it did not mitigate the need for them to provide services in ways that are at the margins of top-level mandates. Strict program guidelines and changes produced with economic efficiency criteria led program recipients to place pressure on them to work outside the tightly defined boundaries of program rules. In this way strategies created in resistance to the dictatorship were maintained and local providers and families continued to coordinate to create services that satisfy demands at times in spite of government mandates.

Author

• Jael A Goldsmith Weil, Universidad de Los Lagos Chile