Introduction

Behind every organization we find a history, that is, a set of individual and collective experiences generated by people with ideas, values, and interests who built that organizational way of being. In the terms of Arellano Gault (2010, p 83), “organizations are biographical entities that are composed of a series of actions, stages, encounters, concrete people who come and go, enter and leave. … This makes organizations a web of trajectories”.

This chapter deals with the history of the Argentine Association of Public Administration Studies (AAEAP), a 20-year-old civil society organization (CSO) which set an innovative precedent in our country. Until then, there was no similar organization that acted as a space for building bridges between different society stakeholders (academics, public officials, politicians, union leaders, among others) for the generation of debates and the exchange of ideas aimed at strengthening state capacities.

Thus, the aim of this study is to describe the trajectory of the AAEAP and analyze its impact on the administration and public policies of Argentina. To this end, the main data collection techniques used were documentary research and semi-structured in-depth interviews with founders, members, and directors of the association.

The Argentine Association of Public Administration Studies in the world of civil society organizations

As Chandler (1962) argues in a now classic study on the history of organizations, understanding the context is key to work of this kind. Thus, in Argentina, since the return of democracy, CSOs have been occupying an increasingly relevant place in various activities, such as education, health, environmental preservation, and the promotion of civil rights, among others. The functions performed by these types of entities are varied, and they are valued for their ability to provide services and for their potential social coordination capacity in order to assume the development of specific institutional areas of discussion. These organizations are also relevant for their condition as institutional laboratories for the deployment and experimentation of new approaches that emerge as a product of work models in which initiative and creativity are combined (Roitter, 2016a).

Acuña and Vaccheri (2007) point out that organizations with diverse agendas and levels of transparency, purposes, structures, and methodologies coexist in the space conceptualized as civil society. It is a social, ideological, and cultural diversity typical of plural and democratic societies.