The Buenos Aires Blackout: Argentine Crisis Management Across the Public-Private Divide

This case study offers an empirical contribution to the understanding of how accidents in complex technical systems in urban settings can become societal crises with severe economic and political consequences. Infrastructural crises are particularly interesting to analyze in terms of private-public decision-making, since a number of socio-technical sectors have been
subject to processes of privatization in large parts of the world during the last few decades. Studies of accidents involving these sectors are therefore likely to reveal how corporations today view questions of social responsibility, how different actors interact and how political decisions are made when urban infrastructure fails.