Collective action and public policies: Recent changes in family livestock farming in Uruguay[Acción colectiva y políticas públicas: Cambios recientes en la ganadería familiar de Uruguay]

Uruguay has historically projected the image of a livestock industry based on independent producers, isolated on dispersed farms. However, in family farmers, collective action is a frequent practice, constituting one of the economic strategies for persistence and reproduction. The public policies implemented between 2005 and 2019 promoted various forms of collective action for family production from a vision of territorial rural development. The article comes from a study that sought to characterize the collective action of family ranchers in the North Coast region of the country, through the review of documentary sources and conducting semi-structured interviews with qualified informants (30) and collective references (50). In the region, there is a diversity of groups that, according to objectives and trajectories, are classified into four types: integral, economic, traditional and productive. In all four types, collective action coordination processes are observed, which differ in the degree of maturity reached according to the trajectories followed. In all of them, it is evident that the processes of formalization or institutionalization of the collectives grant legitimacy to practices that have always been developed by family ranchers, such as mutual help or shared management of assets.