In dryland territories, public policies have often focused more on the biophysical and socio-economic limitations of these unfavourable or marginal areas (Easdale and Domptail, 2014) than on the socio-ecological and productive potential of the place. The department of Malargüe, located in the last region of Mendoza province before the full transition to Patagonia, represents a distinctive example of this. Understanding forms of state intervention in rural spaces implies attending to analytical shifts in the consideration of the state, particularly for arid or semi-arid territories, whose partialised references from the spheres of governance tend to confuse a natural situation – such as aridity – with an induced process – such as degradation (Michel, 2021). In this paper we question the future of transhumant activity in the context of strong socio-ecological changes brought about by the advance of neo-extractivist mining in South American mountains.