Negotiating Regions, Ordering Sustainability: Planning, Infrastructure Transition, and Socio-legal Agency in the Mexican Anthropocene

Abstract

This three-study dissertation explores policy and practice logics of trying to exert multilevel governing influence over transboundary infrastructural and territorial systems, and the ecological underpinnings on which they depend, in contexts of emerging market territories of production, agro-industry, and trade. Across the three studies, in different registers and modes, the project centers the active search for alternative institutional and infrastructural configurations that more frontally grapple with the multi-scale and multi-level entanglements of such regional industrial development projects. To this end, it variously engages with ideas of regionalism and negotiation as motors for cross-scale "creative institutional thinking" as part of broader climate and resource transition planning efforts, themselves taking shape amidst debates about changing industry-society-environment relations. Collectively, the studies are concerned with two broad questions: 1) how are diverse ideas about environmental crisis conditioning the ways in which dilemmas of regional climate transitions are understood and structured in territories of production, agro-industry, and trade; and 2) how do/how should fluid and multi-level ideas of scale, boundary, and subjectivity shape what we think is possible regarding physical/infrastructural interventions, professional practice, policy actions, and the inclusion of relevant stakeholders and affected/responsible parties in response to such transitions? The dissertation pursues these questions via engagement with two regional cases in Mexico, the first concerning policy, planning, and design responses to regional water scarcity and ecosystem degradation in an agro-industrial territory on the very far outskirts of the Mexico City urban agglomeration in Hidalgo state, and the second focused on the nationally-led development of a global trade transshipment and industrial manufacturing corridor project on the Tehuantepec Isthmus in southern Mexico, spanning the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz. Critical socio-legal analysis, integrated with territorial systems governance analysis, is an important component of the broader dissertation frame, specifically in its role as a combined hinge lens for variously broaching structure/agency dilemmas across local-to-global institutional and infrastructural reformulation imperatives amidst cascading climate crises.