ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

U.S.- Mexico Border Environmental Policy Issues

Introduction

The border between the United States and Mexico provides a dynamic and complex example of the problems of bilateral environmental management in the context of economic integration. 2000-kilometer border is home to millions of people who share the water, air, land and ecosystems in very different institutional structures and in different social contexts. While scientists and politicians have analyzed the environmental problems at the border for several decades, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 brought renewed attention to the region.

NAFTA consolidated long-term trends in the field of industrialization, agricultural intensification, urbanization, and the border region, catalyzed by environmental groups and other social movements that led to the creation of several new institutions to manage the border environment. Most of the scientists and staff of the Agency to consider the "boundary" for the region extending "100 km to the north and south of the border, while others include all the borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas in the United States and Baja California, Sonora , Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Mexico.

Border protection, of course, depends on many processes that occur and occur far outside the 100-kilometer border, the fact that air, water, and species movement across much larger areas, and policies made in countries outside this narrow band. The vast majority of border region live in cities. These urban centers of which lie at different points along the border and are usually isolated from each other and from other communities. Neighboring governments, in their various plans for the border, believe that there are 14 pairs of border cities, the largest and most well-known time San Diego, Tijuana, Nogales, Nogales, El Paso-Ju'arez, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Brownsville - Matamoros (Liverman, 1991).

Border with the United States and Mexico provides a useful forum for the analysis of a number of theoretical issues in the field of environmental research, such as the role and effectiveness of environmental social movements and bilateral agencies, the political environment of economic globalization and the implications of decentralization and democratization on the environmental performance of local government. Border also provides enormous challenges for public policy in terms of creating effective institutions, conflict resolution, and understanding of public responses to free trade. In this article we will discuss a number of environmental problems facing border communities and organizations and to explore the driving forces that are transforming the environment and society in the US-Mexico Border. Analysis is framed in terms of interaction between institutional structures and individual actions, especially bilateral agencies, borders and environmental social movements. We begin with a brief review of existing environmental problems facing the border region, and then an analysis of historical and current driving forces of environmental change in the border area(Powell, 1995).

Overview of Contemporary Border Environmental Issues

Today, the border region is one of the most environmentally stressed areas in the world, which creates many problems for the United States and Mexico, especially for people who live in ...