Governance and policy limitations for sustainable urban land planning. The case of Mexico

Abstract

In the last 25 years, unplanned and dispersed urban development has become the norm rather than the exception mostly in medium and small cities of the global south, a region with high poverty rates and weak institutions in charge of land use changes. This paper is based on environmental discourses and governance policy integration to address the limitations in preventing the conversion of open land, which provides ecosystem services, into settlement land. It analyzes the case of the Metropolitan Zone of Queretaro in central Mexico, which has experienced particularly high rates of urban expansion in recent years. This paper focuses on the private sector's significant contribution to urban sprawl, a situation linked to the following deficits: policy domain integration deficit, which is related to competing goals among multi-level, multi-scale and multi-sector actors; the interdisciplinary deficit, which requires various procedures and instruments to promote stakeholder collaboration; and the democracy deficit, which involves micro-level actions rather than substantive policy design to encourage citizens to become agents of change and develop awareness of the value of nature in cities.