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

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.

Navigating challenges and opportunities of land degradation and sustainable livelihood development in dryland social-ecological systems: a case study from Mexico.

Drylands are one of the most diverse yet highly vulnerable social-ecological systems on Earth. Water scarcity has contributed to high levels of heterogeneity, variability and unpredictability, which together have shaped the long coadaptative process of coupling humans and nature. Land degradation and desertification in drylands are some of the largest and most far-reaching global environmental and social change problems, and thus are a daunting challenge for science and society. In this study, we merged the Drylands Development Paradigm, Holling's adaptive cycle metaphor and resilience theory to assess the challenges and opportunities for livelihood development in the Amapola dryland social-ecological system (DSES), a small isolated village in the semi-arid region of Mexico. After 450 years of local social-ecological evolution, external drivers (neoliberal policies, change in land reform legislation) have become the most dominant force in livelihood development, at the cost of loss of natural and cultural capital and an increasingly dysfunctional landscape. Local DSESs have become increasingly coupled to dynamic larger-scale drivers. Hence, cross-scale connectedness feeds back on and transforms local self-sustaining subsistence farming conditions, causing loss of livelihood resilience and diversification in a globally changing world. Effective efforts to combat desertification and improve livelihood security in DSESs need to consider their cyclical rhythms. Hence, we advocate novel dryland stewardship strategies, which foster adaptive capacity, and continuous evaluation and social learning at all levels. Finally, we call for an effective, flexible and viable policy framework that enhances local biotic and cultural diversity of drylands to transform global drylands into a resilient biome in the context of global environmental and social change.