Governing Our Binational Commons: Institutional Development at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Dr. Tony Payan from Rice University's Baker Insisitute for Public Policy and director of Center for the United States and Mexico will present "Governing Our Binational Commons: Institutional Development at the U.S.-Mexico Border." Crossborder Governance (CBG) as a doubly challenging endeavor, largely because it juxtaposes contiguous geographical spaces, split by hard sovereign lines, where there may be very different economic, political, social and cultural systems rubbing against each other, with issues straddling borderlines and demanding effective governance—from environmental and natural resource management to security to human mobility to trade and economic integration to infrastructure interconnectivity to public health supervision to territorial and urban-planning and so on. Consequently, building institutions that adroitly balance territorial contiguity fragmented by sovereign lines and straddling problems, which require good CBG is extremely challenging. But such efforts exist—as in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, our binational commons. The U.S.-Mexico border has certain characteristics, developed over its history, which have both demanded and even forced the construction of governance institutions to deal jointly with just such complex issues. But the historical result of institution building efforts moving at different speeds, over different territorial dimensions, and many issues has also resulted in a region of fragmented governance, never fully integrated and governed as a commons nor fully left to its own fortune. In this conversation, we deal with some of the history of some border issues, the institutional scaffolding built around them, and the increasingly inadequacy of such institutions to improve the lives of borderlanders

Wednesday, September 29
12:00-1:15pm