Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA: Development, Politics, and Participation on the US-Mexico Border

5. Environmental Organizing and Citizenship on the Border

125 Chapter 5 Environmental Organizing and Citizenship on the Border The previous chapter traced the footprints of migrants as they made their ways from southern and central Mexico to the border city of Matamoros. This chapter examines efforts to craft an ecological footprint or “eco-region” consciousness that transcends borders and nation-states. The drive to think in terms of bio- or eco-regions, rather than in terms of regions defined primarily by nation-state boundaries, has been present in environmental history and ecological economics for some time. This impulse has also been implicit, and sometimes explicit, in NAFTA’s environmental accord and accompanying border-specific institutions. The accord and institutions were created to rehabilitate, enhance, and preserve the environment on both sides of the border. The environmental mechanisms of NAFTA—which include the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission, the North American Development Bank, Joint Public Advisory Council and its incumbent Citizens’ Committees— were all created with the aim and scope of addressing the environmental needs of border populations. By default or pragmatic considerations, eco-region became the operative principle of the accord and cross-border allegiances it was intended to encourage. This privileging of an eco-regional frame allowed for border communities to be imagined as sustainable building blocks upon which environmental rehabilitation, preservation, and participatory democracy could be built. However, the framing and conceptualization of the bor- 126   Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA derlands as a specific bio-region belied a fundamental paradox: namely, that the bio-region of the borderland was not untouched nature with naturally inhabiting and stewarding ecological communities but, rather, a “second space” (Brady 2002; Escobar 1996) built by and for capitalism and the nation-state itself. As a second space kind of place, it is inevitably cross cut by inequalities produced and reproduced by the dominant economic system and the border itself. The environmental side accord was founded on a paradox. It was intended to encourage a sense of environmental citizenship and allegiance to the transnational space and place of the border, yet to operationalize the accord is to participate in a nation-building exercise from below. While the border as place encompasses both US and Mexican regions, the legal borderlands of the accords (Dudziack and Volpp 2005) support the reproduction of the respective nation-states and their laws because of their legally pluralistic structure (Merry 1992). While twin and contradictory commitments are well-recognized features of the environmental citizenship model (Dobson 2003), it is especially pronounced in the environmental side agreement. The environmental side accord functions through participation, and participation was recognized in the founding document of sustainable development, Our Common Future (WCED 1987), as essential to both democracy and sustainability. In this report, the Bruntland Commission authors listed first, within their “requirements of a strategy for sustainable development” the following: “A political system that secures effective participation in decision-making” (WCED 1987, 65). Since the late 1980s, participation has been considered essential to successful sustainable development. It was offered as a corrective to top-down development practices that had existed for decades until then, and which were increasingly recognized to isolate target populations. As many participation specialists have noted (Cleaver 2001; Cooke and Kothari 2001; Desai 2002; McAslan 2002; Mosse 2001; Peters 2000; Rahnema 1992), the ideal of participation came into vogue with the recognition that development projects could only gain traction in local, nonwestern settings when native populations were given the opportunity to participate. Kothari provides a concise summary of the general goals of participatory development when he notes that they endeavor to “enable those individuals and groups previously excluded by more top-down planning processes, and who are often marginalized by their separation and isolation from the production of knowledge and the formulation of policies Environmental Organizing and Citizenship on the Border  127 and practices, to be included in decisions that affect their lives” (Kothari 2001, 139). Cooke and Kothari together claim the following: The ostensible aim of participatory approaches to development was to make ‘people’ central to development by encouraging beneficiary involvement in interventions that affect them and over which they previously had limited control or influence. [ . . . ] Participatory approaches to development, then, are justified in terms of sustainability, relevance and empowerment. (Cooke and Kothari 2001, 5) The purpose of the environmental side accord was to provide legitimate and state-sanctioned opportunities for...