The La Paz Agreement 30 Years On

Abstract

On August 14, 1983, the United States and Mexico signed the landmark United States–Mexico Agreement on Cooperation for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment in the Border Area, better known as the La Paz Agreement, which remains the keystone agreement for bilateral cooperation on environmental protection in the border zone. This article reviews the agreement’s history and achievements, with particular emphasis on the post–North American Free Trade Agreement environmental cooperation programs and its influence on other joint agencies with environmental mandates in the border region. It then reviews more recent implementation developments and reflects on political conditions shaping La Paz implementation. It concludes noting that the La Paz Agreement affirms the importance of certain institutional design principles for successful international environmental institutions and arguing for strengthening binational commitment to the La Paz Agreement.

Keywords

La Paz Agreement U.S.–Mexico border environment sustainable development Border 2020 BECC NADB IBWC CEC

On August 14, 2013, the Agreement on Environmental Cooperation along the U.S.–Mexico border, better known as the La Paz Agreement (for the Baja California port city where it was signed), reached its 30th year (“Agreement Between the United States of America,” 1983). The La Paz Agreement is rightly seen as one of the most successful executive agreements in U.S.–Mexican relations and remains the most important agreement in the issue area of environmental protection, an agreement that spawned a number of subsidiary agreements and that today provides the diplomatic umbrella for various initiatives that are vital for environmental protection in the border area. Since its inception, the agreement has survived four U.S. administrations and four Mexican administrations entailing alterations in governing parties in both countries. It is now well into a fifth administration in the United States and in Mexico, attesting to its institutionalization and importance in contemporary binational affairs.

As one of the earliest international environmental framework agreements, the La Paz Agreement is important in own right in terms of its impact and application at the U.S.–Mexico border. It also serves as a valuable object lesson concerning the design elements of international environmental framework agreements that may be conducive to strengthening international cooperation for environmental protection in similar international contexts. This study describes the agreement and reviews its implementation, giving special attention to its impact on institutional development associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and more recent trends. It also reflects on the politics of La Paz. The study concludes by highlighting the design elements associated with the agreement’s success and arguing for renewed bilateral commitment to its implementation.

The La Paz Framework for Environmental Cooperation

The La Paz Agreement is a framework agreement. As such, it is really an executive agreement to agree, though it formally commits the two countries to an annual schedule of interministerial consultation and review of environmental concerns along the border. It does not commit the governments to any specific solution or investment in environmental protection in the border region, though it provides a mechanism for doing so should the governments decide. It structures the domain for agreement substantively and geographically. Substantively, the La Paz Agreement is functionally comprehensive, referring to the protection, improvement, and conservation of the environment in the border area. This language is sufficiently broad to extend to a full range of pollution problems and, arguably, to the protection of the ecology and the natural environment in the border region.¹ Geographically, the Agreement applies 100 km north and 100 km south of the international line but commits each nation to addressing pollution problems that affect the other country in its border area (Hajost, 1984, p. 9).

The La Paz Agreement situates itself within the broader multilateral commitments of the two governments—in particular, the United Nations’ 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment. The agreement specifies administrative and intragovernmental obligations related to consultation and information sharing for environmental protection along the border. It provides for the conclusion of subsidiary agreements in the form of annexes. It designates the heads of the two countries’ environmental agencies as national coordinators for the agreement and requires both an annual meeting and a formal report concerning the activities and programs in which the two countries are engaged. It requires monitoring and measurement of pollution that may affect the other country and the sharing of all gathered data from these endeavors. It specifies the forms of cooperation the two countries may engage in and details their obligations in implementing the agreement. Importantly, the La Paz document not only requires the federal governments to consult with their respective states on cooperative measures, but it also provides for the participation of states and municipalities, other international governmental organizations, and nongovernmental organization (NGOs) in its meetings and, if the parties agree, provides they may be invited to contribute their expertise to the federal governments in implementing the accord. This inclusive provision allows for a measure of public participation and policy decentralization in executing the agreement and was unprecedented in U.S.–Mexican diplomacy in 1983.

The La Paz Trajectory, Pre-NAFTA, Post-NAFTA, and Post-9/11

Since its adoption, the La Paz Agreement has served both as a diplomatic platform for the fashioning of further agreements and as a framework for the crafting of cooperative binational environmental programs for the border region. The Agreement’s service as a diplomatic instrument was most in evidence in the accord’s initial decade when it spawned five formal annexes to La Paz dealing, respectively, with the binational sanitation problem at San Diego and Tijuana, the binational transportation and management of hazardous and toxic substances, air quality in the Arizona–Sonora smelter triangle, and the regulation and management of air quality in the border region’s urban airsheds, particularly at El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

In the 1980s and during the run-up to NAFTA, the La Paz Agreement was roundly criticized by environmentalists who, despite the annual meetings and reports, new media-specific binational working groups, and five subsidiary agreements, saw the governments treating the agreement with low priority, failing to address numerous issues in the border area, and failing to invest in pollution abatement and needed remedial measures within the scope of the agreement (Mumme, 1992). Funding was a particular frustration. Under La Paz’s Article 14, each party was to bear the cost of its own participation in the agreement unless otherwise agreed. For practical purposes, this meant that any cooperative activities would be limited to what the national environmental agencies could afford, and those agencies were already underfunded. No special line item was dedicated to border environmental protection in either of the national environmental agencies’ budgets, making border environmental protection a residual of other programs at the agencies. An exception, as seen with Annex I, was the binational sanitation work of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which antedated the La Paz Agreement and followed an entirely separate funding stream through the foreign ministries. The IBWC’s sanitation authority, enshrined in the 1944 Water Treaty, was formally protected by the La Paz Agreement’s Article 12. This situation made development of new sanitation infrastructure contingent on the IBWC’s support, to the dismay of border environmentalists, who chaffed at the IBWC’s diplomatic insularity and plodding policy responses.

For this reason, environmentalists jumped at the chance to strengthen border environmental protection when the opportunity arose in 1990 in the form of North American trade negotiations. The border provided a powerful object lesson in the trade–environment relationship and an opportunity to hitch its environmental needs to the trinational trade initiative. Eventually, the NAFTA debate would yield four distinct, though related, environmental initiatives, including the establishment of parallel domestic border environment advisory bodies at the national level, the creation of a trinational environmental side agreement, the establishment of a new set of linked institutions for developing and funding environmental projects on the U.S.–Mexico border—the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) and the North American Development Bank (NADB), and an invigoration of the La Paz Agreement. In fact, strengthening of the La Paz Agreement was among the earliest initiatives of the governments as they strove to shore up public support for NAFTA. Beginning in 1991 with a hastily mounted review of the border’s environmental needs, the governments rolled out a series of short- to medium-term implementation agreements (Office of the United States Trade Representative, 1991). These joint programs incorporated the work of the new border environment agencies as part of their operational mission.

The first of these programs, the 1992–1994 Integrated Border Environmental Plan (IBEP), introduced in 1991, was little more than a reframing of existing binational measures, including the IBWC’s sanitation work and that of the La Paz Agreement’s environmental working groups established after 1983. Influenced by the United Nation’s pending Rio Summit on the Human Environment in 1992, IBEP claimed to be guided by the principle of sustainable development. This theme and the work group approach were subsequently incorporated in the Border XXI Program (1995–2000), which built on the new functions and financing of the BECC and the NADB in the area of water and sanitation and expanded the number of binational environmental workgroups to nine. BECC–NADB investment in water projects drove unprecedented intersectoral integration between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IBWC, best seen in the development and funding of an International Wastewater Treatment Plant at San Diego and Tijuana (IBWC, 1995). Systematic tracking of environmental indicators was initiated and greater effort expended on enforcing environmental regulations (EPA, 1998). In general, more federal funds were directed to border environmental projects. While national financing supported most of these, U.S. states were encouraged to commit to the projects, and some, like Texas, did. Other states and tribal governments were less responsive (Good Neighbor Environmental Board [GNEB], 1998, p. 13), claiming exclusion from La Paz program design and planning.

By 2000, the Border XXI Program logged a number of achievements. BECC–NADB projects grew potable water service in Mexican border cities from 88% to 93% coverage between 1995 and 2000 (EPA, 2000, p. 131). The percentage of Mexican citizens served by wastewater treatment jumped from 34% in 1995 to 75% in 2000 (EPA, 2000, p. 131). Air-quality assessment programs had been set in place in seven urban areas with abatement programs in El Paso–Ciudad Juarez and the Mexicali–Imperial Valley. Seven pairs of border sister cities had contingency plans for toxic substance emergencies by 2000, up from zero in 1995. A pilot program to track cross-border hazardous waste trade was put in place, and helpful diagnostic and interpretative tools developed to facilitate binational tracking and regulation of hazardous wastes. Numerous training workshops were conducted on cooperative environmental enforcement, environmental health, pollution prevention, and toxic and hazardous substances management. A serious effort to promote public environmental education complemented these various achievements. Three public information and outreach offices were established in the border region’s major urban areas. Addressing jurisdiction and stakeholder criticism, the EPA and Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries (SEMARNAP—later SEMARNAT) reached understandings with states and tribal governments concerning their participation in the La Paz programs.

The election of more conservative governments in both countries in 2000 ushered in retrenchment. A new 10-year border program, Border 2012, unveiled in September 2002, moved in a decentralized direction, with corresponding reductions in federal support (EPA, 2012a). The nine border-wide binational workgroups model was jettisoned in favor of a system of border-wide policy forums on air, water, and toxic pollution; a more limited number of border-wide work groups dealing with environmental health, emergency response, and cooperative enforcement; four regional workgroups; and local, issue-specific task forces strategically focused on five overarching goals: reducing water contamination, reducing air pollution, reducing land contamination, reducing exposure to pesticides, and improving chemical safety (EPA, 2002, p. 21). U.S. administrative tensions between the EPA and the Interior Department led to dropping natural resource concerns from the border program.

In principle, the decentralizing thrust of the new border program had its virtues and might have been effective in building the partnerships and mobilizing public support behind border area environmental cooperation (Hecht, Whelan, & Sowell, 2002). But given the relative poverty and resource limitations of the border area, federal support was still needed on both sides of the border. Instead, EPA and SEMARNAT financing declined, best exemplified in a 90% drop in Border Environmental Infrastructure Fund (BEIF) grant funding at NADB by 2007 and also felt directly in cutbacks to task force support (GNEB, 2008). A highly critical midterm review of Border 2012 by EPA auditors in 2007 that prompted a revision of the program’s aims, strategies, and procedures in 2008 may have further diminished U.S. program support (EPA, 2008). Restrictive national security policies in the United States and a rise in narco-violence later in the decade further stressed cross-border cooperation, stalling progress and adversely affecting nongovernmental citizen participation (Siwik, Hebard, & Jacquez, 2012).

At its close in 2012, Border 2012 could still claim a number of achievements (Table 1). Water-related projects under the Border Water Infrastructure Program (BWIP) and backed by BECC–NADB again topped the list of accomplishments, with 92 certified water projects by 2012 and investment of USD 1.7 billion in water projects. Between 2006 and 2010, 44 water projects were completed, and 35 of these provided first-time service to border residents, extending service to 53% of the 98,575 homes found lacking in services in 2003 (EPA, 2011, pp. 23–25). Overall, the number of environmental infrastructure projects reached 167 with USD 3.6 billion invested (EPA, 2011, pp. 23–25). For air quality, some gains had been made in extending air-quality monitoring; however, of five established monitoring areas along the border, only at El Paso and Ciudad Juarez was air quality monitored binationally (EPA, 2011, p. 54). The lack of comparable cross-border data continued to plague consistent air quality assessment along the border. A new border program for retrofitting diesel-powered trucks and buses with emissions controls was adopted with Border 2012 support (EPA, 2011, p. 58), and a program of identifying greenhouse gas emitters begun. A solid waste program introduced in 2004 aimed at reducing the many discarded tire dumps in Mexico had eliminated 6.9 million tires by 2009, with a 300% increase in annual tire recovery by 2012 (EPA, 2011, p. 71). By 2008, the two countries had also cleaned up one of the most notorious hazardous waste sites along the border, the Metales y Derivados lead smelter site in Tijuana (Environmental Health Coalition, 2011).

Table 1.

Border 2012 Achievements.

Goal	Border-wide successes 2003–2005	Border-wide successes 2010–2012
Reduce water contamination	11 BEIF-funded water infrastructure projects benefit 1.6 million people 22 projects funded to educate, assess water quality, protect shared waterways, and analyze alternative wastewater projects 39 Tribal Border Infrastructure Program projects for potable water and wastewater collection for 32,000 people	54,000 homes connected to water systems 500,000 homes connected to wastewater collection and treatment services
Reduce air contamination	Project funding for paving roads, reducing diesel, and brick kiln emissions Emissions inventory completed for the six northern border states in Mexico Ultralow sulfur diesel provided in the Mexican communities along the border	Greenhouse gas emission inventories were completed for each Mexican border state
Reduce land contamination	$2.1 million invested on 23 projects 35% of the projects focus on improving scrap tire management 30% focus on hazardous waste management 22% for developing strategies, waste reduction, and recycling programs 13% spent on the cleanup of contaminated sites	12 million scrap tires cleaned up from clandestine dumps 73 metric tons of pesticides and agrochemicals collected from rural sites 673,300 tons of solid waste removed from illegal dump sites, watersheds, estuaries, and public drain systems 570 tons of e-waste disposed/recycled
Improve environmental health	Project funding focus on pesticide use, including children’s exposure and farm worker training Teacher training in environmental hazards, including lead exposure Environmental threats response training
Enhance joint readiness for environmental response	$300,000 invested in 12 emergency response and preparedness projects 72% of funding for building capacity 28% for planning, coordination, and preparedness $880,000 invested in contract support for sister city emergency response plans	Collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) to improve readiness of emergency responders to an environmental disaster. Fifteen sister city emergency contingency plans were developed
Improve environmental performance, compliance, and stewardship	$300,000 invested in six projects to provide technical assistance, ensure compliance of industries, pollution prevention programs, target enforcement activities, and Environmental Management Systems (EMS) training 70% of the funding was used on pollution prevention and EMS training

Note. BEIF = Border Environmental Infrastructure Fund. Source: EPA (2007, 2012a).

In sum, the La Paz Agreement border programs raised the profile of border area environmental problems after NAFTA entered into effect. Even subtracting the BECC–NADB water and sanitation project work under BWIP, the Border XXI and Border 2012 programs have proved important in addressing critical border environmental issues and sustaining binational dialog on environmental protection in the border region. Yet, it is also clear that national support for these programs, including the water and sanitation programs, has waned significantly since the mid-1990s, a fact not lost on the GNEB, the U.S. presidential advisory committee on border environmental affairs (GNEB, 2004, p. 31; 2006, p. 49; 2007, p. 46; 2008, p. 54).

Multigovernance Under La Paz: The BECC, the NADB, the Border Health Commission, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and the IBWC

From its inception, the La Paz Agreement was meant to enfold, legitimize, and strengthen the binational engagement of government agencies at various levels in environmental protection along the U.S.–Mexican border. Though led by the environmental agencies of the two governments, the assumption at the beginning was that the agreement would to some degree apply intersectorally at the national level, engaging agencies outside the EPA and Secretaria de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecologia (SEDUE) with jurisdiction and competencies over water and natural resources as the governments deemed necessary for environmental management. As seen earlier, the agreement explicitly recognized that the IBWC had treaty authority over transboundary sanitation issues and acknowledged the Commission’s leading role in managing this particular policy sphere (Article 12). An earlier memorandum of understanding in 1978 also recognized the importance of the Border Health Association, an affiliate of the Pan American Health Organization in monitoring and addressing the human health effects of deleterious environmental conditions. There is little doubt that the agreement was meant to mobilize other agencies in border area environmental protection as need be.

But intersectoral integration proved difficult to achieve in the 1980s, complicated by differential jurisdictions and fiscal limitations. At the IBWC, for example, which had drawn upon the La Paz Agreement in Annex I to deal with the sanitation problem at San Diego and Tijuana, the sanitation and water quality focus remained narrowly centered on boundary-specific problems, restricting its potential participation in water quality initiatives. To take another example, the Secretaria de Recursos Hidraulicos (SRH), which administered Mexico’s water resources until 1989 reforms, and the Comision Nacional de Agua (CNA), which succeeded it, had little engagement with SEDUE throughout the 1980s. The limited fiscal capacity of the environmental offices and their dislinkage from these other agencies prevented them from addressing pressing water infrastructure problems outside the established agendas and jurisdictions of these other bodies. This drew the ire of border environmentalists and helped justify the creation of new NAFTA-based environmental infrastructure agencies.

Yet in a roundabout fashion, the La Paz Agreement may be partially credited with the creation of the new agencies, as it provided legitimation and focus for arguments for new institutions advanced after 1990. In the debate leading to NAFTA, the La Paz Agreement was frequently mentioned as a commitment in need of strengthening. It was also criticized as one that let the governments off the hook when it came to financing needed environmental infrastructure along the border. The La Paz Agreement enabled the governments to show their commitment to environmental improvement by repackaging existing efforts within its framework and also provided, in effect, a legitimizing tool used by advocacy groups to demand additional investment. As a diplomatic framework, it has been instrumental in facilitating the emergence of what can be described as a new multilevel set of governance institutions for environmental protection along the border. These include the BECC, the NADB, the Border Health Commission (BHC), and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), as well as national advisory bodies to the border programs and older entities like the IBWC.

The BECC and the NADB

The most consequential of the NAFTA-generated institutions cooperating for environmental protection along the border are the BECC and its financial partner, NADB. These two agencies have exerted the greatest impact on the border environment precisely because they came with funding and government support.

Though established as separate but linked agencies, both the BECC and the NADB are intended to serve the goals and objectives of the La Paz Agreement, a point that is made in the preamble of the 1993 BECC–NADB protocol (McKinney, 2000, p. 179). From the outset, the two agencies focused on water and sanitation infrastructure. When the Border XXI Program was inaugurated in 1996, it recognized the BECC's and the NADB’s importance to water and wastewater infrastructure development in the border area (EPA, 1996, p. III-17). In 1997, when it became clear that NADB would have diminished impact under the restrictive terms of its charter, the U.S. EPA stepped in with a new BWIP, to direct financing to project development (via the BECC) and construction (via the NADB). The BWIP began with a dedicated fund, originally USD 100 million, to be administered by the bank as grants. The two funds, the BEIF and the Project Development Assistance Program (PDAP), enabled the NADB to sidestep some of its lending constraints.

Of the two agencies, the BECC was meant to directly address the environmental infrastructure deficit identified in the NAFTA debates. Designed as a distinctly binational agency based in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the BECC was to technically assist, receive, assess, and authorize desirable environmental projects for the border area, employing sustainable development criteria in project approval (Spalding, 2000, pp. 124–125). It was meant to be representative of border constituencies, open to public participation at both the operational and project levels and transparent in its decision-making procedures (Spalding, 1999, p. 68).

Since its inception, the BECC has certified more than 200 projects along the border, a slight majority of these situated in Mexico. The BECC’s 2012 annual report notes that 171 of these projects have received NADB financing of which 110 projects had completed construction and financing (BECC, 2012, p. 6). The majority of these projects addressed sanitation or potable water needs along the border, but a wide range of other needs such as paving roads, sanitation, water conservation, wetlands development, and renewable energy were also addressed (BECC, 2011, p. 6). The USD 4 billion invested in the border area has supported significant improvements in border environmental infrastructure, though it falls well short of estimated needs.

Since 1994, the BECC’s authority, jurisdiction, and procedures have been substantially altered, with some controversy. The governments broadened the BECC's and the NADB’s functions and jurisdiction in 2001, allowing the agencies to support environmental projects beyond water provision and wastewater treatment and extending their reach to 300 km south of the international boundary (“Protocol of Amendment,” 2002). Over environmentalists’ objections, the two countries in 2004 revised the BECC/NADB agreement, merging the boards, eliminating the BECC’s international advisory council, and placing the two agencies more directly under the oversight of the financial ministries. This sharply restricted NGO participation in BECC’s policy making and NGOs' opportunity to shape its agenda. While functional–jurisdictional elaboration was generally well received by environmentalists, the administrative changes were criticized (Ganster, 2005, p. 49).

The BECC’s sister agency, the NADB, was controversial from the start. It was designed to operate at some remove from the border public and burdened with government-imposed fiscal limitations (Varady, Colnic, Merideth, & Sprouse, 1996). Its mandate was to lend strictly at market rates and not encroach on commercial lending. In its early years, much of its lending capacity went unutilized, reflecting the border region’s poverty (NADB, 2011, p. 20). The EPA came to its rescue in 1998 with the BWIP, strengthening the NADB’s lending in support of BECC-certified projects (GNEB, 2012, pp. 8, 9). When the BECC/NADB charter was revised in 2004, a key change enabled the NADB to offer dedicated grants from its own funds as well as from the EPA’s funds.

The 2004 board merger placed the NADB front and center in environmental infrastructure financing, reversing the roles originally designed for the linked institutions. Spalding (2000), a negotiator of the 1993 agreement, says that “BECC was made separate to avoid being driven by financial considerations only” (p. 125). Finance now dominates the BECC’s certification decisions. Still, the NADB’s border development impact is undeniable. Jurisdictional expansion enables the NADB to support a wider range of projects, including water conservation (IBWC, 2002; NADB, 2007, p. 5). It now extends funds across all environmental sectors to include small grants up to USD 500,000. Such subsidies are critical to project development in poor communities on either side of the boundary.

NADB financing is now the core of the NAFTA-based environmental initiatives along the border and partly offsets shrinkage in the EPA’s contributions to environmental infrastructure development. Yet, the NADB is not immune to the weakening of government commitment that has been evident at the EPA over the past decade.

Border Health Commission

When the IBEP was introduced in 1991, environmental health protection was incorporated as a working area with the EPA-led La Paz initiative. Riding the NAFTA wave of attention to border environmental affairs, health advocacy groups were also able to successfully press forward with a parallel initiative for the creation of a new border health commission. Though not formally linked to NAFTA, there is no doubt the BHC initiative was fed by public interest in NAFTA and benefitted indirectly from the heightened environmental cooperation that issued from it (Collins-Dogrul, 2013). In 1994, the BHC’s U.S. Section was authorized by Congress (PL103-400). Mexico subsequently joined in 2000.

The BHC comprises 26 members, including the heads of the health ministries of the two countries, the health department heads of the 10 border states, and well-respected health professionals from the border communities of both nations. Based in Washington, D.C., the BHC works with the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization and functions to mobilize health professionals and prioritize health problems in the border area. Though its role in managing water resources is slight, the BHC has an interest in all waterborne diseases and problems related to sanitation and sewage that brings it into contact with other national and binational water agencies along the border. Its 2003 work agenda, Healthy Border 2010, targets environmental health among its priorities and acknowledges the importance of the La Paz Agreement in directing attention to this issue area (BHC, 2003, p. 27). While direct collaboration between the health and environmental agencies is limited, this is an area where greater intersectoral collaboration is possible, particularly on environmental education, and some collaboration is occurring.² The La Paz Agreement’s impact on border environmental health is further evidence of its value in legitimizing, supporting, and facilitating binational cooperation in other environment-related sectors of binational affairs.

Commission for Environmental Cooperation

Another of the NAFTA side agreements, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), should also be mentioned when considering La Paz Agreement impacts (NAAEC, 1993). The NAAEC is structured as a North American regional accord, yet at least some of its rationale derived from the general debate on conditions along the border. There was legitimate expectation that the new secretariat, the CEC, would play a modest supporting role for other border institutions and programs (see the Border XXI Framework Document). From the beginning, however, the CEC had small interest in strictly binational environmental affairs.

Two areas within the CEC’s mandate have special relevance for the border area. The first is associated with its investigative authority and includes NAAEC Articles 13 and 14. Article 13 endows the secretariat with power to undertake studies that spotlight regionally important, environmental issues. Article 14 allows citizens to bring forward cases of government noncompliance of environmental law. The second relates to its work program.

Acting on its Articles 13 and 14 authority, the CEC has initiated a number of investigations in the border region that spotlight important environmental concerns. CEC’s Secretariat has undertaken eight special studies since 1994, two of which specifically addressed border concerns. The first, in 1998, looked at environmental stressors in the San Pedro River watershed in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands (CEC, 1999; Varady, Moote, & Merideth, 2000). This study catalyzed ongoing cross-border watershed protection endeavors. A second investigation, in 2012, centered on trade and recycling of spent lead-acid batteries in North America. Inspired by the notorious case of Metales y Derivados in Tijuana, its purpose was to strengthen the regulations and practices associated with lead-acid battery reprocessing in Mexican border cities (CEC, 2012). Though both of these investigations addressed serious environmental challenges, the small number of border area studies to date limits the CEC’s impact. The same can be seen with a review of the Article 14 cases.

Between 1994 and December 2012, there have been 81 Article 14 citizen-initiated investigations of governmental noncompliance of environmental laws (CEC, 2013a). The Commission’s procedure is rigorous. Citizen applicants must first work through all domestic legal and administrative remedies before approaching the CEC and must provide proof of this process. If all of the paperwork is in order and the application is accepted, the CEC Council votes on whether to open a factual record (CEC, 2008). Two of the three member nations must agree to authorize a factual investigation. When completed, majority approval is also required for public release of the final report. This process is daunting for most citizen groups, but it has been used by some with favorable results.

Since CEC was founded, there have been 10 citizen applications from the United States and 40 from Mexico. Of these submissions, about a quarter originated from border states—3 from the United States and 10 from Mexico. Only one U.S. submission and three Mexican submissions were generated from the immediate border area. There have been two factual records produced from these four cases. The first, in 2000, was directed at Metales y Derivados. The second case, in 2002, focused on the illegal discharge of wastewater into Sonora’s Rio Magdalena (CEC, 2001, 2003). In the Metales y Derivados investigation, the results led to the company’s closure and eventual cleanup of the site. For the Rio Magdalena, the factual record revealed a systematic failure to enforce water quality norms. It is generally agreed that these investigations are helpful (Dimento & Doughman, 1998, p. 695; Markell, 2003, p. 274; 2005, pp. 790–791). Yet, the limited number from the U.S.–Mexico border region, known to suffer a considerable number of environmental threats, suggests modest overall impact.

With respect to its regular work program, the CEC’s charter specifically incorporates transborder activities in its portfolio. In 1998, though, to avoid duplication of efforts with other national and binational conservation and environment programs, the Secretariat abandoned this work. In 2002, it also dropped the North American Fund for Environmental Cooperation (NAFEC), a modest seed grant program benefitting environmental NGOs along the border.

Despite these setbacks, a number of the CEC’s programs favor the border region. Much of their work on conservation and toxic substances has a border focus. One that has a direct impact on the border is the Big Bend-Rio Bravo Collaboration for Landscape Conservation/North American Invasive Species Network (CEC, 2013b). Through the Species of Common Concern initiative, endangered and threatened border species vitally important to North American ecosystems are spotlighted (Mumme, Lybecker, Gaona, & Monterola, 2009). Overall, the CEC works with other domestic agencies in the member states to highlight environmental concerns. It has also facilitated the dissemination of environmental information and data, providing the legitimatization of concerns and supporting public participation throughout North America (Mumme & Lybecker, 2011). In these respects, it is fair to place the CEC’s border work within the binational (and trinational) arc of cooperative effort supported by the La Paz Agreement.

International Boundary and Water Commission

The La Paz Agreement may also be partially credited with stimulating certain reforms at the IBWC, the first binational agency with a role in transboundary environmental protection through its treaty-based sewage and sanitation mandate. The La Paz Agreement emerges in part driven by dissatisfaction with the IBWC’s limits in the environmental domain, even after the IBWC’s responsibility for water quality was broadened by Minute 261 in 1979. The very first of the La Paz Annexes is directed at an IBWC-led project to improve sanitation at San Diego and Tijuana. The La Paz Agreement and each of the aforementioned agreements struck from 1983 forward acknowledge the leading role of the IBWC in the field of transboundary sanitation and water quality.

In the 1990s, administrative changes at the IBWC’s national sections roughly coincided with the strengthening of the La Paz process and the establishment of the new NAFTA-based or -influenced institutions with functions for border area environmental protection. In 1995, the IBWC’s U.S. Section reached an interagency agreement with the EPA for cooperation on financing of border water infrastructure that represented an important step forward in intersectoral cooperation within the orbit of the La Paz Agreement (IBWC, 1995). The BECC–NADB Agreement was particularly influential on the IBWC, as the IBWC’s commissioners for a time were drawn in to the BECC administration as ex officio members of its governing board. Although not obligated by treaty, the IBWC’s sections independently of each other began to make changes in operating procedures, increasing outreach to stakeholders and incorporating the language and goals of the La Paz process in their reports and presentations. By 2000, the U.S. Section had drawn up a strategic plan that favored sustainable development of the water resources in its jurisdiction and begun to establish new citizen forums in various watersheds for consultation and advisory purposes (IBWC, 2000). The elaboration of the IBWC’s work in environmental matters as well as its public affairs programs continued apace even after changes to the BECC–NADB mandate eliminated the IBWC’s ex officio involvement in the BECC’s work.

The Politics of La Paz

The La Paz Agreement can be credited with supporting the development of a rich complex of institutions that in their various ways complement each other and strengthen binational cooperation for environmental protection along the border. This process of institutional thickening and strengthening of public effort for environmental improvement in the border region is vital for the health and well-being of more than 12 million residents and many more beyond. This is a considerable achievement by the two countries. If measured by financial investment, however, it is clear that the attention to the border environment plateaued about a decade ago and has been in a gradual but steady decline. This decline is masked by the decentralizing focus of recent border environmental programs, including the most recent one unveiled in August 2012, the Border 2020 Program (EPA, 2012b). This diminished federal support is largely political in nature and cannot be adequately explained by the various post-1983 policy attainments because the need for substantial environmental infrastructure investment in the context of the border’s dynamic development remains.

Understanding the politics of La Paz is important for understanding the challenge the border faces in addressing the recent decline in border funding. Unfortunately, this is an understudied aspect of the La Paz process. To gain perspective, however, we can draw on several influential policy arguments for insights on how La Paz policy trends might be explained.

When we consider the political influences on the development of the La Paz Agreement, one plausible argument for the decade-long slide in La Paz-related funding is simply the waning of public awareness of border environmental problems. Economist Anthony Downs (1972) famously argued years ago that environmental policy was susceptible to what he called an “issue-attention cycle,” where public concern rose sharply in response to a trigger or catalyst and then rapidly declined once the problem abated or stabilized. This argument seems broadly applicable to the agreement’s trajectory in the aftermath of the NAFTA accords.

Yet another explanation draws on the insights of political theorist Theodore Lowi, who in the 1960s argued that certain types of issues triggered particular patterns of political responses. Lowi’s (1972) argument has been much criticized by political scientists over the years but is still partially helpful for understanding some of the variation we see in U.S. support for the La Paz process. Lowi distinguishes between different policy domains, distributive policy, regulatory policy, and redistributive policy, arguing that these policy types vary politically according to the scope of policy application and the immediacy or likelihood of coercive impact on citizens. A distributive policy, defined as policy that has a narrow scope of application and less coercive impact on citizens, will produce the pork barrel politics associated with inside deal making, compromise, and earmark politics in legislatures that is of limited interest to all but the intended beneficiaries. Distributive policies tend to be uncontroversial because they mobilize many fewer voters than other policy types. Regulatory policies are usually those that have a limited scope of application but have more coercive impact on the citizens they affect. Thus, they are more politically controversial. Redistributive policies have a broad scope of application and substantial coercive effects that are most likely to roil the political arena and mobilize large numbers of citizens at the national level in support or opposition to such policy.

If we look at the La Paz process and the policies it has spawned, those policies tend to fall into two of Lowi’s (1972) policy types, distributive policies and regulatory policies. The border water infrastructure policies directing mostly federal funds at environmental projects fits the mold of a classic distributive policy that would generate support from the specific localities that would benefit from such investment and would not otherwise provoke much controversy. The other policies associated with the La Paz process are largely regulatory in nature and might well be expected to generate more controversy along the border.

While these broad generalizations certainly do some violence to the particular projects and programs along the border, they also contain some truth. The border water infrastructure projects, distributive in nature, have been better supported over time than other, more regulatory, policy areas. Funding has declined, yes, but this is still the policy area within the La Paz process that is the most heavily funded and one where strong local support for proposed projects is evident. It suffers some from the fact that the border is politically divided into four states, multiple tribal governments, two EPA administrative regions, and five La Paz–specific regions, as well as 14 different pairs of sister cities and a number of other smaller communities. In this governmentally fragmented environment, it is hard to mobilize a common border-wide interest in the La Paz process but still possible to muster political support at the project level.

Regulatory policies in La Paz span a gamut ranging across the environmental media to include regulating air quality, water quality, toxic and solid wastes, environmental health, environmental enforcement, and so forth. These policies largely conform to national regulatory policies in these areas supplemented by specific binational arrangements to coordinate or cooperate in providing or strengthening policy efforts along the border. Not surprisingly, it is hard to build support for these policies beyond what is already in place at the national and state level. Much of the effort involves either local-level task forces working with very limited funds to better apply existing standards or state and federal governments participating in training and education efforts to strengthen local regulatory capacity along the border.

A further theoretical argument that may be applicable draws on the political psychology of materialism and postmaterialism as it affects policy choices in democratic governments. The argument here is that environmental policy represents postmaterialist policy preferences predicated on a fundamental sense of fulfillment of basic needs and physical security associated with advanced industrial societies (Inglehart, 1990, p. 66). Environmental policy from this perspective is most supported in the absence of other primary threats to citizen well-being. A basic assumption in this argument is that where such primary threats intrude, civic support for environmental improvement may diminish. This argument, while very general in nature, suggests an explanation for declining U.S. attention to border region environmental concerns at a time of greatly amplified security concerns along the border after the 9/11 events.

These several explanations, while plausible, are overly general as given and would need to be examined in greater detail as they apply to the trajectory of the La Paz process and its various policy elements. However, they do suggest the vulnerability of the La Paz process to enduring governmental challenges and changing political conditions. While the La Paz process has become well institutionalized over time, its revitalization and strengthening cannot be taken for granted. The border region is still struggling to find a means of mobilizing national support for regional initiatives, and the La Paz process and its progress well illustrates this dilemma. NAFTA-like events that galvanize national attention to the border’s problems are few and far between and their institutional achievements can be quickly impaired, as the U.S. security response after 9/11 so aptly reveals.

The La Paz Agreement’s impact on environmental politics in the border region is another interesting issue. The Agreement does not expressly identify enhanced public participation in border environmental affairs as a binational objective. Yet, there is little doubt that its advocates believed it would create new opportunities for public participation and promote civic engagement along the border. By 1992, when the NAFTA debate was underway, enhanced public participation had clearly become a goal associated with the La Paz Agreement.

Public participation was incorporated as an objective of the La Paz programs beginning with the IBEP in 1992 (EPA, 1992, p. V-48; Gregory, 1992, p. 172). It was also a goal of the BECC and the NADB and, in a more broad gauged fashion, incorporated as a core objective of the CEC.

As Sabet (2008) documents with specific reference to border water policy, the NAFTA reforms also created new political opportunities for civil society organizations to pursue environmental improvements in the border region. At least a dozen new cross-border environmental advocacy partnerships and coalitions were established during and after the NAFTA reforms with interest in the border water sector (Sabet, 2008, p. 140). New advocacy groups were created and old ones were energized. Under the umbrella of the La Paz process, national advisory bodies were created in both countries, and Border XXI working groups collaborated with NGOs. Environmental information centers were established, as noted previously. Border 2012’s decentralized task forces provided further opportunities for public participation, joining governments and citizen-based groups in environmental problem solving. The BECC’s original board and advisory structure represented civil society and NGOs as well as governmental stakeholders (“Agreement Concerning,” 1993; Siwik et al., 2012). Its project certification process required citizen advisory boards as part of its commitment to sustainable development. At CEC, the Article 14 citizen submission process, project advisory boards, and an advocacy group grant program, the NAFEC, all promoted public engagement in work related to the border environment. By 1999, even the IBWC had begun to open doors, establishing new citizen committees and embracing the concept of sustainable development as part of its mandate (IBWC-US, 2000).

Taken as a set, these various reforms helped legitimize, institutionalize, and broaden public participation in border area environmental affairs and in this sense may be considered net gains for environmental activism (Velasquez & Alberto, 2007, p. 189). Compared with the state of affairs in 1990, the border today has more participatory opportunities.

Unfortunately, since 2000, some of these gains have been lost (Mumme, 2009). For example, there has been a marked reduction in funding of the Border 2012 task forces. This limits binational participation as was found in the Chihuahua–New Mexico border by Siwik et al. (2012, p. 122). U.S. border security operations impede interaction on both sides of the border, burdening cross-border commuters with increased costs in time and money and intimidation by security officials (de la Parra & Cordova, 2007). The 2004 elimination of the BECC and NADB Binational Advisory Board has reduced the opportunity for civil society and interested groups to be involved in these paired organizations’ policy making. As well documented by Rios and Jozwiak (2008, pp. 76–78) for the Texas–Mexico border region, the management of specific project citizen advisory boards has limited the participation of outside environmental advocacy groups in the project certification and development process. At the same time, a reduction in support from philanthropic organizations has also hindered environmental advocacy in the border region. From 1997 to 2002, for example, the Ford Foundation funded the annual Binational Environmental Forum (Encuentro Binacional Ambiental) that drew environmentalists from throughout the border region for workshops and networking. The Encuentro, now abandoned, was an important force in coalition building in the region (Liverman, Varady, Chavez, & Sanchez, 1999, p. 629). The Ford Foundation’s retreat from the border was mirrored by other foundations, Hewlett, Charles Stewart Mott, Packard, and Pew, who, for various reasons, shrank their support for border environmental programs.

In sum, the La Paz Agreement and its complex of supporting institutions and programs have strengthened public participation and citizen advocacy along the border. But opportunities for public participation have contracted in the past decade. The venues for public participation in border area environmental policy tend to be dominated by government agencies in a pattern that may be characterized as government-led participation that is often less independent and autonomous and may not adequately represent or capture the interests of various border constituencies. It can be argued then that the La Paz programs, while beneficial, have not yet satisfied the need for a stronger public voice in border environment decision making.

The Lessons and Future of La Paz

After 30 years and with the wisdom of hindsight, it is evident that the La Paz Agreement was visionary. It has served the two countries well in the spirit of what legal scholars have called “preventive diplomacy.” At a time of unprecedented industrialization and growth along the U.S.–Mexico border, the La Paz Agreement has nurtured cooperative environmental practices that diminish the likelihood of bilateral friction in this issue area and generate goodwill that arguably spills over to other issues on the bilateral agenda. The institutionalization of the agreement affords the promise of cooperatively managing binational environmental and natural resource disputes well into the foreseeable future.

The institutionalization of cooperation is, of course, what international environmental agreements are much about, and this is where the U.S.–Mexico La Paz experience offers some useful lessons at a time when bilateral and multilateral environmental agreements are proliferating, particularly for those situations involving territorially contiguous nation-states expressing substantial socioeconomic and political differences and interdependence. Perhaps the most elementary lesson, and the most familiar to scholars, is that process matters. Formalizing and routinizing a general procedure for identifying and discussing environmental issues of concern to one or more of the parties are vital for problem identification and initial engagement of mutual concerns. It is also a legitimation mechanism, providing standing for the parties as such and allowing issues that might otherwise be defined as strictly national concerns to be construed and represented by at least one party as matters warranting binational concern. In essence, the La Paz Agreement allowed a range of issues that had largely been defined as domestic problems (sewage, sanitation, air quality, public health, and conservation) to be internationalized and treated as matters of common environmental concern.

The La Paz experience demonstrates the importance of broad scope agreements, particularly in the absence of other, more focused accords, when combined with limited geographic jurisdiction. La Paz is one of the earliest international framework agreements for environmental protection, adopted at a time when the United States and Mexico had just two other binational agreements that addressed shared resource issues, one addressing water resources and the other dealing with migratory birds and wildlife. La Paz was sufficiently broad to enfold these natural resource commitments while opening the agenda to such concerns as stakeholders chose to place on the table. It strengthened stakeholdership by restricting the agreement’s geographic jurisdiction, even where, as in the case of air pollution, adverse effects were not confined to the administratively defined border region. But it avoided the practice, best seen in U.S.–Mexican boundary and water agreements, of categorically linking jurisdiction to the boundary itself, thus allowing domestic problems to be considered in an international context. This functional breadth fitted to a delimited geographic jurisdiction would later prove politically valuable as a focusing element when international trade negotiations afforded the opportunity to link environmental concerns to economic development at a North American scale.

The Agreement also recognized the importance of intersectoral articulation, what Oran Young, King, and Schroeder (2008) have called “institutional interplay” (p. xvi), in advancing binational environmental cooperation. The parties were to coordinate their efforts and ensure that the national coordinators were apprised of the activities of cooperating agencies and the implementation of other agreements as these were related to La Paz. The IBWC’s functions were acknowledged and protected, effectively giving the IBWC the leading role in water quality administration on international streams and rivers but having the effect of linking the IBWC to La Paz. While not directly obligating or encroaching on the authority of other agencies, such language provided for engaging these entities as necessary in implementing the agreement.

Of considerable importance, the agreement affirmed the necessity of cooperatively monitoring and assessing environmental impacts and required the parties to share any technical data gathered in the context of implementing the agreement. The parties were obligated to assess any projects that would have “a significant impact on the environment of the border area . . .” (Article 7). Such imperatives positioned La Paz as an active agreement, enabling stakeholders to better hold the governments publically accountable for reliable information on environmental conditions in the border region.

The La Paz Agreement is also a lesson in the importance of building into framework agreements a role for subnational governments and citizen-based organizations. It was the first bilateral agreement between these two countries to allow for the involvement—by invitation of the national coordinators—of subnational governments and advocacy groups as expert advisors in deliberations among the two countries and to allow for arrangements for public participation in implementing the agreement. Though more common in today’s environmental agreements, this was new terrain at the time for both Mexico and the United States. While the new norms of public participation were established in domestic law and internationally endorsed at Stockholm in 1972, they had yet not penetrated the foreign ministries or gained acceptance in bilateral diplomacy. The La Paz Agreement provided an avenue for the emergence of these norms. NGOs’ presence at annual meetings and their new role as invited technical consultants to the agreement legitimized environmentalists’ voice in bilateral diplomacy, including water management, a standing they had not previously enjoyed. Beginning with the NAFTA negotiations, procedures for public participation would formally be built into the La Paz program as provided for in the Agreement and incorporated in the new NAFTA-based environmental agencies. Eventually, these norms would even push the IBWC to be more consultative and responsive to environmental concerns.

Finally, the La Paz Agreement was designed for resilience. Its annex procedure enables the governments to fashion substantive solutions to border area environmental problems as diplomatic circumstances, including politics and resources, allow. The annex procedure is sufficiently elastic as to accommodate any future procedural changes the governments should deem necessary in implementing the accord.

These basic design principles enabled the La Paz Agreement to serve as an institutional platform that facilitated the emergence of new institutions and the strengthening of existing ones, including the agreement itself. The ability to incubate new commitments and strengthen old ones is certainly one of the critical tests of any international framework agreement, and by this measure, the La Paz Agreement is certainly a success.

Ironically, this very success raises public expectations of the agreement and draws attention to the governments’ retreat in recent years in its implementation. The Agreement was always conditional on the willingness of the governments to support its aims and purposes, as set out in Article 18’s instruction that “Activities under this Agreement shall be subject to the availability of funds and other resources to each Party and to the applicable laws and regulations of each country”—the “availability of funds,” of course, contingent on government priorities.

As the GNEB has indicated in its annual reports, strengthening environmental protection at the border requires a number of things from the governments. These include a renewed commitment to financing, a commitment to more intersectoral cooperation among government agencies, better program evaluation, and attention to public involvement. These concerns are partly evident in the design of the new Border 2020 Program unveiled in August 2012, which emphasizes better communication and engagement with the public, program partners, and stakeholders, and interagency cooperation and resources leveraging (EPA, 2012b, pp. 33–36). The new program, however, risks committing the cardinal sin of decentralization by placing the burden of supporting binational cooperation on the backs of local communities that may lack the capacity to support these activities. Given the enduring asymmetries of economic development in the border area, some of the particular initiatives and collaborative partnerships that Border 2020 envisions cannot be sustained without federal support.

Greater attention to the mechanisms and opportunities for public participation in Border 2020 task forces and policy would also strengthen the agreement. Public participation would also be strengthened by building out citizen advisory committees at the BECC and the IBWC and reincorporating advocacy group representation in the BECC–NADB Board’s deliberations.

It is also instructive that no new La Paz-based annexes have been struck since 1991. This is not for want of binational problems that would benefit from greater commitment by the governments. A long list of problems ranging from management of the Tijuana River and its ecosystem, the preservation of wetlands along the international boundary, the management of air quality in rapidly growing sister city communities along the border, the prevention of transboundary groundwater basin contamination, mitigations arising from border security, transboundary environmental impact assessment, and other problems, some to be addressed within the IBWC’s mandate and capabilities, should have the attention of the governments. The fact that more agreements have not been reached over the past 20 years may be attributed in part to the diminished interest of the two governments.

Finally, after 30 years in motion, the two countries have still been unable to develop a comprehensive strategic plan for environmental protection along the border. The criticisms that were directed to the agreement in the mid-1980s and early 1990s have enduring bite, as the succession of programs and projects still have the look and feel of an ad hoc, piecemeal approach to conservation and environmental protection along the border (Sánchez-Rodríguez & Mumme, 2013).

In sum, the La Paz Agreement remains a work in progress. Its institutionalization is now a stable element of binational relations. The institutions, resources, initiatives, and reforms that have been mobilized under its diplomatic umbrella are vital to managing the adversities of urbanization and rapid growth that so define today’s border region. What was visionary in 1983 is normal in 2013 and that is precisely the challenge. If the two countries are to build beyond the NAFTA-based reforms, it will take renewed commitment to the sustainable development of the border region at the level of the two federal governments to make it happen. And at the moment, both domestically and binationally, that remains a formidable challenge.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Stephen P. Mumme is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where he specializes in comparative environmental politics and policy. He is a leading authority on water management along the U.S.–Mexico border. In addition to authoring numerous publications, he has served as consultation to the International Boundary and Water Commission and to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal. He is past president of the Association for Borderlands Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Albert E. Utton Transboundary Resources Center at the University of New Mexico School of Law.

Kimberly Collins is an assistant professor of public administration at the California State University, San Bernardino. She was the founding director of the California Center for Border and Regional Economic Studies and has taught at San Diego State University and the Universidad Autonóma de Baja California. She was U.S. Co-Chair of the Air Quality (Imperial-Mexicali) Taskforce for the EPA/SEMARNAT program. Her research centers on U.S.–Mexico environmental management, sustainable development, citizen engagement, and local governance.

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