Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The growing concentration of population and productive processes in metropolitan areas has deteriorated and continues to generate pressure on territories that provide environmental services. Querétaro's metropolitan area (ZMQ), where urban sprawl quadrupled between 1990 and 2017, is a particularly sensitive case of degradation of peri-urban territories and consequently of the environmental services that they provide.

Two of the main challenges of the urban policy agenda in Mexico are capacity building for urban planning with an environmental perspective, and developing governance instruments that allow real incorporation of the various stakeholders and sectors involved in spatial planning. Although some instruments have been developed at the local level such as the Local Ecological Management Programs (known in Spanish as POEL) which are aimed to promote more balanced processes of development, these instruments fall short to properly promote spatial planning with an environmental approach. These paper assesses the real scope and limitations of this type of instruments in contexts of explosive urban growth such as the kind experienced in the ZMQ, in order to identify the gaps that need to be filled to improve environmental public policies at the regional and local levels, and to promote sustainable development of metropolitan regions in Mexico.