Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

One of the main barriers to the implementation of sustainable urban policies in Mexico is the lack of collaboration between metropolitan municipalities. Although incentives have been increased for urban municipalities to collaborate with their neighbors in the governance of cities, there has not been a significant increase in collaboration between Mexican municipalities (Cabrero & Arellano, 2010). The literature focused on analyzing the issue from the rational choice theory emphasizes that collaboration occurs if the transaction costs between the parties involved are overcome (Feiock, 2004).

However, this paper argues that local government structures are organizations with decision-making institutions (Brunsson, 2007), i.e., patterns of action known and linked to rules that everyone takes for granted. Decisions produced by these organizations are not always the outcome of a rational optimizing process, but are often spawned in an automatic and thoughtless process, based on organizational routines and ideologies. So, the decision to collaborate implies an organizational change in the structure of each metropolitan local government.

The change to collaboration can only take place if a contingency that must be addressed cannot be solved through the local and independent municipal decision-making institutions. Moreover, it would be necessary that the contingency (perceived as an internal failure) could only be solved through collaboration, and not just with a modification of internal decision institutions of each municipality. Such failures would define the propensity of urban municipalities to collaborate. The perception of the problem, combined with the institutional strength of municipalities, creates different collaboration arrangements in Mexican cities.