Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Mexico is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, 80% of its population lives in cities. There are 59 metropolitan areas distributed in 29 of the 32 states of the country which are home to nearly 60% of Mexico´s total population. These areas are embraced by nearly 400 local governments which main feature is their extreme heterogeneity in terms of size, institutional capacities and fiscal resources, among many other variables. However, officially, the Mexican Federal government considers only three types of metropolitan municipalities: central, external according to statistics and geographical basis and external according to planning criteria and urban policy. This classification pays little attention to other important variables for a country like México, such as ethnical and cultural ones. Specially in southern Mexico, some metropolitan areas include indigenous municipalities, that in many cases are governed under customary systems. This special condition makes more complex to achieve agreements among the stakeholders involved in the metropolitan governance of this kind of urban settlements. Based on a case study from Oaxaca, one of the poorest Mexican states, the paper aims to analyze this complex situation and shed light on a largely ignored aspect of Metropolitan governance in Latin American countries.