Mining, Institutional Change, and Mexico’s Natural Resource Governance in Comparative Perspective, 1988-2018

Abstract

Between 1988-2018, Mexico’s mining sector underwent a structural transition, which entailed a change from a joint-ownership model between the national government and domestic industry to a completely privatized model led by foreign exploration companies. In this process, mining production rose significantly, which happened in tandem with a legislative and regulatory overhaul of the major policy domains of natural resource governance (NRG), understood as land tenure, environmental policy, labour policy, and the regulation of capital. Despite the shift towards new institutions and the increasing influence of foreign capital and global mining companies, not all of these policy domains were successfully reformed to align with the new neoliberal-oriented NRG, which has led to conflicting regulatory and legislative formations that fuel social-environmental conflict. Of the four main policy areas that comprise NRG, there is unevenness in the extent to which they were reformed, despite their equal importance to determining distributions of power between stakeholders, and the relative influence of private, public, or community authority. Drawing on a combination of Historical Institutionalism (HI) and Political Ecology (PE), this dissertation aims to explain why there is divergence in the policy changes and how they are explained by shifts in the influence of stakeholders as the sector began to dominate the countryside and create historically high profits in the country. This study finds that, despite widely accepted narratives about policy change in Mexico during democratic opening and the global diffusion of neoliberal economic policies, there are important institutional and policy legacies rooted in certain veto players that constrained policy reforms in some policy domains while creating pathways of reform in others. The unevenness in reforms, contradictory legislation, and vagueness of certain laws have all contributed to the current NRG paradigm and Mexico’s status as hosting the highest number of mining-related social-environmental conflicts in the Americas. This dissertation also introduces and applies a unique analytical framework for tracing policy change across time, which joins existing comparative public policy scholarship that examines several different policy areas at once. My study qualifies insights from HI and PE by tracing the discrete policy events and wider shifts in stakeholder power and influence in the processes of shifting the mining sector from import-substitution models of production to neoliberalism.