Water challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border: learning from community and expert voices

Abstract

We discuss the results of a multi-dimensional learning process (expert surveys, community workshops) addressing water challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border. The grand institutional and political framework of the international border, and the tensions and gaps in it, dominates the water literature and expert concerns. However, social inequality and spatial and temporal diversity on both sides of the border emerge as important considerations from community input. Our goal is to make planning for regional water sustainability more comprehensive, both spatially and temporally, and more community responsive in a context of important divisions and inequalities. This is because the “sustainability” frame, as operationalized in resource bureaucracies and academic research, focuses on long-term ecosystem dynamics and supplies of fundamental resources. In this region, however, a supply emphasis on transboundary water quantity hides urgent matters of well-being and justice. For instance, community consultation emphasized two more immediate water issues: water quality, especially microbial issues, and localized catastrophic flooding amid general water scarcity. Understanding how adaptation to environmental change can be pursued efficiently and equitably will require convergent sustainability knowledge and action that addresses multiple sources of risk and potential resilience/adaptation. Framing these within an analysis of social vulnerability can help us to better understand patterns of risk produced by changes in earth systems and act effectively and efficiently to address them in equitable ways. Such a frame is particularly relevant to the U.S.-Mexico border region because of the large vulnerable populations on both sides and comparatively low capacity for collective and household-community resilience on the Mexican side of the border.

INTRODUCTION: WATER GOVERNANCE AT THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER

The U.S.-Mexican border concentrates sustainability challenges. It is an outsize producer of ecosystem services, while also a hub of manufacturing, distribution, and agriculture. It has a growing population while concurrently running out of water. And it concentrates socioeconomic inequality. These challenges interact on multiple temporal and geographic scales rendering social-ecological resilience complex but informative, not only to regional specialists but also a wider audience.

This kind of complexity is not unique. In fact, it is common to many contemporary challenges that seek to address the effects of global change on specific regions, with their attendant effects on the production of social risk and loss of resilience in ecological systems. These changes are especially potent and legible where they affect critical resources like water that crosses or divides political jurisdictions (Hedlund et al. 2018, Carter et al. 2021). The U.S.-Mexico border, with the physical proximity of its communities, is a special place to better understand the interplay between global change and regional precarity.

Given increasing calls to go beyond mitigation to adapt to global change, the U.S.-Mexico border can be a key entry point for how to follow such calls with justice across counties and developmental divides (Benzie and Persson 2019, Persson 2019, Malloy and Ashcraft 2020). It demonstrates the kinds of social and institutional complexity that must be accounted for to match the acknowledged complexity of ecological systems (Meadowcroft 2007, Okereke et al. 2009, Dorsch and Flachsland 2017, Cradock-Henry and Frame 2021).

The U.S.-Mexico border case brings us to think carefully how just adaptation pathways are conceptualized (Burnham et al. 2018, Shi and Moser 2021, Werners et al. 2021). What is already well-understood as a challenge for the borderlands—if still difficult to address—is divided governance over the macroscopic (big quantity, long term) aspects of water (Wilder et al. 2010, Gerlak 2015, Peña 2015, Wilder et al. 2020, Lara-Valencia et al. 2023). But the region contains a series of twinned urban areas, which display extreme inequality both within and between countries. This geography creates distinct challenges for pursuing adaptation pathways that account for pre-existing precarity and prioritize social risk reduction (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020, Sultana 2022). Concerns with a sustainable human-water relationship must involve varied social, spatial, and temporal scales (Bulkeley and Betsill 2005, Singh et al. 2022). These include water justice involving scales that are smaller and more immediate than the transboundary focus on long-term water quantity.

An illustrative example is communities on both sides, usually very poor and socially marginal, who express strong concerns with flooding by contaminated water. The overdetermining presence of the international border tends to hide localism and immediacy in favor of how to coordinate two societies in long-term sustainable water quantity sharing. But both larger and smaller scales matter to ecosystem and human well-being. A convergence approach, learning from people outside as well as within institutional governance and organized interest groups, pointed our project toward multi-social, multi-spatial, and multi-temporal approaches to sustainability (see Angeler et al. 2020, Peek et al. 2020). Current conceptual approaches to sustainability emphasize insights such as the way complex knowledge and action improves adaptability (Gunderson and Hollings 2002, Folke 2006, Cinner and Barnes 2019). Our case study shows how diverse communities, concerns, and scales can be systematically brought together in sustainability studies.

Drawing on a novel survey of water managers, academic experts, and activist organizations from both nations and across the length of border, as well as four workshops in the three most populated segments of the border, this paper examines how local experts and the broader set of involved community members understand sustainable water governance. Beginning with shared concerns with water quantity, we acknowledge but expand beyond the management concerns of bureaucratic institutions to include voices from below. We do this expansion by examining “second” and “third” issues mentioned in the survey, after the big picture issue of water quantity, and we also do it by juxtaposing community-oriented workshops with the survey per se, which tended to be answered by institutionally placed actors. Through this community-researcher convergent method, we point to new kinds of inclusion, policy experimentation, and community priorities to guide the next generation of water sustainability at the border. Targeting marginalized communities as sites of intervention in larger-scale adaptation policy is both pragmatic, in terms of rapid and achievable social impacts, and ethical. Any form of just climate adaptation should prioritize lowering social vulnerability in the most exposed areas. Likewise, it should involve ways of learning from the policy experiments and designing novel configurations of jurisdictional and non-state action before the arrival of emergency conditions.

Sustainability, resilience, and the U.S.-Mexico border context

Environmental sustainability is an intentionally malleable concept (Bernstein 2001). Formulations typically express some synergistic concept of human and environmental well-being. One expression of this synergy, the “triple bottom line,” popular in the business sustainability literature, calls for an integrated consideration of social equity, environmental care, and economic growth (Elkington 1998, Slaper and Hall 2011, Alhaddi 2015). As operationalized in programs for resource harvesting, like timber and fisheries, the term (maximum) sustainable yield and its variants translate to the maximum harvest without the collapse of the resource. Concurrently, government programs focused on the human dimension of sustainability tend to adopt the semantics of resilience and, increasingly, equity.

Resilience language has become popular in the scholarly sustainability literature because of its ontological underpinnings. It suggests non-linear threshold-based social and ecological systems, and the mutual constitution of the two. These social-ecological systems (SES) are organized as complex-adaptive systems with elements (e.g., biota, people, cultural practices) that maintain path dependence on varied spatial and temporal scales, but that may also shift to new equilibria because of long-term natural changes or human interventions (Folke 2006). The “complex” and “adaptive” dimensions of these systems are key traits for governance intervention (Walker et al. 2004).^[1]

Complexity inheres in the mélange of traits that define specific systems, like its scale and the multi-scalar, multi-temporal cycles that impinge on it, habitat and food webs, geophysical traits, and social organization of human resource users. Adaptation occurs through the interaction and adjustment of these complex elements. Processes that encourage adaptation contribute to resilience. Central to the resilience concept is the point that SES do not have a single equilibrium state to which resilient systems will return; rather, it is that SES have basins of attraction to which and between which they may transition (Folke 2006). Cinner and Kittinger (2015) refer to the “distal drivers” (e.g., social structure, markets, technology) and “proximal drivers” (e.g., climate change, pollution, resource extraction) that bring about systemic change.

This conceptual understanding of the environment and society’s relationship to it has substantial implications about how we organize ourselves to govern. Terms like ecosystem-based management and adaptive co-management capture the idea that management interventions must be designed for specific contexts (Grumbine 1994, Armitage et al. 2009, Berkes 2017). At their core is the task of organizing as a complex adaptive system. Such organizing necessarily means surmounting outmoded command and control approaches to environmental management (Holling and Meffe 1996) and many of the market-based “new environmental regulation” approaches that replaced them (Fiorino 2006). Scholars have labeled these panaceas because of their tendency to placate political demand for responses rather than addressing underlying management issues, accounting for ecosystem complexity, and for their tendency to bring about undesired unanticipated consequences (Gonzalez 2001, Young et al. 2018).

Following these theoretical insights, the U.S-Mexican border water management needs the insights of more localized and nuanced investigations. Because of the unavoidable importance of paired binational, top-down water resource management institutions, focused mainly on surface water quantity and water contamination issues (using a small number of aggregate, quantitative measures), more complex and multiscalar adaptive issues within and across countries are not adequately developed. These complications are exacerbated by the considerable growth, informal urbanization, industrialization, and stark inequalities of the region (Collins 2009, Anderson and Gerber 2023, Gerber 2024). New approaches to adaptation have emerged, though often in small scale. Some bi- and tri-national institutions created during the NAFTA process aimed to monitor and ameliorate the likely environmental and labor-relations challenges that would result from regional economic intensification (Simon 2014, Simon 2017, Pacheco-Vega 2015, Aguilera Fernández and Castro Lugo 2018, Gladstone et al. 2021). These and other governmental organizations involved in border environmental issues have sought to open policy processes to more citizen inclusion and to fund research consistent with equity and environmental justice considerations. They include the citizens forums of the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission and the inclusion of NGOs in policy making (Gerlak 2015, Mumme 2016), the Border 2020 initiative of SEMARNAT and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Prado 2019), and the Border Environment Cooperation Commission/North American Development Bank’s funding priorities (Giner et al. 2019, Allen 2020). Discussions centered on equitable development and environmental justice have increased with the Inflation-Reduction Act (IRA) and Executive Order 14096, which prioritized the implementation of equitable-centered infrastructure investments (Perls 2022).

Nevertheless, international institutions such as the North American Development Bank and intranational institutions such as the Environmental Protection Agency have struggled to address distributive and procedural justice issues in the borderlands (US EPA 2024). For example, the significant water challenges facing communities who reside in these regions reflect the low priorities of border environmental justice issues. What is needed is regionally specific understanding of what promotes adaptive capacity that recognizes not only the macro (binational) division, but also the high degree of social inequality within and between countries. This regionally specific understanding involves learning and making more complex management interventions through the integration of knowledge, a process that falls into the field of convergence approaches.

Research that involves complex social and ecological systems in governance of critical resources like water is a prime target for convergence research (NRC 2014). Convergence research approaches interdisciplinary and interdivisional collaboration through the creation of overarching frameworks focused on solving complex problems (Oerther et al. 2019, Sundstrom et al. 2023). These frameworks converge on urgent and complicated problems that no single disciplinary approach can explain. Beginning with convergence between scholarly disciplines scholars (Enders 2005, Klein 2008, Wilson 2019), more recently convergence has considered the diverse kinds of knowledge that emerge from scholars and community members in dialogue and collaboration, in particular including social sectors whose voices are not often heard. Our work here centers precisely on insights from diverse community interlocutors combined with regional academics and managerial experts. The resulting multi-social, multi-scalar, multi-temporal framework fits well within the complex adaptation approach.

Our dual methodology (a key actor survey and more socially diverse community workshops) aimed to collect a variety of perspectives from both expert discourse (academics, resource managers, local politicians) and civil society actors (non-governmental organizations, activists, and residents). We engage and deploy convergence, thus, as a method for approaching complicated issues from a variety of epistemological and political perspectives. We do not argue for or against convergence, but rather use it as a method of aggregating and clarifying disciplinary and geographical differences to look for complex, spatially located issues that involve multi-level and multi-jurisdictional institutions (Hooghe et al. 2008). The results show what happens when you do convergence research: they reveal an increasingly complex ecology of issues and priorities that nonetheless converges on urgent problems that can only be addressed through greater collaboration and expanded participation in shared governance (Fig. 1).

METHODS

The research was supported by a National Science Foundation planning grant on sustainability in regional systems that combined urban and rural subsystems. Three U.S.-side universities supplied the research team: the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and the University of California San Diego. These three sites are located in the three largest population concentrations on the U.S.-Mexico border, and span its full east-west length. Mexican scholars and civil society participants were included (following the framework governing the grant) in the initial survey and via the workshops.

The research team did a literature review of relevant published and white papers on border water resources, and from this review created a survey with a variety of closed- and open-responses. The list of potential respondents was compiled by each partner university in collaboration with regional experts to include managers, activist groups, local government officials, and academics. Invitations were sent to roughly 50 prospective takers per region with personalized invitations and clear explanation of their use and privacy restrictions, with follow up reminders sent after three weeks. Responses were collected online through QUESTION PRO (https://www.questionpro.com/survey-software/).

The closed- and open-answer survey responses were analyzed by each regional partner university before conducting follow-up workshops focused on understanding the initial results, deepening these understandings through dialog, and capturing lay perspectives of the key themes identified by the expert responses. Each region customized its own workshops, reflecting the interests and capacities of the community partners as well as the specific already existing cross-institutional collaborations. The products of these workshops were then processed, analyzed, and compared with earlier survey results. Open responses were analyzed using NVIVO software (https://lumivero.com/products/nvivo/) to visualize relationships between primary issues and other topics identified.

The survey sampling process aimed at experts, managers, and activists that act across scales, some with purviews that extend along the length of the border, others with regional or more local issue agendas. Respondents included regional and national water experts, largely from academic or bureaucratic backgrounds, but also included relevant non-governmental organizations and activist groups. Hence, the sample contains many people attending to different scales, producing a kind of overlapping coverage that produces an incomplete but generally accurate impression of perspectives on water resources in different areas of the U.S.-Mexico border.

FINDINGS

Survey results

The final respondent numbers tilted toward Paso del Norte and the Central region, where 43% of respondents reported working, with lower numbers in the West (23%) and East regions (33%). In the Western region, respondents were mostly from Tijuana and San Diego, where nearly 19% of the respondents in the border-wide sample claimed to work. As noted in the limitations section below, there is an obvious gap in eastern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Coahuila, and Sonora. Government agencies dominated the Eastern borderlands. There is an absence of representatives of agriculture in the more urbanized West (0%), reflecting urban-rural differences in priorities and central actors and a clear difference from the Central (29%) and Eastern (13%) regions.

In the West, the bulk of the sample is made up by higher education or environmental education / preservation experts, alongside representatives of government agencies. These government agencies make up a similar number (38%) in the Central region but are a substantial 62% of the study respondents in the East, partially reflecting higher numbers in agriculture (respondents could choose as many sectors as they wanted, percentages reflect how many of the total respondents selected a sector, not the percentage of total responses).

In total, nearly half (46%) of respondents identified their sector as including working for a “Government agency,” which should condition the interpretation of the results on priorities, barriers, and opportunities that follow, in particular the calls for increased application of community knowledge. This institutional setting contrasts with 23% border-wide who reported being part of “Environmental education or preservation,” the other highest percentage sector represented in our sample. That category overlaps substantially but not completely with the 19% of respondents self-identifying “Other higher education.” The institutional lean of the survey would be counter-balanced by more diverse community participation in workshops (Table 1).

Closed answers

Our closed answer results gesture at several important patterns to be examined with further research. Table 2 presents (a) the modal answers for priority issues (meaning that less frequent answers are not included on the table so it is efficient and readable), (b) barriers to collaboration, and (c) opportunities identified. Because many of the questions were “Select all that apply,” all numbers in the table represent the percentage of respondents who identified that issue in their suite of answers. The “primary issue” question did require respondents to choose one single item.

Modal concerns: scarcity, flooding, and climate change

All three regions clearly are concerned with water quantity. Over 50% of the respondents identified water scarcity as the primary concern. These concerns reflect the sustainability and adaptive management agendas of water managers and national institutions across the border region.

Although the format of the previous question forced one response for the priority issue, thereby identifying the overall centrality of water quantity sustainability, we also asked about additional important issues, and allowed multiple responses. This move enabled the survey to detect more complex elements of system stress and adaptation, in keeping with key items of the literature on socio-environmental complexity. These additional concerns included acute water quality challenges and other social risks produced by inadequate sewage treatment, trash collection, and stormwater management, amongst others.

The listing of additional concerns is not to say that scarcity disappears as a fundamental problem for resource governance when viewed locally. It is rather that community members often confront urgent issues on shorter time scales and in more local spaces of dwelling that may be obscured by the sample bias toward government agencies and high-level experts, which tend to have national scales, long time horizons, and narrow issue jurisdictions, focused especially on geographic and sectoral partitioning of scarce quantities of water. By analyzing “additional” concerns (see below), we find that working on acute social-ecological resilience problems requires awareness of the local nature of secondary issues, especially flooding and stormwater management.

For the primary issues question, 15% of respondents reported Flooding or Stormwater, with 13% reporting Climate Change. These are not mutually exclusive, but may instead reflect scales of engagement. Climate change, in particular, has clear effects on both flooding and scarcity, but it is a more general and abstract way to premise those issues, which also comes out in the open-ended question about additional important issues. It is interesting that only 4% of respondents identified Contamination as the primary issue, and 0% reported Public Health. Both of these themes, however, emerged in the additional issue answers and the workshops, where we captured more of the local geographic and immediate temporal scales that big sustainability frames may override.

Barriers to collaboration: legal fragmentation, financing, and community knowledge

There were two outstanding results in the questions probing obstacles to solving first priority water issues (people could select multiple issues to respond to this question). The first is the lack of engagement with communities and community knowledge, which was evident through the 80% of respondents identifying Lack of Community Knowledge and 65% reporting Lack of Stakeholder Engagement as major barriers. These items point to a need for convergent, adaptive knowledge and action.

The second relates to financing deficits for infrastructure in border communities, recognized in parallel to the governance gap produced by fragmented political institutions. Inadequate Financing was identified by 75% of the respondents, while Fragmentation of Responsibility was selected by 65%. Issues with infrastructure are apparent on both sides of the border, but most keenly felt in underserved and informal communities that are largely (but not exclusively) found on the Mexican side. These gaps cause or exacerbate the pattern of exposure to health and physical risk that mirrors economic inequality.

There is also a substantial cluster of responses, around 58% of respondents, identifying Lack of Urgency, Inadequacy of Water Policies, Unwillingness to Change Behavior, and Lack of Information. These relate largely to institutional priorities, most clearly in water policies and information issues, but also pertain to social attitudes around behavior change. They point to multi-scalar adaptive challenges.

Our survey asked about the specific role that the border itself plays in creating barriers to solving water issues (multiple responses permitted). These are some of the most interesting results in the data, as they pinpoint institutional issues like Political Division (67%) and Legal and Policy Differences (54%). These results contrast with much lower reports of Social and Linguistic Gaps (25%), Interpersonal connections (23%), Migration (19%), and Cultural Diversity (15%) as key obstacles created by the border context (non-modal variants not listed on Table 2). The lower occurrence of those responses is interesting because they drive domestic narratives of border wars in the U.S., more figments of national imagination more than lived realities in the border region itself (Heyman 2013).

When asked how the border impacts collaboration, these results were mirrored. No one issue emerged as dominant and none of the cultural categories appeared to affect collaboration significantly in any of the regional samples. The most common response (33%) was Crossing the Border, supported by 23% identifying issues with the Time and Effort entailed. These two responses are largely consonant in our reading and personal experiences with crossing the border, which entails taxing wait times and other logistical issues related to infrastructure failures. The other responses were fairly evenly split between Language Barriers (23%), Lack of Interest (19%), and Redundancy with Other Institutions (19%).

Resources and opportunities

In our results there is a clear opportunity to move from obstacles to opportunities for adaptive action. Our respondents reported institutional issues with infrastructure and large-scale financing (bilateral, federal institutions) relatively evenly with issues of community knowledge and stakeholder engagement. When asked to identify resources for addressing water issues, 85% of respondents claimed that Community Knowledge was key, alongside 73% for Stakeholder Engagement. Again, Financing (83%) emerged as a critical element, as did Availability of Information (66%).

Our findings point to a higher-level, national- and bilateral need for new strategies for financing and reconciling fragmented jurisdictional priorities so that information can become more readily available. At the same time, they also point to a need for new kinds of engagement that move beyond the usual box-checking of the major institutions. Such new activities require more than workshops and information sessions. Adaptive action could include creating new fora for exchange and more meaningful kinds of public accountability, including cross-border forms of agency and democratic decision making.

Below the threshold of the values reported in Table 2, but still important, are a cluster of institutional concerns, including Adequacy of Water Policies (63%), Forward Thinking Water Institutions (60%), and Clarity of Goals in Water Management Institutions (60%). Again, as in the obstacles section, these results are interesting given the bias toward institutional actors in the sample. The finding should be read alongside the 33% of respondents who reported Never Collaborating and the 85% identifying Community Knowledge as a key resource.

Mirrored by problems of information availability and need for forward-thinking institutions, such institutional challenges parallel identification of Sense of Urgency and Community Knowledge as obstacles. This inference is born out as well in the results for “Other important issues” affecting water outcomes, where respondents recognized the tangled role of “non-water” environmental issues (58%) alongside poverty and education (both 56%). It is interesting that less than one-fifth of respondents reported Immigration status, Employment, or Transportation as major related issues (all 18.75%). All of these findings point to a more complicated and multiscalar panorama of potential action: improvements to political economy and institutions converging with greater community knowledge and action in the face of a divided and highly unequal border.

Open-ended answers

As previously noted, we gave respondents an open-ended section to identify their secondary (but still important) water concerns, and the barriers and opportunities pertaining to them. The open-ended section captured the multi-level character of the water issues facing the region. This level of analysis was particularly important given the complexity revealed in the closed answer portion and potential for multiple- and overlapping-issue framings that appeared to be present.

To look at the relationships between primary and other issues identified, we used NVIVO software to visualize the contingencies among answers. We started with the four most common first-choice issues, and then looked at what additional issues each set of respondents also identified as important. NVIVO helped us to identify clusters of additional issues that follow each initial priority issue choice. The grouping of clusters is based on the numerical counts regarding the number of times a theme was mentioned in a cluster.^[2]

Table 3 illustrates the secondary issues contingent on the most common first priority issue, Water Scarcity. Cluster 1, with the most themes, was the most common line of follow-up. Themes in clusters 2 and 3 occurred also but were not as common. Other themes, like public health and agriculture, although not occurring in the primary issue stage, in the contingency analysis emerge as strong community concerns.

There is evidence of overlap between themes within the major topics of water scarcity, climate change, flooding, and water services. Several themes were identified in more than one topic, including Public Health, Water Scarcity, Flooding, Agriculture, Groundwater, and Water Quality. On the whole, public health, water scarcity, and flooding were mentioned in over half of the responses. Water scarcity, in particular, was often related to poor agricultural practices, whereas public health was linked to water shortages, pollution, and ecological degradation. Flooding was related to themes of stormwater management, lack of cultural awareness about water conservation issues, solid waste, and access to water services.

Agriculture, groundwater, and water quality also appeared in half of the responses. This finding makes sense because water rights allocation was mentioned, with most surface water being delegated to agricultural practices. Other issues that came forward were related to the over-extraction of groundwater, with agriculture being responsible for the majority of the consumption of this resource. Many noted that modern water-saving technologies have not been widely adopted in Mexico. There were also concerns with water quality, sanitation, and hardness. Water quality and public health were often associated with each other.

In keeping with a complex adaptive challenge, there was extensive overlap among water challenges with participants simultaneously voicing their concerns about water scarcity, water contamination, public health, and flooding. Likewise, there was a recognition that water issues do not stop at the U.S. border. Indeed, the issues presented from the Mexican side of the border seemed to be magnified in comparison to those of the U.S., exacerbated by the generally poorer population and lower state capacity there. But both sides identified a dense, multiscalar, multitemporal set of water concerns. Overall, our findings cement the necessity for large-scale but diverse adaptive policies to address complex binational water challenges effectively.

Our major finding is that complexity in scales makes identifying single issues problematic, i.e., many people see climate change and water scarcity as functionally interdependent (see the contingency hierarchy of primary issue and other important issue mentioned by the same individuals, as depicted in Table 3). The scale of the problem identified as a priority likely relates to the scale at which the respondent works and whether they have specific management responsibilities or are activists, residents, NGOs, etc. who participate in governance but do not manage large budgets or have their priorities set by higher levels. These various scales of knowledge and action present an important challenge of bringing into adaptive equilibrium the issues facing specific communities (especially disadvantaged ones) and ecosystems, and broad system dynamics, such as salinity and water quantity. The incredible soup of acronyms produced by this binational survey in two languages and the many sets of actors involved in water governance is a testament to this complexity in two countries. It would be unhelpful to flatten these phenomena as an agenda of sustained water supply.

Workshops

The workshops offered a format that was less researcher- and more attendee-driven compared to the survey.^[3] There were formal activities and discussion prompts jointly organized by scientists and main community partners but diverse community members could, and did, take the conversational lead. Hence the workshops developed convergence more explicitly, as joint groups of academics and community organizations created conversations with and among stakeholders. This diversity proved to be an asset in exploring more complicated and dynamic concepts of sustainability.

Tijuana/San Diego

The Tijuana/San Diego workshop was designed to engage with residents and activists in Mexico who were not well represented in our survey sample and, more broadly, in regional discussions about governance and water security. It was held in a near-boundary area where Mexican residents felt welcome, Jardín Binacional de la Amistad in the Playas de Tijuana, but which also was accessible for North Americans. The event had a majority of women but included both sexes. It included participants from academia, voluntary organizations (environmental sector, social justice/community advocacy sector), resource agencies (NOAA), volunteers / activists, and residents.

Specific methods engaged community members, including means to encourage less typical participants (short information presentations with hands-on activities, curated group discussion, and a prize raffle for native plants to close). Information presentations included cost-effective natural solutions to problems with flooding and water contamination, water conservation strategies at home, and a presentation of survey findings. Activities included an interactive native plants and erosion demonstration and a “Letters to the [Tijuana] River” exercise with a binational map eliciting resident perspectives on risk and recreation related to the Tijuana River. It had an effective design for convergence.

Though the Playas de Tijuana area itself is relatively prosperous, the event succeeded at obtaining perspectives from a wide range of communities. The most often mentioned issues from residents were water contamination (related to flows of both sewage and trash) and flooding risks. Other issues mentioned were related problems with infrastructure, poverty, climate change, lack of care, the role of the physical border barrier, lack of binational and intranational dialogue, water scarcity, water cost, and water access. Key terms cutting across the discussion were climate change, equity, risk, and contamination.

It is worth noting that a long-temporal-scale phenomenon, climate change, and spatially large social scale frames (binational division and inequality) were mentioned alongside problems of short-temporal-scale and local-spatial extent for the community (e.g., flooding). Conceptually these are different but in understanding the lived water environment, they are nested together, consistent with multi-level resilience theory. Several themes of the Tijuana workshop discussion brought out matters affecting vulnerable communities not normally foregrounded in formal border water plans. First, there was a sense of high urgency related to physical and health risks in specific local settlements. Second, there was a sense of immediate concern with the arrival of climate change effects, particularly for such places.

As noted, a number of agencies and institutions, national and binational, were mentioned in the closed and open survey results, but in this institutional tangle vulnerable Mexican-side communities were relatively neglected. Responsibility felt fragmented and distant. In part, but not solely, the neglect of vulnerable people in Mexico was a border effect, because risk and vulnerability weighed heavily on one portion (not all) of the people of one country in a divided institutional framework that allows these communities to be neglected. Probably the participants who had the most binational perspective were activists against sewage releases propagating from Mexico into the United States, but that framing of an issue-coming from Mexico, harming the United States-neglected related Tijuana River and other sewage impacts on poor Mexican neighborhoods. This workshop stood out for bringing out that less-recognized dimension of sewage harm.

Finally, because the main water supply for the region, the Colorado River, is remote (imported by canal from far to the east), and because that water is divided between huge coastal urban centers and vast irrigated farms in the two countries, concern with the challenge of urban/agricultural water sharing was muted, unlike the two other regions. This specific water geography in turn muted the discussion of how climate change has impacted freshwater water quantity from that river, as opposed to other Colorado users (e.g., Mexicali/Imperial Valley, coastal U.S. California).

Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV)

The LRGV workshop was in person, in Edinburg, Texas, with some virtual participation. It involved presentations on major water topics followed by ample open-ended discussion. Although the presentations gave some topical structure to the event, they were sufficiently widely varied in kind of issue, time, and spatial scale that there was plenty of room for the kinds of variability that interest us to emerge. The participants mainly came from organized groups of some sort: government agencies at all three levels, non-profit organizations, the private sector (e.g., farming, engineering), and academia. The non-profits offered a good representation of vulnerable populations in the United States. The most important limitation of this workshop was that it was only attended by U.S. side participants.^[4]

The issues mentioned most often in this workshop were flooding and drainage. Geographically, this selection of focal issues makes sense, because the region (on both sides of the border) is a delta, vulnerable to those phenomena. Mixed in with these issues, which involve keeping some degree of separation of water from human dwellings and activities, is concern with the water-driven spread of sewage, trash, and industrial contamination.

These issues cut across regional participants but were presented as most affecting poor populations who live in small informal settlements outside of larger, better-protected towns and cities. The region, with low elevation (near sea level), flat topography, a river that is higher than the surrounding delta, and extensive delivery of water to irrigated agriculture and then drainage from fields, is understood by participants to be vulnerable to stormwater, both ordinary storms and potential hurricanes. That is, risk is understood to crop up across temporal scales.

At the same time, water quantity remains an important regional concern. For drinking water, in most cases, the region depends on water from the Rio Grande, which is shaped by large water sources upstream. They are mostly from Mexico, with quantities determined by the treaty, and there are on-going U.S.-Mexico tensions over deliveries. But interestingly, beyond the institutional (treaty) level, in the workshop there was an understanding that climate change was putting the overall regional freshwater supply at risk.

The water contamination concern was notably socially divided, since for environmentalists and tourist business interests, runoff into the large intracoastal Laguna Madre (river termination) was a concern, while local contaminated runoff was more of a concern for small, informal, and other poor settlements. The dynamics of flooding, contamination, and freshwater supply discussed in the workshop were intricately multi-scalar in spatial, temporal, and social terms.

Paso del Norte

Paso del Norte had two workshops, one online with both Mexican and U.S. side attendees (basically in equal numbers), and the other on the U.S. side, more North Americans but with several attendees who came from the Mexican side. The first workshop had a diverse but mainly institutionalist mixture of politicians with notable records in water, farmers, agency officials, community and environmental advocacy organizations, and academics. The second workshop was equally diverse, but lacked the political and official agency sector, and had more environmental and alternative farming advocates. The structure in both cases was a focus group, where the organizers (an academic and a community organization staffer) supplied prompts, but the prompts did little to shape the discussion, which took its own direction.

Of the regional workshops, those in Paso del Norte most focused on a resource-management concept of water quantity sustainability with a long timeline shared across social sectors. Of course, important divisions over control of water were mentioned, such as Mexico and the United States, or agriculture, urban, and ecological preservation/restoration.

There are several reasons this version of sustainability came out of the Paso del Norte workshops. First, the region itself is the driest of the three sites involved in the study (given the anthropogenic circumstance that much Colorado River water is diverted to the San Diego/Tijuana area). Hence, Paso del Norte is most concerned with water scarcity, currently and into the future. Second, many prompts for the first workshop directed attention to water institutions under conditions of climate change and worsening scarcity. But some prompts did draw attention to issues of drinking water access, water contamination, wastewater disposal, and flooding, concerns affecting poorer communities. Those did receive significant discussion.

The organizers of the second workshop responded to the limits of long established sectoral “water management” debates by using a series of prompts seeking deeper reflection, asking “what is sustainability?” This provocative theme ignited energetic discussion, the thrust of which was questioning the long-term viability of standard U.S. and Mexican models of development in such a dry place. Challenges were posed to large-scale monocrop agroindustry and large cities based on low-wage industrialization in Mexico and military bases in the United States, all using large quantities of water in conventional ways. Alternative agriculture and water conserving urbanism was discussed extensively, as was the deep social inequality in the region, tying that to water issues.

The second workshop, then, expressed a strong need for profound change in regional culture and social structure to fit more lastingly within the biophysical region. But, interestingly, the everyday water concerns of poorer and more marginal communities were not mentioned as much as in the otherwise more conventional first workshop. The experience shows the challenge of multi-scalar environmentalism; the big sustainability vision does not necessarily speak about short-timeline, local water risks, without a lot of knowledge of local realities of disadvantaged communities and strong voices at the table.

Limitations

The survey had a relatively small number of total responses (48) and within it, the response rate between regions was uneven, with more responses from the Paso del Norte area than the others (the survey was distributed from UTEP). The invitations to the survey were based on existing university partner networks. Eleven of the respondents were from Mexico, a good outcome given that the survey was distributed from the United States, both in Spanish and English. That the survey came from researchers at UCSD, UTEP, and UTRGV also meant less information was garnered from areas east of the Colorado River and west of El Paso, as well as east of El Paso to the lower Rio Grande Valley, more sparsely populated but still important segments of the border.

Likewise, workshops inevitably were geographically sited. The workshops were varied in format and themes, which grew organically out of existing university-community initiatives and relationships that were both their strength and limitation as exercises in convergence science. The overall project was aimed at planning future research so it took an open-ended information gathering approach rather than having a predetermined set of research propositions and methods to examine them more definitively.

DISCUSSION

Our results highlight a series of issues for discussion. Although border water issues have been intelligently and critically surveyed before (Liverman et al. 1999, Wilder et al. 2010, Garfin et al. 2013, Lara-Valencia et al. 2023), we have deployed a convergent methodology in order to explore relationships between issues that make selecting effective and just binational adaptation pathways difficult. These deeper connections indicate a complexity to water issues at the U.S.-Mexico border that is not reflected in the dominant bureaucratic approaches to long-term scarcity. They pinpoint gaps in mechanisms of governance that may obscure short-term, urgently felt priorities of residents and activists working and living on both sides of the border.

These gaps have equity concerns built into them, as they often occur in clear patterns produced by social and economic inequality. These results are legible through convergence research sited at the border, but they parallel global concerns with climate adaptation and sustainability that involve communities with unequal resources worldwide (Okereke et al. 2009, Benzie and Persson 2019). Just adaptation, climate justice, and other academic discourses with similar concerns must ask both how to adapt and also where to adapt first. This negotiation often takes place at a global level in terms of annexes of climate accords and historical responsibility in a way that is unproductively disconnected from local and regional vulnerability. Our example helps add useful detail to what these global commitments mean in context, in this case uneven but interconnected development at a major international border (Gerber 2024). Complicating matters further, many resources are shared and impossible to govern alone, like shared waterways and migratory species habitat. Unlike disparate and distant countries from different annexes of climate treaties (e.g., Germany and Bangladesh), the U.S. and Mexico have a series of bilateral commitments to facilitate this shared governance, such as the Colorado River Compact, the La Paz Agreement, and institutions associated with NAFTA and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. These institutions, however, lack the funding, mandates, and deliberative processes to act at scale with the changes that they must confront (Temby and Stoett 2017).

Thinking about water helps us focus on shared challenges and on ways to prioritize adaptation measures and effectively fund, design, and implement projects that reduce vulnerability for the most exposed communities within the border zone. Our multi-method convergent approach collected perspectives from experts, managers, and residents with regional lenses to create a register of geographic issue sets rather than an overarching national or even binational set of concerns established by bureaucrats and water managers.

The modal priority issue of scarcity perhaps (over)simplifies governance and equity concerns to supply of water. This prioritization is most salient to dominant economic and political interests. Long-term supply is undeniably a key issue, reaching down to poorer consumers and residents. However, the more acute challenges identified for those communities, relating to public health, stormwater management, and trash collection, are potentially sites of entry for global and continental priorities for just forms of climate adaptation and adaptive governance of shared resources. They are unequally experienced on the different national sides of the U.S.-Mexico border as well as within domestic communities. They also reflect regional differences in the effects of the changing climate as well as the varying geographic locations of different parts of the border. At the same time, our observation that scarcity emerges as the most broadly shared concern is a kind of first hint at what a shared issue set would look like. The novel insight is a more complex understanding of the subnational and binational issues that emerge from convergent processes of looking at many types of data, using different engagement strategies, and incorporating more voices into the conversation. This complexity is useful for thinking about environmental justice broadly (Schlosberg and Collins 2014) and for beginning to understand how just adaptation scholarship can identify and fortify robust forms of regional governance and increasingly legible understandings of local effects of global change.

Widespread calls for utilizing community knowledge and rationalizing financing for infrastructure signal the need to incorporate more voices (Mostafavi et al. 2014, Noordegraaf et al. 2014). This widening of concerns requires thinking across temporal scales, at once looking at long-term solutions for water scarcity and quality concerns that are expensive and require adequate financing mechanisms, and at the same time focusing on how these issues appear in urgent and present ways to residents of both sides of the border. In our workshops, there was an obvious concern with the mismatch between these different time horizons and urgencies, where long-term planning over scarcity and climate change overlap and layer with immediacies like acute water quality, flooding, and physical security.

This multiscalar, multitemporal set of concerns generates discussions about how binational water governance should approach, emphasize, and at times confront to deliver more resilient and less-risky results. How key hazards are mitigated or adapted to depends on how we understand the connectivity of social and ecological systems and the relationship between different scales and flows of material, capital, and people. The border region brings together political, ecological, and social complexity in tight geographical proximity, but this challenge is not unique to the border or to the U.S. and Mexico. It is, instead, a clear example of the difficult measurements, discussions, and translations that occur in continental trade agreements, and global climate treaties (Malloy and Ashcraft 2020, Sultana 2022).

In such discussions, we need to pay attention to who is at risk. Using an environmental justice (EJ) lens, there is a clear inequality of exposure and preexisting vulnerability both within and across national communities at the border. Much of this inequality is related to asymmetric institutional capacity, most obviously visible in insufficient funding for critical infrastructure. Moreover, the EJ lens points to outstanding issues with lack of representation and participation, many of which are noted in the high survey numbers reporting never or rarely collaborating (a survey of the meanings of the term environmental justice is Holifield et al. 2017; an example of using an EJ lens is Pacheco-Vega 2019).

Thinking at the larger scales of bilateral and domestic bureaucratic institutions, water sustainability questions can easily become abstract, aggregate, and quantitative. There is important value to this level; as our survey results revealed, water scarcity is a key concern across the border. Water quantity is one of the important ways that water managers and activists translate the consequences of global climate change into relevant local context. But considering this level alone may obscure the fact that there are at least two temporalities at play, a reality that is exposed in concerns with risks from stormwater or contamination alongside longer-term risks of scarcity and water shortage. Meaningful learning and action involves working simultaneously at several spatial scales, from major regional water supplies, to very fine-grained patterns of localized flooding and debris flow.

Our conceptual point, derived from convergent research, is the need to do our sustainability thinking and acting at multiple temporal and spatial scales at the same time. Such thinking and acting should attend to the most disadvantaged communities that big management approaches may neglect. This complexity is both challenging and increasingly important.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, our findings point to a need for more complexity in the types of issues and priorities treated, filling governance gaps left by fragmented institutions, and including more voices and participants in the governance process. Each of these themes are central to developing adaptive capacity in the border region. Developing such capacity is a prerequisite for avoiding pathologies of unilineal adaptive management regimes, and to ensuring equitable access to vital resources and achieving the conditions for successful adaptive governance of these resources in the context of climate change.

Our preliminary research suggests that there are a multiplicity of perspectives, concerns, and priorities at play in binational water issues, and that these concerns are more linked and inter-related than they appear at first glance. The gaps identified point to possibilities for learning-while-doing inherent to adaptive governance approaches. These social learning possibilities, however, will require the inclusion of more voices. They will involve overcoming governance gaps produced by fragmented institutions. They will require complicating and complexifying water governance issues to match the complexity of the ecological systems they aspire to manage and protect.

This study suggests that alongside the valuable work identifying the diverse and fragmented institutional landscape of border water issues there is also work to be done to match ecological and institutional complexity with an understanding of overlapping and interpenetrating forms of social diversity, social inequality, and multi-spatial and multi-temporal scales. Our work bears directly on key challenges for increased social learning and adaptive forms of governance. It both requires urgent action and necessitates careful thought in conditions of social and political differentiation. Exclusive focus on long-term supply concerns may close possibilities for developing effective adaptive pathways for mitigating social risk and increasing ecological resilience, especially where these concerns minimize urgent priorities and limit participation of non-traditional governance actors.

These exposed border communities will experience many of the changes in water supply and exposure to water-related risks like flooding, disease, and landslides, as will be found worldwide. Parallel long- and short-term challenges take place in the social context of rapidly increasing urbanization, with related demands on rural agriculture; they do so in states of extreme inequality of vulnerability, as well as the political context of divided jurisdictional power and fragmented tools for management. Moving toward convergence with the roughly 50% of respondents who reported never or rarely consulting (48%) or collaborating (54%) with their counterparts is a much needed goal.

An environmental justice lens helps to bring in the lower scale to treat vulnerability and plan for just forms of adaptation, rather than remaining at the larger scale where scarcity is the modal concern. This observation is not to argue that scarcity should disappear as a fundamental problem for resource governance when viewed locally. It is rather to assert the need to deepen the urgency of regional issues that may be obscured by the national scale and sample bias toward government agencies, which tend to have long time horizons and narrow issue jurisdictions.

Bilateral agreements provide the openings for the legal investment of U.S. money in Mexico and are well-known by activists and local officials. Their importance is sapped, however, by their lack of recognition of the vulnerable places where they might be applied. There are small existing institutions designed to channel funding toward contamination and flooding, as well as other water quality and infrastructure issues. But we need in the borderlands a cognate public with a coherent and responsive decision-making structure to hold them accountable, or, more importantly, to lobby national governments and binational institutions to invest much greater resources so those programs can actually address such problems effectively and at scale.

More than listing institutions and their main agendas, then, we need to see how these can work for people. The border provides a particularly powerful reminder (because it is so divided and unequal) that institutions need to work for residents of multiple kinds and at multiple scales to produce the resilient and just outcomes that both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border deserve.

__________

^[1] This focus on governance by scholars of resilience is more complicated where multiple scales and jurisdictions of institutions are considered. The experimental policy regimes that ideally underpin “adaptive governance” schemes presuppose stable political and bureaucratic authorities with relationships with their counterparts in the other country. The U.S.-Mexico context, by contrast, is characterized by unequal policy capacity and thin public management networks (Healy et al. 2014, Temby and Stoett 2017, Lima et al. 2019).

^[2] A perspicacious reviewer asked for the numbers/percentages of each code for Table 3. Given that the analysis involves three or four levels of contingent cells, the resulting contingency chart shows a vast quantity of small numbers with many connecting lines, visually difficult to represent, and not always informative (e.g., is there a difference between a contingent code that produced two instances or one instance?). However, the data is available from the corresponding author.

^[3] Attendance at workshops was compensated. Recruitment was done jointly by researchers and lead community partners.

^[4] This imbalance was inconsistent with the goals for workshops, as well as the conduct of the other three workshops, and represented a breakdown in planning.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Project P.I.: Heyman

Research design and implementation: Forman; Fuller; Haines; Heyman; Kim; Mayer; Racelis; Temby

Data analysis: Brown; Haines; Heyman; Temby

Authorship: Haynes; Heyman; Temby

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the community participants in surveys and workshops in the three sites. We also thank these students: Dylan Diaz-Infante, Mara Rodríguez-Gámez, and Mya Brown. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2115124. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted Tools

None.

DATA AVAILABILITY

Data for this article is available at https://scholarworks.utep.edu/sa_datasets/.

Corresponding author:

Josiah Heyman

[email protected]

Table 1. Respondents’ details.

	%	No.
Respondent location
Border	100%	48
West	23%	11
Central	43%	21
East	33%	16
Where do you work (can be multiple)
All regions	10%
Tijuana/San Diego	19%
Paso del Norte (El Paso/Ciudad Juárez)	44%
Lower Rio Grande/Bajo Bravo	31%
Sector of respondent (can be multiple)
Government agency	46%
Environmental education or preservation	23%
Other higher education	19%
Other agriculture	17%
Do you consult with the other side? (single answer)
Never	31%
Rarely	17%
Sometimes	21%
Frequently	31%
Do you collaborate with the other side? (single answer)
Never	33%
Rarely	21%
Sometimes	17%
Frequently	29%

Table 2. Closed-answer findings.

Primary issue identified
Water scarcity	50%
Flooding/stormwater	15%
Climate change	13%
Obstacles to addressing primary water issue
Lack of community knowledge	80%
Inadequacy of water infrastructure financing	75%
Lack of stakeholder engagement	65%
Fragmentation of responsibility between water institutions	65%
Border effect on primary issue
Political division	67%
Legal / institutional differences	54%
Population growth	50%
Barriers to collaboration
Crossing the border	33%
Too much time and effort	23%
Language barriers	23%
Redundancy with water institutions	19%
Lack of interest / sense of distance from MX	19%
Lack of interest/ arrogance from U.S.	19%
Resources for addressing water issues
Community knowledge	85%
Financing water infrastructure	83%
Stakeholder engagement	73%
Availability of information	66%
Other issues important for water solutions
Environmental issues (non-water)	58%
Poverty	56%
Education	56%

Table 3. Example of NVIVO cluster analysis for water scarcity.

Priority issue = Water Scarcity	Cluster 1 = Climate change consequences and acute water challenges	Other environmental issues	Climate change
		Water issues	Flooding
			Groundwater
			Stormwater
			Water quality
			Water scarcity
	Cluster 2 = Policy and Education	Government relationships	Federal
			International
			Local
		Public policy	Education
			Public health
			Recreation
	Cluster 3 = Technology and Agriculture	Economic industries	Agriculture
		Technology

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