The global political agenda has included some high-profile environmental summits over the past few months. Three of these events stand out. The 2022 United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, was held from 6–20 November 2022. This was followed from 7–19 December 2022 by the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montréal, Canada, and the UN-Water Summit at UN Headquarters in New York City from 22–24 March 2023. Of these three events, the Biodiversity Summit made the most impact as delegates committed to protecting 30% of land and 30% of coastal and marine areas by 2030. This pledge is remarkable because it re-establishes political commitments to protect biodiversity, which is a key component of climate action. At the same time, many observers of the summit questioned how nation-states will implement this goal. Like the SDGs, the “30 by 30” commitment is long on aspirations but short on operationalization details. This observation is not a criticism of the agreement per se but a recognition of the challenges preventing ambitious biodiversity conservation plans from being fully implemented.
In fact, implementation mechanisms are key components of successful sustainable development strategies. Monitoring and evaluation are often overlooked in global discussions of sustainability. However, policy innovations often occur at the local level, and they often derive from evaluation.
In this issue of Regions & Cohesion, the editorial team is pleased to highlight discussions of innovative local sustainability evaluation. Specifically, we present three Spanish-language articles that focus on this theme as well as an interesting English-language assessment of water cooperation in the region of West Africa.
The first article in this issue by Carolina Álvarez-Peredo and Armando Contreras-Hernández addresses an original proposal to improve the understanding and the implementation of the Management Units for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Wildlife (UMA for its acronym in Spanish). The Mexican environmental authorities presented this scheme in the late 1990s as an innovative way to combine environmental sustainability and economic development for vulnerable communities. This article proposes a unique multidisciplinary approach to the evaluation of the effectiveness of the conservation scheme, introducing a paradigm shift contextualizing UMAs as complex and adaptive socio-ecological systems with the potential to offer ecosystem antifragility alternatives.
Noteworthy, there is a growing interest in advancing the collaborative and sustainable development efforts of water resources in the international arena, especially in cases where countries share rivers and other key freshwater resources. In the second article presented here, Miguel Roy Whitehead Dos Santos looks at the current state of water cooperation initiatives regarding two major transboundary river basins in West Africa: Niger and Lake Chad. The author proposes an evaluation method combining quantitative and qualitative data, providing insights into understanding how stakeholders and institutions interact to face ongoing challenges in this relevant region connected by water.
Continuing with the local assessment endeavors, Lissette Juárez Islas, Columba Rodríguez Alviso, José Luis Aparicio López, Salvador Villerías Salinas, and Mirna Castro Bello analyze the Tres Palos Lagoon case study, in Guerrero, Mexico, through a structural analysis matrix (MICMAC), which represents an innovative tool for local sustainability evaluation. Interestingly, actors highlight on a participatory basis the relevance of environmental education. They conclude that the socio-environmental degradation documented by the study interlinks to corruption and weak governance and governability factors.
Such factors are also present in the fourth article included in this issue of Regions & Cohesion, written by Esmeralda Pliego Alvarado and Edith Kauffer. This study contributes to environmental policy debates by assessing vertical and horizontal policy coherences regarding Mexican climate action in a multi-scalar context. The study focuses on the case of the Usumacinta River Basin in the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Campeche, southeast Mexico, which is currently one of the most important and endangered Mexican regions in ecological and social terms. The authors underline a vertical coherence between the climate measures on the national and international scales, as well as coherence within the legal frameworks at the state level in Chiapas but not in the states of Tabasco and Campeche. On the other hand, horizontal incoherences are visible at the basin level, both in the legal framework at the state level in Chiapas, Tabasco, and Campeche and in terms of concrete local basin actions. This is the first study that applies policy coherence for development evaluation to river basins in Mexico. Moreover, the analysis presented here identifies how horizontal and vertical policy incoherence interacts between the national scale and the states in the Usumacinta River Basin.
In the leadership forum, Tainá Siman reflects on enforcing norms for sanctioning member countries within Regional Integration Organizations (RIOs) when concerns arise after irregularities in regime changes or undemocratic practices occur. This comparative analysis is based on two paradigmatic cases: Venezuela in Mercosur, and Hungary in the European Union. Rather than providing a straightforward answer on the success or failure of processes in those RIO frameworks, the article brings forward keen observations on these case studies, presenting them as sources of mutual learning.
To close the summer issue, Analine Berenice Vázquez Bahéna portrays the history of the famous mining town of Taxco de Alarcón, Guerrero, Mexico, which currently comes to life through tourism and the production of jewelry, mainly from silver. Through a brief tour of images, the author contextualizes the site's dynamics of livelihoods and culture, where she is conducting her doctoral research on soil contaminants and potential repercussions on human health in the area. This case further underscores the need for local sustainability evaluation. This approach to sustainable development may be limited in scope geographically. However, local evaluation promotes concrete actions that operationalize sustainability, and in many ways, it presents a fruitful pathway for implementing sustainability actions. The accumulation of local policy evaluation tools may be a more effective sustainable development policy strategy than grand declarations of principles in global summits.
Harlan Koff, Citlalli Alheli González H., Edith Kauffer, Carmen Maganda