ABSTRACT
The region straddling the US border with Mexico is well situated on the cutting edge of globalisation. If globalisation is taken to mean the process “of societal transformation that encompasses… growth in trade, investment, travel, computer networking, and transboundary pollution”, it is hard to escape its imprint on a border region that has been a prominent locale for globalising practices since those practices were embraced as a cornerstone of US foreign policy at the end of World War II.1 As early as 1965, a bilateral focus on the US-Mexico border area as a platform for assembly for export operations (under the auspices of the well-known Border Industrialisation Program [BIP]), initiated a process of rapid industrialisation that continues unabated today.2 Many of the manufacturing techniques and export practices now found across the globe were pioneered in this region, as well as their negative externalities in the form of social and environmental degradation and persistent economic dependency. By the mid-1970s, not much more than a decade after the BIP was rolled out, the environmental problems associated with this mode of development were clearly apparent. By 1983, mounting problems, including the transboundary spillover of rapid urbanisation, led the two countries to their first binational agreement addressing the mitigation of
environmental problems along the border. A decade later, as the newly minted North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) spurred these globalising trends, new environmental agreements were struck to mitigate their adverse effects. This article examines the trajectory of environmental protection along the US-
Mexico border since NAFTA entered into force. It begins with a brief review of the NAFTA debate and the agreements it spawned to protect the border environment. It then reports on the implementation and principal achievements of these agreements since 1994. These achievements are important and have partially buffered the border environment from the impact of globalisation, yet fall well short of the hopes and expectations of the border environmental community and the needs of border communities. The conclusion points to the enduring environmental stresses associated with globalisation along the border, the imperative of adopting a more strategic and comprehensive approach to environmental protection, and the need to need reinvigorate and strengthen federal commitments to environmental protection along the border.
