Research Talk - Dr. Analiese Richard. "Before the Wall: Science and Environmental Governance on the US-Mexico Border"

In the early 1980s, a time of heightened geopolitical tension between the First and Third Worlds, Mexico and the US negotiated the first environmental agreement on the border region, the La Paz Agreement. A key dispute between the parties centered on the use of a relatively new technoscientific instrument, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), to govern transborder economic and infrastructural expansion. Using archival and ethnographic research, I trace the debates that arose both among US government agencies and between Mexican and US negotiators over requiring EIA, which originated in and was promoted worldwide by the US, but which the State Department sought to exclude from the La Paz Agreement. These debates yield important insights into how both countries approached environmental governance in the early days of its global spread, as well as the precedents this lopsided process set for later projects of environmental and economic cooperation such as NAFTA and USMCA.

 

Analiese Richard earned a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley. She has published articles and book chapters on the topics of citizenship, democracy, NGOs, cultures of expertise, and environmental governance. Her book, The Unsettled Sector: NGOs and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizenship in Rural Mexico. She has taught at universities in the United States and Mexico and is Full Professor in the Department of Humanities at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Her current research project explores the ethnographic history of environmental governance instruments in Mexico.