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

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.