Elusive Urban - Regional Governance: The Sustainable Development Challenge of Megacities in Latin America

Abstract

Four of the world’s megacities have consolidated in the Latin American (LatAm) region: Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, while there are two more in the process: Lima and Bogota. These big urban agglomerations are not only essential national economic engines of major demographic significance; but have extended into city-regions which embody the most acute development challenges: environmental degradation, resource inefficiency, social exclusion, income inequality, impoverishment, insecurity, violence, social and economic vulnerability to climate change, and corresponding liveability concerns. In brief, LatAm’s megacities are dealing with the cumulative impacts and feedback loops of long-neglected mega-problems. This paper explores the strategies or institutional arrangements used to face these cities and city-regions’ development issues and the governance practices implicit in different approaches used to manage key sectors. A review of existing comparative studies and cases, complemented by several interviews with local experts, suggests that specific political, administrative, and legal national contexts greatly define the options to formally approach these challenges at an appropriate geographic scale. However, our analysis highlights three issues for overcoming political and institutional hurdles, which hamper integrated planning, coordinated policies and investments at the megacity scale, and the limited implementation of formal, integrated management schemes, such as metropolitan areas, to address problems across and beyond metropolises effectively. The evaluation suggests both situations have promoted the emergence of alternate, sometimes informal, parallel network governance arrangements amongst a diversity of stakeholders.