The Construction and Sabotage of Successful Agricultural Lands in Semiarid Lands: A Case Study of Vitivinicultural Areas in Northern México

Abstract

The land-use planning effort for a semiarid watershed where wine is the staple economic product was evaluated. Over the last 30 years, three top-down local public policies have been in effect with the shared objective of building a sustainable valley where rural settlements, Mediterranean-type crops, and tourism can thrive. The evaluation result was that most of the proposed guidelines were not implemented. The questions addressed in this chapter are: what are the main reasons behind the non-compliance of regulations in land-use planning and what kind of alternatives can be proposed? To answer these questions, documental analysis of land-use planning publications, reports, and laws was analyzed. All findings were interpreted by a transdisciplinary team (the coauthors: local producers, government stakeholders, ecosystems management researchers, and graduate students). The main results behind the unsuccessfulness of the evaluated public policy instruments are: (1) unclear land tenure, (2) ambiguous laws and lack of by-laws, (3) corruption between buyers and government agents, and (4) lack of awareness by users. Our alternative proposal is a bottom-up transdisciplinary plan with five main strategies: (a) a participatory observatory as a science communication tool, (b) green infrastructure projects and guidelines, (c) identification and valuation of available ecosystem and environmental services, (d) diffusion of innovative wise water management techniques for the region, and lastly (e) a new larger scale land-use plan for the watershed that uses environmental units with landscape values for the local people. Our proposal might help others to change paradigms and design transdisciplinary regional plans.