Cross-Border Community Advocacy and Cooperation in the Paso del Norte Airshed

Between 1940 and 1990, the Paso del Norte Region (El Paso, TX/Cd. Juarez, CH/ Sunland Park, NM) experienced an extraordinary and unsustainable rate of growth, primarily due to the Bracero Program and the Border Industrialization Program. By the early-1990s, rapid industrialization and poor socioeconomic conditions coupled with geographic characteristics and failed environmental governance to produce the worst air quality along the U.S.-Mexico border. My research examines the work of the Paso del Norte Air Quality Task Force (Task Force) – a binational consortium of business leaders, NGOs, physicians, scientists, and government officials that spearheaded an advocacy effort to gain recognition of a common airshed with coordinated pollution abatement agenda across jurisdictions. The Task Force was instrumental to the 1996 adoption of the Joint Advisory Committee on Air Quality Improvement for the El Paso - Ciudad Juárez - Doña Ana County Air Quality Management Basin (JAC), through the La Paz Agreement. The Task Force was also responsible for facilitating several innovative cross-border pollution abatement projects. However, I argue that the Task Force was truly significant because it successfully advocated for coordinated transboundary resource governance, which is evident in subsequent border environmental policy initiatives beyond the Paso del Norte Airshed.