Institutional Conflicts in Urban Land Use: Land Regularization in Environmental Conservation Areas in Mexico City and São Paulo

There is a broad consensus that public policies must be changed to address the urgent challenges of climate change. However, environmental policies may clash with social policies, placing policymakers and politicians in a dilemma about which policies to pursue. This paper explores a recurring conflict in large Global South cities: between environmental conservation areas and the regularization of informal settlements. Focusing on Mexico City and São Paulo, where informal settlements have expanded into areas designated as conservation and watershed protection zones, housing 242,000 people and 172,000 households, respectively, it investigates how this conflict played out from the 1990s to the 2020s. Using a comparative process-tracing methodology, it explores how land regularization was made “compatible” with environmental regulations in both cases. However, the leading actors, arrangements, and outcomes differed substantially.

In Mexico City, the city government avoided taking sides and delegated decision-making to a collegiate body of multiple actors. With the upper hand of environmentalists, the collegiate developed a complex procedure to assess environmental damage and implement mitigation. While inefficient in practice, it allowed the government to avoid blame and partially address both sides' concerns. In São Paulo, a pro-housing coalition of bureaucrats embedded in civil society pushed for legal changes, especially during the Workers' Party mandates. They leveraged political connections and partisan alignment at local and federal levels to override environmental rules and frame land regularization as environmentally beneficial.

In summary, the arrangement in Mexico City increased veto points, stalling land regularization, while in São Paulo, it decreased opportunities for opposition, streamlining and accelerating regularization in environmental conservation areas. This comparative analysis thus underscores how institutional arrangements and political dynamics shape the conflicts between environmental and social policies in urban governance.