SRS RN: Shared destinies: Hydro-social infrastructures for community involvement and sustainability in fragmented border regions

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Border agglomerations face distinctive sustainability challenges. This Sustainable Regional Systems planning grant is focused on water issues affecting three major zones along the U.S.-Mexico border that involve the San Diego/Tijuana, El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, and lower Rio Grande/Bajo Bravo Valley agglomerations. The project aims to map research resources, community partners, and the social infrastructure of these zones, and the participants will work collaboratively with border stakeholders to identify and prioritize water-related sustainability issues. Researchers from the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and the University of California, San Diego will collaborate on two binational, bilingual workshops in each site to engage community partners and to delineate water issues, barriers, and assets. The team also will conduct a survey to offer a broader and more quantitative perspective on water issues, barriers, and assets. Finally, the researchers will pursue a systematic collection and analysis of existing data, literature, reports, etc. on water in these settings. Through these activities, the research team will co-generate knowledge with civil society and government across a border region defined by complex relations, inequalities, cultural and linguistic differences, and political division.Sustainability challenges intensify at linkage sites, such as international borders, where differentiated people, goods, values, and rules come together for exchange and intermediation. Urban-rural agglomerations at borders constitute a populous, rapidly growing cohort of distinctive regional units. The U.S.-Mexico border, the most populated seam between regions of differing wealth in the world, has amongst the largest, most dynamically growing, and most stressed agglomerations. This planning project will contribute to the field of sustainability by delineating three critical border dynamics including the mutual socio-environmental linkage of populations that are divided markedly by prosperity and capacities, the transboundary cooperation in sharing and management of common resources, and the coordination across divisions of government, culture, language, and data. In particular, the key scientific and public concept of “commons” will be challenged and further developed at border sites that represent populations divided by prosperity and other capacities that are inherently linked. Overall, this research work will build towards a fully co-produced research project on sustainable regional systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.