The purpose of this chapter, as mentioned in the introduction and Chapter II, is to test the first hypothesis of this research. According to this hypothesis, government air pollution programmes from 1979 to 1996 lack an appropriate analytical social dimension, in the sense explained in Chapter II. All these programmes are biased toward a more technical approach. However, although social aspects and concepts are included, they are not incorporated for the purpose o f explaining facts. This chapter is based on an analysis of the three government programmes already mentioned. The methodology for this analysis was described in Chapter II and will be summarised in section 2 of this chapter. Before the specific analysis is provided, an overview of the general context in which these programmes were designed will be given.
1. Government Programmes to Combat Pollution 1979-1996
The period from 1979-1996 saw the implementation of three government programmes to combat the air pollution problem in Mexico City. These included: 1) “The Co-ordinated Programme for Air Quality Improvement in Mexico City 1979- 1982 (PCMCA) begun in 1979, 2) the “Integral Programme to Combat Air Pollution in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area” (PICCA) started in 1990 and 3) the “ 1995- 2000 Air Quality Improvement Programme for the Valley of Mexico (PROAIRE) begun in 1996. Various measures were implemented in the 1980s, some of which had a powerful impact in terms of improving the air quality of the region. They are not included in this analysis since do not constitute comprehensive government programmes but merely isolated measures.
Between the date of publication of the first and last programmes, fundamental changes took place as regards both the environmental problem in the Valley of Mexico and the economic and socio-political conditions in which it took place. First o f all, the composition of substances released into the atmosphere underwent significant modifications as a result of changes in the types of fuel used for different manufacturing activities and changes in the composition of the product itself. The conceptualisation of these changes is crucial to drawing up air policies. However, government diagnoses failed to describe the changing situation, meaning that the
proposals for action lagged behind the development of these phenomena. The entire environmental programming system for 1979-1996 failed to reflect these changing socio-economic circumstances. This meant that although the latter underwent an intense process of change, political policies insisted on repeating an analytical and programmatic project which began with the 1979 programme and was characterised by positing a notion of atmospheric problems and a set of proposals for action outside the economic, social and political context of the problems they sought to influence.
The construction of the environmental programme by the government sector has experienced an analytical deadlock, reflected in the inability of official programmes to transcend the narrow view of the environment and air pollution which was made official in the 1979 programme. It has also limited the sphere of analysis and government intervention to the level of the physical and technical existence of problems, ignoring the economic, social and political aspects of the problems being targeted by government action. The cause of the deadlock is due to a planning system that does not permit the involvement of scientists or the public at either the policy formulation or implementation stage. The scientific community’s findings fail to reach government offices and when they do, they are only used to confirm government views. The institutional bodies created to ensure the participation of various sectors of the community are only called on to validate diagnoses that have already been undertaken and decisions that have already been made in government offices. Real civic participation is absent during the various stages of planning, and replaced by a manipulative version of it which attempts to convince citizens o f the government’s view o f the problem and of the official version of solutions. Environmental programmes appear as a unilateral construction, primarily designed to legitimise public action.
The differences between the programmes are more a question of form than content. The general conception formulated by PCMCA in 1979 continues to be maintained even in the most recent programmes. The analytical and programmatic suggestions proposed by PCMCA in 1979 have become a sort of analytical ceiling which subsequent programming systems have failed to break through. One difference between PICCA (1990) and PRO AIRE (1996) is that the latter has taken the original programme to its ultimate consequences and provided a more detailed and extensive breakdown of specific goals and actions. Beyond these operational differences, the
most recent programmes revalidate the concept in which priority was given to the physico-chemical and technical aspect, revealing an inability to reach the level of social and political aspects.
The most recent programme (Proaire, 1996) incorporated part of the international discussion on social and cultural aspects of pollution. The aim was to adapt the government’s planning action to the international environmental discourse, with the emerging aspirations of an increasingly informed citizenry which was more aware of the deterioration of its quality of its life as a result of the deterioration of air quality. Changes in the characteristics of pollution and the social context mentioned, which the government agenda has failed to assimilate, are also linked to the improved quality of knowledge generated and the internalisation of the environmental issue in Mexican society’s scheme o f preferences. Air policy has become more aggressive while citizens have become more aware of the problem. Certain changes in the ways of perceiving environmental problems, the dissemination of the scientific findings produced by the scientific community, a more participatory society, the severity of environmental damage which increasingly affects the health, economy and everyday life of various sectors of the population and the obviously poor air quality, have led to a public awareness of air pollution, at least among some sectors of the population.
The 1979 PCMCA was created in a somewhat unfavourable social context for achieving the shift from the physical to the social aspects of pollution. The four million tons of pollutants released into the air failed to ensure that environmental issues were regarded as a social problem or the focus of public policies. This presence was not enough because there was no parallel, broad-based environmentalist movement, the scientific community’s findings were still not sufficient to analyse the causes or effects of pollution, the problem of lead in the atmosphere had been insufficiently documented and disseminated, while studies on its effects on health had not yet reached the point of raising the population’s awareness. In short, there was no significant shift from the concept of physical to social risk, which results in its being incorporated into the community’s package of basic needs and demands
The handling of environmental issues by the Secretariat of State for Health not only revealed the public health approach used in the problem but also decision makers’ lack of room for manoeuvre in the implementation of these programmes.
The Secretariat was characterised by its low capacity for manoeuvre, scant financial and professional resources and its use of a traditional medical approach. The 1979 programme contained no attempt to construct environmental issues on the basis of their own legality, merely in conjunction with the branch of medicine concerned with public health. There was no link between environmental proposals and those of an economic nature nor was there any attempt to question development models and their link with environmental degradation.
A comparison of the problem of air pollution as it was conceived in PICCA and PCMCA, assuming that both reflect the general conditions of their times, shows that in the eleven years that have elapsed between the two programmes, there have been substantial changes in the air pollution problem in the Valley of Mexico. This has translated into a different interpretation (more scientific, more political and also more ideological) on the part of the different sectors of society involved and reflects the meticulous social construction of the environmental problem. Key factors in this process obviously include the increase in the volume and composition of air pollution and the progress achieved as regards the knowledge and role of the media. In this respect, there has been more accurate measurement and characterisation of some of the pollutants, particularly those classified by the international community as criterion contaminants, together with the accumulation of a significant number of case studies on the relation between pollution and morbidity. At the same time, the environmental problem has become a banner for environmental groups and various sectors of society, while at the same time, this discourse has been integrated into official planning discourse. In 1985, as a result of the devastating effects of the earthquake in Mexico City and government inaction, there was a vast degree of social mobilisation. The environment appeared with a force it had previously lacked at the level of group awareness, one of the most striking aspects being the emergence of various environmental organisations. From the ideological point of view, the issues of sustainability and the environment have gradually penetrated the scheme of social values, and slowly intervened as an aspect of the quality of life. The media and the educational system have placed the topic of the environment in the public scenario, creating a public opinion that is increasingly interested in the environment, either because it is affected by its degradation or because it is moved by the increasing amount of information published on the various dangers faced as a result of irresponsible natural resource management.
In 1979, when PCMCA was drawn up, the volume of pollutants appeared to be similar to that of 1994. Obviously, four million tons of pollutants in 1994 corresponded to a more precise measurement, while in 1979, only estimates were available. It is also true that the contents of the two inventories are extremely different. In 1994, the amount of lead in the atmosphere was significantly less. This does not mean, however, that the rest of the pollutants and the variety of toxic substances, in terms of their effects on health, were more favourable in either of the two periods analysed. However, government and civic awareness of the scope of the problem did not exist in 1979 to the same degree as it did in 1996.
The period between 1979 and 1996 saw significant changes in the country as a whole and in the Valley of Mexico at the different levels of the environmental issue in general and the air problem in particular. The population in the Metropolitan Zone increased significantly, the number of industries and service establishments also rose, the composition of air pollution underwent transformations, inputs were modified, the various types of fuel were subjected to an intense process of reformulation, economic agents were significantly readjusted while political agents faced new, changing situations which led them to seek different forms of social consensus. This period also marked the start of a new form of institutional apparatus in which environmental issues were fully incorporated into official discourse and the practice of environmental planning and management became official. The government of Mexico City, which, in the early 1980s, had no specific organisation for handling environmental issues, created first an environmental office and then a Secretariat of State for the Environment. These institutions arose under the auspices of other national institutions, driven by the same need to deal with the various national environmental problems. However, this was also a period of change at the level of civic awareness o f environmental issues, and of an unprecedented creation of knowledge linked to environmental issues, particularly the deterioration of the quality o f life of many sectors of society.
However, as a result of all these changes, air pollution programmes have failed to incorporate an appropriate social approach to reflect all these economic, social and political dynamic that have emerged over the last two decades. Social and political forces, as explanatory elements of air pollution issues, are totally absent from government programmes, while the proposals for actions do not include measures to deal with this dimension of the problem. After this general background to the design
and implementation of air pollution programmes, the following section will introduce the analysis of the three main programmes to test the first hypothesis of this research, on the lack of an appropriate social dimension in official air pollution programmes.
2. Criticism of the Government’s Construction of Air Pollution
The construction of the air problem and the strategies designed for its programmatic treatment in the Valley of Mexico, as specified in the three programmes successively implemented between 1979 and 1996, will now be analysed. As noted in Chapter II, the methodology for analysing these programmes is as follows:
First, the list of the factors that each of the programmes regards as most important in explaining air pollution is presented. These factors are then classified into two groups, one of which corresponds to what could be regarded as a first level o f analysis (level 1), which includes what has been classified here as physical,
chemical and technical factors, and another which has been called a second level o f analysis (level 2) which includes those of a socio-political order. It is assumed that these levels have a specific degree of explanatory effectiveness on their own, but when placed at the level of public policies, the level corresponding to social aspects is more effective inasmuch as the most important relations to be explained or modified in the implementation of policies are those o f a social and political nature. This analytical arrangement does not reduce the importance of the first level. Instead, it links both levels, removing their self-referential nature by giving them relative rather than absolute levels of causality. A factor is classified as level 1 when it refers to the physical and chemical aspects of pollution, or when its explanatory sphere is limited to technical elements, without seeking relations beyond this level of existence. A factor is classified as level 2 when its causal elements transcend level 1 and suggest causal links between the conditions of existence at the physical, chemical and technical level and social determinations or their links with political forces. To a certain extent, this level includes the embodiment at the social and political level of factors expressed in level 1. It is essential to point out that at this level, it does not suffice for a programme to indicate the incorporation of socio economic elements for it to be included in level 2; it must establish precise relations
level 1 factors at the level of social relations. These agents must be located in the context of what makes them into this type of agents, in other words, as bearers of resources which influence or determine the specific shape taken by a phenomenon linked to air pollution. Programmes often mention socio-economic factors, yet restrict themselves to their physical and technical expressions. For example, industrial or population concentration tends to be regarded as a socio-economic element. In other words, the consequence o f a relationship is taken to be the relationship itself, and the virtues of socio-economic aspects are attributed to it. It is worth pointing out that the limits between levels 1 and 2 are arbitrary and should only be regarded as tools of analysis.
The aim is to analyse the analytical procedure by which each programme prioritises the causal factors it uses to explain air pollution. The programmatic strategies and their relation and congruence with the construction of the environmental programme will be analysed below. The next stage involves a comparison with an ideal scheme that includes those elements which, according with the assumptions of this research, should be included in the construction of the problem. The three programmes are classified according to their proximity or distance from this scheme. It is assumed here that a policy that is congruent with a social notion of environmental factors could be classified as more or less appropriate depending on its proximity to or distance from this analytical scheme.
2.1 Co-ordinated Air Quality Improvement Programme fo r the Valley o f Mexico 1979 (PCMCA)
In 1979, the government of Mexico City published the Co-ordinated Air Quality Improvement Programme for the Valley of Mexico in which, in general terms, it incorporated the recommendations of the international group o f experts invited by the government of the Mexico City in November 1978 (DDF, 1978) to analyse the problem of air pollution in this region of the country. This programme, which does not contain the diagnosis on which its programmatic strategy is based, includes natural and geographical features to explain the air pollution in the Valley of Mexico, citing the concentration of human activities in the Valley of Mexico as another causal feature. Thus, demographic concentration, industrial concentration, the concentration of polluting industries and cars are listed as the causes of pollution.
The problem of air pollution is constructed, particularly at the first level of analysis, according to the scheme presented here (schemes 1 and 2as see appendix), including considerations corresponding to level 2 but without giving them any explanatory relevance. In this respect, the physical-chemical-technical characteristics of pollution suffice to explain the atmospheric problem in the Valley. Consequently, air problems emerge as the result of a vast concentration of polluting substances discharged into a geographical and climatological sphere together with a type of soil susceptible to degradation and the emission of dust. Under these conditions and given the lack of natural dispersing factors, the substances emitted not only concentrate in the Valley’s atmosphere but also produce chemical processes and reactions which, when combined with other physical and chemical features, create situations o f environmental contingency.
On the one hand, there are the technical characteristics of the vehicle fleet and industrial factories and services, while on the other, there are the type and quality of fuel used, which have been here classified as level 1 because, in conjunction with
factors of a physical-chemical and natural order in general, they constitute the principal factors behind air pollution in the region, according to this programme. The PCMCA contains certain elements which could be included in level 2, such as the cases of mentioning the concentration of socio-economic activities and consumer elements such as unlimited car use However, the PCMCA’s inclusion o f social and economic factors does not have the same or a greater explanatory capacity than that