Cross-Border Collaborations

In “A Binational Journey Toward Sustainability” (Issues, Summer 2024), Christopher A. Scott, Constantino Macías Garcia, Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña, Thomas F. Thornton, and Heather Kreidler highlight the critical role of partnerships in mobilizing the knowledge, action, and resources to advance sustainability pathways for the US-Mexico border region. The authors illustrate how partnerships enable trust building, resilience, and adaptability in a region often characterized as fraught with conflict and social-ecological challenges. Yet partnerships also need support and recognition to thrive. In the binational region, the technical expertise, communication and physical infrastructure, and administrative processes can vary widely across private, civil society, and governmental organizations, and asymmetries can foster competition rather than collaboration.

To leverage the existing organizational capacities, there is a need for investment in cross-border and within-country organizational networks. Such investment could enable organizations to autonomously develop the technical capacities and deepen their relations of trust and collaboration in the contested and highly dynamic binational space. Networks of boundary-spanning institutions and organizations—literally spanning the international border, but also bridging science-policy, citizen-government, Indigenous-settler, private-public divides—are increasingly critical.

In a different region of the world, through the Accelerating Adaptation via Meso-Level Integration (ACAMI) initiative in sub-Saharan Africa, we are exploring what makes partnerships of organizations effective in enabling climate change adaptation for small-scale agricultural producers. We focus on “meso-level organizations” that individually and collectively channel material resources, knowledge, finance, and experience between macro-level actors (national governments, international organizations) and local-level beneficiaries. As in the US-Mexico border region, these meso-level organizations demonstrate innovative practices, novel interventions, and valuable experiences for sustainability transformations. They also face constraints: they often lack the time, flexibility, and capacity to retrain and pivot to embrace emergent and evolving challenges in the way they know is most appropriate. Networks of organizations that enable cross-organization learning rarely receive funding from the international community, and are rarely prioritized in national policy efforts.

Findings from the ACAMI initiative suggest that there is a need for investments in the organizational landscape to enable existing and new partnerships to thrive as sustainability challenges evolve. Scaling success requires recognizing the role of organizational networks in producing, synthesizing, and sharing knowledge; efficiently leveraging finance; building capacity across organizations; and influencing policy. Networks can enable the specialization and expertise of some organizations to serve others, reducing the barriers to engage with the frontiers of sustainability science through state-of-the-art data analytics, leading-edge system modeling and knowledge integration, and innovative and ethical collaborative frameworks. More successful networks can strategically manage uncertainty by leveraging complementary member resources and enabling less powerful organizations to contribute. Attention to power asymmetries and alignment of multiple forms of knowledge inherent in sustainability transformations is fundamental. As organizations, their partnerships, and networks assume larger roles in the sustainability space, they also must be accountable to the communities that support them through transparent processes of monitoring and evaluation. Pursuing sustainability goals is thus just as much about complexity in the organizational landscape as it is about the social-ecological challenges of critical regions.

Hallie Eakin

Luis Bojórquez-Tapia

Eric Welch

Christopher A. Scott, Constantino Macías Garcia, Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña, Thomas F. Thornton, and Heather Kreidler offer a detailed yet concise look at a unique collaboration over the past decade, centered on the US-Mexico border region, by the countries’ academies of science. This work is both engaging and timely, with significant implications for advancing partnerships and sustainability policy in both countries.

The authors emphasize the border region as a shared binational, multidimensional landscape of similarities and differences. They point out that addressing the challenges arising in this vast and complex region—spanning politics, economics, the environment, and more—requires “collaborative approaches that extend beyond immediate geographical boundaries and across scientific disciplines.”

As a key point along the emerging path to partnership, the authors cite the 2020 report Advancing United States-Mexico Binational Sustainability Partnerships. The report reflected an inclusive reach, involving experts from the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Mexican Academy of Sciences, Mexican Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Medicine of Mexico. It also featured wide vision, encompassing the complexity of the border landscape within the comprehensive context of binational sustainability policy challenges.

One noteworthy point the authors raise is the role of the border as an effective venue for science diplomacy. As seen in other arenas of the US-Mexico border region, cooperation and coordination are possible where there is commitment. Leadership and personal relationships are particularly valuable, perhaps even more so than formal mechanisms of collaboration. In terms of policy science, this level of border diplomacy is exemplified by the efforts of the International Boundary and Water Commission/Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas, a joint organization that is responsible for applying the boundary and water treaties between the United States and Mexico and settling differences that may arise in their application.

I would further like to emphasize how important the efforts the authors describe have proved as hubs of knowledge and human relational capital. I have been fortunate to participate in some of the initiatives, such as the workshop in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in May 2018. This gathering featured in-depth scientific and policy discussions focused on drylands in the border region. Equally important was the opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and friends from both countries, with whom I had developed both professional and personal relationships over several years. I am convinced that this relational aspect has been one of the significant accomplishments of the journey initiated by the academies and should be nurtured in the years to come.

Ismael Aguilar-Barajas