Interactions Between Economic Development, Housing, and Public Transport Policies and the Mobility Experience of Workers in Greater Mexico City

The Policy Interactions Framework: Interactions between economic development, housing, and public transport policies and the mobility experience of workers in Greater Mexico City David López-García, PhD Adjunct Assistant Professor, Urban Studies Department, Queens College – CUNY Visiting Research Scholar, Observatory on Latin America (OLA), The New School Paper prepared for the 5th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP5), Barcelona, July 5-9, 2021 (4,321 words) DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE Abstract Contemporary urban policy analysis is by and large based on a sectorial approach that subdivides urban dynamics into individual silos. The silos approach to urban policy analysis is problematic as it leads researchers and practitioners to retreat into narrow areas of expertise and makes it difficult to identify the policy interactions likely to produce unintended urban outcomes. Aiming to get pass the silos approach, this article seeks to contribute analytical and methodological tools for the empirical investigation of policy interactions in urban policy analysis. To do so, the Policy Interactions Framework (PIF) is developed and applied. The article presents the assumptions, concepts, propositions, causal drivers, and the categories of analysis of the PIF. The PIF is then applied to the study of the mobility experience of workers in Greater Mexico City. By applying the PIF, this article demonstrates that the highly unequal mobility experience of workers is the result of the interaction between three urban policy areas that often work at cross- purposes: economic development, housing, and transportation. 1 Introduction Contemporary urban policy analysis is by and large based on a sectorial approach that subdivides urban dynamics into individual silos (Cohen, 2016; Crawford, 2018; OECD, 2010; Pettit et al., 2019). Within this approach, scholars and practitioners have traditionally divided reality into subsectors to analyze it, understand it, and deal with it. For example, in the field of international assistance for urban development and the road towards the Habitat III agenda, much of the urban policy debate remained in silos. As it has been pointed out by observers of the Habitat III conference, “most proposed analysis of issues of human settlements was within disciplines and not cross-disciplines” (Cohen, 2016: p. 41). The silos approach in urban policy analysis is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the approach has led researchers and practitioners to retreat into narrow areas of expertise which has led to a failure to link together important subfields of investigation (Duranton & Guerra, 2016). For example, as Duranton and Guerra (2016) have pointed out, within this approach the land use specialists traditionally deal exclusively with land use issues, transportation planners focus only on transportation, and housing scholars think only about shelter. Second, by directing scholars’ and policymakers’ attention to a specific policy area, the silos approach makes it difficult to acknowledge the interactions between silos which produce unintended consequences. This is not to say that the inquiry about policy interactions has been completely absent from academic debates. There are several efforts to develop analytical frameworks useful for the assessment of policy interactions (Bason, 2014; Fuller & Vu, 2011; Nilsson et al., 2012, 2016; Pettit et al., 2019). However, most of the analytical frameworks hitherto developed are primarily concerned with achieving policy coherence and complementarities in policy design. Much less is known about the long-term outcomes of existing policy interactions and the ways in which 2 such interactions have operated to produce inequitable urban outcomes over the long-term. Aiming to get pass the policy silos approach, this article seeks to contribute analytical and methodological tools for the empirical investigation of policy interactions in urban policy analysis. To do so, the Policy Interactions Framework (PIF) is developed and applied. The PIF provides analytical lens to explore the possibility that urban outcomes are better understood as the result of the dynamics of interactions between policies from different policy domains than from any single policy silo. The interaction between policy domains is placed as the locus of study. Epistemologically, it is in the study of such interaction where new knowledge about the causality between urban policy and the urban experience is produced. The PIF builds on two influential theories of the policy process: urban political economy (Nevarez, 2015) and policy feedback theory (Mettler & Sorelle, 2017). The field of urban political economy examines how urban development shapes, and is shaped by decisions and activities from economic, social, and governmental actors (Nevarez, 2015). Policy feedback theory holds that policies, once operating, restructure subsequent political processes by becoming an additional layer to the institutional setting within which the policy process takes place (Mettler, 2016; Mettler & Sorelle, 2017; Skocpol, 1992). The PIF, then, is designed to explore the possibility that the political economy within a specific policy domain can produce outcomes that loop back as an input into the political economy within a distinct policy domain. The PIF is applied to the study of the policy interactions that have shaped the mobility experience of Workers in Greater Mexico City. Based on 64 semi- structured interviews with key informants and 4 focus groups, this research identified a policy interaction contributing to shape the mobility experience of workers. Housing policies have consistently pushed workers towards the urban periphery and further away from existing employment subcenters. Economic 3 development policies have concentrated formal jobs towards the urban center. Public transit policy has been decisively influenced the political engagement of private providers of public transport who have achieved to commodify public transport. When interacting, housing, economic development, and housing policies have contributed to produce inequalities in the mobility experience for workers in Greater Mexico City. The article is organized as follows. The next section presents a literature review, where I put forward the rationale for the development of the PIF, I explain the theories that inform the framework, and present its main categories of analysis. Then, the PIF is formally presented and a step-by-step guide of how to apply the framework is provided. The PIF is then applied to the empirical study of the long- term policy interactions that have contributed to shape the unequal mobility experience of workers in Greater Mexico City. Finally, the concluding section points out to the potential research avenues opened by the PIF. Literature review In the second edition of the influential book Theories of the Policy Process, Sabatier (2007) made a lucid argument about the need for better analytical frameworks in public policy analysis. Given the staggering complexity of the policy process, “the analyst must find some way of simplifying the situation in order to have any chance of understanding it” (Sabatier, 2007: 4). To Sabatier (2007), the scientific method provides such a strategy, given that its fundamental ontological assumption is that a smaller set of critical relationships underlies the bewildering complexity of the phenomena under study. The challenge then lies in crafting the analytical lens, which is able to visualize and better-understand the specific set of relationships under study. The question is, amidst the complexity of urban phenomena, which specific relationships should the policy analyst look at? The development of conceptual frameworks provides a 4 fruitful entry point (Ostrom, 2007). Following Ostrom (2007), the role of conceptual frameworks is to provide a list of elements that should be considered to analyze a policy process, and points out the relationships among these elements that the policy analyst should consider. Frameworks, then, “attempt to identify the universal elements that any theory relevant to the same kind of phenomena would need to include” (Ostrom, 2007: 25). Until now, the available frameworks for the study of the policy process lack guidance on how to conduct empirical research about policy interactions (Sabatier, 2007b; Weible & Sabatier, 2018). From rational choice-based frameworks such as the policy stages heuristic (Brewer, 1974; Lasswell, 1971) and the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Kiser & Ostrom, 1982; Ostrom, 2007), to post-Weberian frameworks like the Multiple Streams (Herweg et al., 2018; Kingdon, 1984), Punctuated Equilibrium (Baumgartner, 1993; Baumgartner & Jones, 1991), Advocacy Coalition (Sabatier, 1987; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993), and Policy Feedback (Mettler, 2016; Skocpol, 1992), to postpositivist frameworks such as Policy Narratives (Jones & Mcbeth, 2010), frameworks have been developed and applied for the study of individual policy domains. Equipped with existing analytical frameworks, scholars and practitioners will inevitably fall short to fully grasp the complex ways in which policies interact with each other. The literature on the policy process would surely benefit from developing an analytical framework specifically designed for the study of long-term policy interactions. This article aims at providing such analytical lenses. However, designing an analytical framework for the study of policy interactions is by no means an

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