Between Threat and Opportunity: The Impact of Drug Trafficking on Governance in the Frontier Region of Mexico and the United States

ABSTRACTThe war on drugs along the U.S. - Mexico border is widely recognized as a threat to public security and border integrity in both countries. However, the demands imposed on public officials and institutions of both countries continue. How have these public institutions, officials and administrators responded to the continuing demands for public services in terms of:* Political-administrative relations: How have the wars affected the ways that public administrators work with elected and appointed officials in multiple levels of government and across national boundaries to provide public services?* The role of community institutions: How have community agencies along the border responded on the ongoing needs of public safety, security, legal trade facilitation and transport, economic development, water management, environmental protection and migration?* Performance and productivity: How has the war on drugs affected agency productivity? Perhaps more importantly, how have wars affected the ability of public managers to measure the performance of their agencies and to respond appropriately to changing conditions?* Communications, decision making and organizational learning: What innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have made it easier for them to work with and learn from each other despite these risks?Keywords: Mexico-U.S. relations, drug trafficking, public administration, capacity-building, governanceIntroductionGlobalization describes the interacting conditions that make the world smaller and more interconnected (Keohane and Nye, 2000). These include faster and cheaper information, communication and transportation technologies (ICTs); the gamut of demographic, economic, political, social and environmental conditions around the world; and threats like poverty, war, terrorism, violence, ethnic conflict, environmental pollution, natural disasters, pandemics and global climate change.Whatever the specific pressures that define globalization in a given context, they generally increase demands for governance- i.e., effective political responses to them by elected and appointed officials, public administrators, and international financial institutions (IFIs). Good governance means enhanced government capacity to marshal resources and coordinate authoritative national and international responses (Farazmand, 1999; Pollitt and Bouchaert, 2000; Jreisat, 2011). In developed countries, this typically means maintaining governments' abilities to coordinate policy, gather information, deliver services through multiple (often non-governmental) partners, replace hierarchical bureaucracies with more flexible mechanisms for managing indirect government (Dilulio, Garvey and Kettl, 1993; Brudney, O'Toole and Rainey, 2000; Kettl, 2002), and resolve issues of performance and accountability caused by interactions across sectors and levels of government (Klingner, Nalbandian and Romzek, 2002). In developing countries, good governance usually means establishing government's ability to deliver vital public services (through core management functions like budgeting, human resource management and program evaluation) while simultaneously focusing on more fundamental changes (e.g., citizen participation, decentralization, innovation and entrepreneurial leadership (Kettl, 1997) required for effective political systems.In this context, the war on drugs along the US - Mexico border is widely recognized as a threat to both public safety and border security. Nonetheless, public administrators and public agencies in both countries face continueddemands for public services, particularly those for which state and local governments have traditionally beenresponsible such as education, public health, public works and community development. So this threat also represents an unrecognized opportunity to examine how state and local governments throughout the border region between the US and Mexico have responded to this crisis, particularly with respect to the governance issues that have traditionally been considered important in comparative public administration:* Political-Administrative Relations. …

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