The governmental construction of environmental pollution: the air policy in Mexico City, 1979-1996

Abstract

I analyze atmospheric pollution, such as it is conceptualized in the programs elaborated by governmental authorities, as a product of a dual construction. On the one side, as a product of social construction, particularly as an ideological and political construction; ideological construction because it depends on the way society values, assumes and lives the problem of pollution. Political construction because its public emergence is in function of factors such as being valued as an element of civil reclaim, being valued by the governmental authority as profitable from the governability standpoint of legitimacy of public action, and being valued and lived by different social actors as a factor that affects the distribution of income and power relations. On the other side, as a result from an analytical construction carried out both by the scientific authority and the governmental one; for the latter, as for diagnostic elements upon which the objectives, goals strategies and actions of official programs to counteract air pollution are supported. Both sorts of constructions are interrelated. The diagnoses and action strategies of the programs of public policies reflect in various manners the sort of social valuing the environmental problems have, the political interests that come from the environmental issues to governmental and private spheres, the degree of knowledge reached and the sort and scope of civil claims.