Finding a Safe and Just Space for Water Use in Mexico City: An Evaluation of Mexico City's Water Public Policies with Doughnut Economic Sustainability Transitions Criteria

Sammanfattning: Mexico City’s water system is not sustainable. There is an unfair inequality gap in the quantity and quality of water access for its residents. Moreover, the groundwater aquifers in the city are being over-exploited and polluted. This has resulted in the sinking of the city, damage to the ecosystems, and the reduction of water access to Mexico City’s residents. As the policies are a direct instrument of the governments to transform the systems, this research aimed to find support tools that analyzed and strengthened the degree to which sustainable transition elements are included in Mexico City’s local policies. For this, a sustainable evaluation was made with the minimum sustainable criteria to guarantee the human right to water and to ensure a minimum ecological water flow of Mexico City’s basins. This sustainable criterion was based on Raworth’s (2019) Doughnut Economics Model but translated from a planetary focus to an urban water sector focus. For the methodology, the theory of change of the status quo policies was compared to the one required for a sustainable water model scenario of the city, to understand the sustainable transitions degree of the policies. The results from this comparison showed there are ongoing, missing, and threatened transitions. This means that there are different stages of the transition still required in the current and future Mexico City’s water policies. For this reason, this research proposed policy recommendations about how to include these sustainable transition elements in the policies in three stages. Moreover, it proposes to use this Raworth’s sustainable criteria as a clear basis to set a sustainable goal in different contexts, and the impact evaluation to understand what elements in the process are required to get to the sustainable scenario goal within each context.