Debates about how much the federal government should influence local-level infrastructure are not new, and as the negotiations over the American Jobs Plan have shown, these debates are often contentious. These conversations are not limited to the US. As Democrats and Republicans argue for and against federal oversight of infrastructure, we spoke with Román Meyer, Mexico’s Secretary of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development (SEDATU in Spanish), to learn how Mexico has approached the balance between federal intervention and local planning in infrastructure projects.

Under Meyer’s administration, SEDATU has set out to improve urban infrastructure, strengthen the capacity of local planning institutions, and ultimately redress the social inequities that pervade Mexican cities. To achieve this mission, SEDATU has centralized some infrastructure investment decisions previously left to municipalities and more assertively influenced how local institutions engage in land and urban planning. We have distilled some lessons shared by Meyer during our conversation that could inform how policymakers in the US approach federal intervention in local infrastructure.

For SEDATU, improving the planning capacity of municipalities is essential. Only 10 percent of municipalities in Mexico have a local sustainable development plan, 15 percent of which are up-to-date. Between 2010 and 2019, 45 percent of Mexican municipalities experienced urban growth without any plan to guide this expansion.

Read the full article about infrastructure planning in Mexico by Jorge González-Hermoso and Jorge Morales-Burnett at Urban Institute.