Ecological transition and social trajectories: the translators of sustainable mobility in Mexico City between international expertise and local politics
This article seeks to understand the causes and context of the “transition” towards sustainable urban mobility that has been implemented since the early 2000s in Mexico City despite the rather unfavorable political climate. Based on an ethnographic survey, it analyzes the “process of translation” that members of a cycling collective initiated in the 90’s. Although they initially occupied a marginal position within the political parties’ networks, these actors gradually manage to put the “transition” towards sustainable mobility on the agenda by promoting expert and international resources. Through professionalization strategies and entryism in the local government, they manage to boost the development of low-pollution public transportation modes. Facing the persistent contradictions of public action in this area, they finally seek to use this insertion in the political-administrative field in order to guarantee the autonomy of their contribution, by setting up a new legal framework dependent on the specific resources of international expertise. The analysis of this process underlines the need to study “transition trajectories” in the light of the social trajectories of actors who promote them. The “transition” to sustainable mobility is thus conditioned in Mexico by a transformation of the space of urban policies production, affected by the emergence of actors carrying new legitimacy operating shifts and exchanges between different fields. These movements show, more than an opposition between local political capital and international expertise, the complex logic of transfer between these two types of resources.