Municipal Risk Atlases are one of the policy instruments that Mexican government has prioritized in the last few years in order to consolidate the territorial regulation of human settlements in the country. This paper reviews the legal, institutional conceptual and methodological developments of these documents and analyzes its current scope and limitations within the Program of Risk Prevention in Human Settlements (PRAH), which had been designed and implemented by the Ministry of Social Development (SEDESOL) between 2010 and 2012, and by the Ministry f Urban, Territorial and Agrarian Development (SEDATU) from 2013. The objective of the paper is to understand the conditions under which the Municipal Risk Atlases have been produced to regulate human settlements in risk-prone areas, as one of many juridical instruments that operate in the fields of land use planning and natural hazards provisions. In the first place, we review different approaches that have been used by different agents within the federal government to produce cartographic information to identify and reduce disaster risk. That includes the different concepts and methodologies used to identify different risk components (such as 'vulnerability', 'affected systems', 'disturbances') but also under which institutional context each of them emerge, how they relate to each other and how are they integrated with other policy devices. This legal and institutional review leads to a conceptual framework based on recent contributions of the field of legal geographies and socio-legal studies on disasters. The paper discusses the process of juridification of risk Atlases (that is, how have they become policy instruments), together with a complex set of normative documents, including laws, codes, programs, land use plans and planning acts, among others. The main contributions from theorists of the field of legal geographies of disasters are discussed to understand how Risk Atlases have become important documents for the 'juridical production of the territory'. These documents are part of a normative universe that is embedded in a complex and decentralized scheme of both natural hazards provisions and urban development planning. Many of the agencies involved in these two fields have superimposed functions and scopes, while others that should be closely related because they complement each other's objectives, are in fact separated and with no legal linkages among them. In particular, the current program under which Risk Atlases are produced is nested in the government office in charge of the land use national policy and used by the urban development offices of municipal governments, to prevent human settlements to consolidate in risk-prone areas. Nevertheless, Risk Atlases are defined in several laws as key tools to prevent risk and manage emergencies. That means that they are increasingly used by many other agents involved in the National System of Civil Protection (an arrangement to co-ordinate different stakeholders, including national, provincial and municipal governments, together with federal agencies, private and social sectors) for objectives that fall far beyond land use regulation. However, despite its undeniable importance, there is still a remarkable inoperative character of many of these Atlases. The paper intends to explain the reasons behind this problem by identifying the distance between the normative content of these documents and their conditions of enforcement. The authors review the laws and programs that define the scope and the actual rules of implementation of the Atlas, and discuss why the expected outcomes on risk reduction and land regulation are not possible under the current normative and organizational structure within which Atlas operate. Some of these reasons are the vagueness about what kind of information should an Atlas contain and how this information should be used; the lack of clarity regarding who should implement that in each government level; and finally, the lack of sanctions if the restrictions derived from the risk analysis contained in the Atlases are unfulfilled. The paper concludes that Atlases have emerged as an informative rather than regulatory document, in a context of weak institutional capacities at the municipal level. With that conclusion the authors urge policymakers to review the position of risk Atlases within the National System of Civil Protection, as well as the legal framework of natural hazard provisions and land use planning in order to strengthen them.
Los Atlas de Riesgos municipales constituyen uno de los instrumentos que el gobierno mexicano ha privilegiado en los últimos años, con la finalidad de apoyar el ordenamiento de los asentamientos humanos en México. Este artículo recupera los principales antecedentes conceptuales, metodológicos, institucionales y legales de estos productos cartográficos, y analiza sus alcances y limitaciones reales en cuanto instrumentos de regulación de usos de suelo y gestión de riesgo en el caso mexicano. Para ello, utiliza los conceptos de juridificación, cumplimiento de marcos normativos (enforcement ) y gestión multi-escalar, con el objeto de analizar las condiciones en las que estos atlas surgen como dispositivos jurídicos en el contexto de una descentralización parcial del ordenamiento teritorial y la protección civil, así como la distancia que los separa de los efectos territoriales esperados de ellos. El artículo sustenta las razones para la relativa inoperancia de los atlas en el contexto de los gobiernos municipales; entre estas razones destacan la indefinición en el marco legal sobre su contenido y uso; la falta de claridad sobre las instancias responsables de su implementación, y la carencia de sanciones que conlleva su incumplimiento en la mayoría de las legislaciones estatales.
