Governing the Puebla-Tlaxcala metropolitan area

Successful implementation of many of the recommendations proposed throughout this review – improving workforce and economic development (Chapter 2), better managing urban growth (Chapter 3) or improving service delivery (Chapters 3 and 4) – will require Puebla-Tlaxcala to improve governance arrangements. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section examines capacity challenges in the public sector and proposes strategies for: i) bolstering revenue-raising capacities of municipalities ii) limiting the effects of recurrent political and administrative upheavals and iii) building more effective public administration. The second section assesses the key policy obstacles to metropolitan governance arrangements in Puebla-Tlaxcala and recommends ways in which regional leaders could: i) create operational legitimacy through the development of a strategic metropolitan vision ii) create operational legitimacy via opportunities for metropolitan co-ordination and iii) create institutional legitimacy by operationalising planning at the metropolitan scale.