City governments are increasingly incorporating urban and peri-urban agriculture into their policies and programs, a trend seen as advancing sustainability, development, and food security. Urban governance can provide new opportunities for farmers, but it also creates structures to control their activities, lands, and purposes.

This study focused on Mexico City, which is celebrated for its agricultural traditions and policies. The study examined: 1) the functions of urban and peri-urban agriculture that the Government of Mexico City (GMC) manages and prioritizes; 2) how the GMC’s policies have framed farmers, and how that framing affects farmers’ identity and purpose; and 3) how the inclusion of agrarian activities and lands in the city’s climate-change adaptation plan has created opportunities and obstacles for farmers. Data was collected through participant observation of agricultural and conservation events, informal and semi-structured interviews with government and agrarian actors, and analysis of government documents and budgets.

Analysis of policy documents revealed that the GMC manages agriculture as an instrument for achieving urban objectives largely unrelated to food: to conserve the city’s watershed and provide environmental services. Current policies negatively frame peri-urban agriculture as unproductive and a source of environmental contamination, but associate urban agriculture with positive outcomes for development and sustainability. Peri-urban farmers have resisted this framing, asserting that the GMC inadequately supports farmers’ watershed conservation efforts, and lacks understanding of and concern for farmers’ needs and interests. The city’s climate plan implicitly considers farmers to be private providers of public adaptation benefits, but the plan’s programs do not sufficiently address the socioeconomic changes responsible for agriculture’s decline, and therefore may undermine the government’s climate adaptation objectives.

The findings illuminate the challenges for urban governance of agriculture. Farms do not become instruments for urban sustainability, development, and food security simply because the government creates policies for them. Urban governments will be more likely to achieve their goals for agriculture by being transparent about their objectives, honestly evaluating how well those objectives fit with farmers’ needs and interests, cultivating genuine partnerships with farmers, and appropriately compensating farmers for the public benefits they provide.

Sinaloa, a coastal state in the northwest of Mexico, is known for irrigated conventional agriculture, and is considered one of the greatest successes of the Green Revolution. With the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, Sinaloa farmers shifted out of conventional wheat, soy, cotton, and other commodities and into white maize, a major food staple in Mexico that is traditionally produced by millions of small-scale farmers. Sinaloa is now a major contributor to the national food supply, producing 26% of total domestic white maize production. Research on Sinaloa's maize has focused on economic and agronomic components. Little attention, however, has been given to the environmental sustainability of Sinaloa's expansion in maize. With uniquely biodiverse coastal and terrestrial ecosystems that support economic activities such as fishing and tourism, the environmental consequences of agriculture in Sinaloa are important to monitor. Agricultural sustainability assessments have largely focused on alternative agricultural approaches, or espouse alternative philosophies that are biased against conventional production. Conventional agriculture, however, provides a significant portion of the world's calories. In addition, incentives such as federal subsidies and other institutions complicate transitions to alternative modes of production. To meet the agricultural sustainability goals of food production and environmental stewardship, we must put conventional agriculture on a more sustainable path. One step toward achieving this is structuring agricultural sustainability assessments around achievable goals that encourage continual adaptations toward sustainability. I attempted this in my thesis by assessing conventional maize production in Sinaloa at the regional/state scale using network analysis and incorporating stakeholder values through a multicriteria decision analysis approach. The analysis showed that the overall sustainability of Sinaloa maize production is far from an ideal state. I made recommendations on how to improve the sustainability of maize production, and how to better monitor the sustainability of agriculture in Sinaloa.