Intercurrence and Policy Stagnation: The Long-Term Distribution of Land Rights in Mexico City (1974–2024)

This paper examines how intercurrence—the interaction of overlapping or conflicting institutional orders—leads to policy stagnation, deadlock, or constrained implementation. Drawing on Orren and Skowronek’s concept of intercurrence (1996, 2004), which highlights the friction arising from historically layered and enduring institutions, I extend their framework to examine how these frictions affect policy development. I argue that accumulating institutional frictions over time often results in policy stagnation and gridlock, especially in densely regulated sectors like land tenure and property rights. However, whether these frictions persist or are resolved depends on the relative power of veto players and the capacity of policy advocates to make incremental adjustments that realign conflicting institutional rules. Using this framework, I explain the changes in policies granting land rights to informal settlements in one of Latin America’s largest urban agglomerations, Mexico City, over the past five decades. Known as “land regularisation,” these policies aim to formalise property ownership for millions of residents in informal settlements, constituting significant portions of both cities. Emerging under authoritarian regimes in the 1970s, land regularisation initially responded to social mobilisation by providing formal land titles to informal settlers. While the implementation was initially rooted in clientelist practices (Larreguy et al., 2018; Varley, 1998), these policies gradually became institutionalised and entrenched in bureaucratic procedures. Through archival research, policy document analysis, and interviews with policymakers and bureaucrats, I trace how institutional frictions and conflicts emerged, leading to different outcomes in different periods, from restrictions to policy implementation to gradual stagnation. I argue that this policy trajectory is shaped by the dynamics of intercurrence. While land regularisation was institutionalised, it gradually collided with other policies, particularly land-use regulations and environmental zoning laws. These frictions created new layers of restrictions that limited access to land rights by imposing additional eligibility criteria for land regularisation, such as compliance with environmental and land-use laws that excluded certain settlements. While the authoritarian PRI regime bypassed land-use restrictions to facilitate regularisation in the 1990s, overruling veto players, the subsequent democratic regime introduced stronger environmental and land-use regulations that complicated eligibility assessments, stalling land rights distribution. In other words, after the democratisation and decentralisation of Mexico City’s governance, environmental and urban development governmental agencies obtained increased veto power and sustained restrictive eligibility criteria for land regularisation. My research contributes to the literature on policy processes by offering a new perspective on gradual institutional change and policy entrenchment (Anria et al., 2024; Fioretos et al., 2016; Mahoney & Thelen, 2010), emphasising unintended consequences of institutional processes, particularly, institutional intercurrence.