Homogeneous Policy/Heterogeneous Processes: A Historical Comparative Analysis of Legislating "Border Health" in Mexico and the United States.

Social scientists have advanced our understanding of how transnational processes and actors promote the international agreements common to today's global era, most advancing a homogenization thesis. But our understanding of the cross-national heterogeneity that underlies many agreements is limited. This paper advances this task by analyzing how Mexico and the United States came to agree on public health policy for their shared border. I trace the development of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, a public international organization, from conception within a transnational "border health" network in the late 1980's, to policy development in the U.S. Congress, to negotiations with Mexican legislators, and finally to bi-national enactment of the Commission agreement in 2000. With identical legislation in both countries, the Commission is an example of complete policy convergence. However, I argue that although the idea for the Commission emerged within an apparently homogeneous transnational network of professionals and organizations, policy development was temporally and conceptually divided along national lines. I use historical comparative methods to elucidate the disjoined policy process and I show how Mexican and U.S. legislators created divergent public problem constructions - stories of harm, cause, and blame - within their national political arenas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]