Department Alumnus, Dr. John P. Hayes, Earns 2025 CALACS Outstanding Dissertation Award

Dr. John P. Hayes, who completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science in 2024, has been awarded the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2025. The purpose of the Outstanding Dissertation Award is to provide recognition to an emerging scholar who has significantly advanced our understanding of Latin America or the Caribbean. Congratulations, John!

John’s thesis delves into a critical policy issue: the factors driving Mexico’s reforms in mining industry regulations between 1988 and 2018. Mexico is among the global top-ten countries for mining production, including silver, gold, copper, iron, and thirteen other minerals, some of which are essential for carbon-free technology development. Canadian firms represent the largest source of foreign investment in Mexican mining, increasing the importance of understanding the mining landscape in Mexico for both countries’ economic output.

John’s unique approach encompasses multiple policy domains, including land and water rights, environmental regulations, labour, investment, and taxation, that collectively shape the mining industry. This original and holistic view, which he terms “natural resource governance,” allows John to explain why stakeholders and government pursue certain policy domains for reform, while leaving others largely unchanged. He uses comparative historical methods of process tracing in each policy domain and presidential administration to draw inferences about why elected governments and stakeholders, like domestic and foreign mining firms, unions, and local communities, seek and successfully reform key laws and regulations.

Overall, the thesis is both theoretically and empirically ambitious. The final thesis not only makes an original contribution to our understanding of mining policy in Mexico by highlighting the complexity of the policy reform process but also develops a persuasive theoretical argument to explain why policy reforms may be uneven across domains and why it is essential to consider the complex web of policies, rather than a single policy domain, to understand government policy toward primary sector industries, like mining.

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