The Challenge

Mexico is home to one of the most sophisticated community forest management systems in the world — and yet the country barely builds with wood. Millions of hectares of productive forest exist alongside a construction sector that often imports standardized lumber from the US and others because domestic supply chains are fragmented, under-documented, and structurally disconnected. The idea of fully ethical, traceable domestic wood feels, to many, like an impossible task.

La Liga de la Madera formed to take that challenge on: a coalition of architects, engineers, producers, researchers, and designers who believe Mexico’s forests could be central to the country’s climate future — if the right connections are made, and the hard questions aren’t avoided.

Our Approach

Astronomos joined La Liga at a pivotal moment: the group had done the early exploration, traveled into the field, and built real trust — but hadn’t yet answered the tough questions around how to organise and what to prioritise.

We designed and are facilitating a participatory governance process to help the Liga work through these questions collectively. That meant deep listening first — conversations with each member to surface what they actually believed, feared, and hoped for — before any workshops or frameworks. What emerged was a nuanced picture: strong alignment on values, real tension on structure, and a shared conviction that the Liga’s value lives in the knowledge it generates and the connections it can catalyze across the whole chain, from forest to finished chair or building.

From there, we are co-designing a governance model, shared commitments, and a strategy for 2026 — using live facilitation tools, collective mapping, and systemic thinking — built to hold up under the pressures of a complex subject and a group of talented and very busy people.

Services: Systems Change, Strategy, Facilitation, Governance

Sectors: Governance, climate

2026 – Ongoing

What We’re Learning

The real bottleneck in Mexico’s wood sector isn’t the forest — it’s the system. Producers, processors, architects, and regulators are each doing meaningful work, but rarely in coordination. Good policy, serious research, community empowerment, training the next generation of engineers and architects, understanding regional vernaculars and layered histories, connecting certification to quality of processing and handling— all of it is needed, simultaneously, to make sustainable domestic wood a genuine option for the Mexican construction and design industry.

What La Liga is testing is whether a small, high-trust coalition of people who genuinely understand the chain can act as the connective layer that’s been missing — a platform for shared intelligence and collective action. It’s an experiment worth watching.