Integrated spatial framework to assess coupled social-ecological systems and design ad hoc public policies is still lacking. We used the country of Mexico as a case study to: i) develop a social-ecological spatial framework, the socio-ecoregions, ii) describe the resulting patterns, and iii) explore how the framework can be used for designing policies towards sustainabillity. Ecoregions and Human Development Index were used to build socioecoregions. We showed how the socio-ecoregions framework reflects the ecological and social heterogeneity of the country. This framework was shown to be useful to design social-ecological policies. We discuss that this framework may easily be developed for other regions at global to local scales and contribute to the development of more integrated policies towards sustainability.