Is Governance Enough? Assessing Municipal Capacity for Complex Service Delivery

• In Event: Public Management and Performance

Abstract

The relationship between democracy and government responsiveness seems to have been muddled by the minimalist definition based on its procedural facet, such as electoral processes. However, a central feature of a democratic system of government is both the agency of individuals as well as the access to services that enhance their capabilities. This means that it is key to study democracy from an outcomes approach, especially in fragile democracies such as those in the Global South. Government performance is thus central to the quality of democracy.
In the context of climate emergency, democracy could become increasingly at risk if public agencies do not deliver the services needed for effective adaptation and mitigation. Traditional explanations have, nonetheless, focused on issues of political decision-making, governance, and the policy process at the national and international levels. Yet, the relationship between climate change and local government management is less often considered. To examine the issue of government performance in the face of this grand challenge, and due to its growing implications for greenhouse gas emissions as a consequence of population increase in developing countries, this paper uses the waste management sector as a case study to examine how variation in local governance factors may have differential effects on the performance of two waste services. Specifically, solid waste collection from the streets, on one side, and the final disposal of waste, on the other, may be affected differently by the organizational characteristics of municipalities. This distinction is significant since the differences in the complexity of providing them may reflect the gaps in municipal administrative capacity to adequately address increasingly complex service delivery needs related to waste. However, these bureaucratic limitations may also interact with the degree to which civil society is organized and collaborates with the responsible municipal offices. Differential performance outcomes between simple and complex waste management services may thus be explained by the levels of administrative capacity and civil society organization and how these interplay. The issue becomes more urgent in the context of population growth in urban areas and the need for an effective climate change policy that incorporates waste. Using a quantitative methods research design, this paper conducts a comparative study based on a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities between 2013-2018. This project intends to fill the gap in the political science and public administration literatures regarding the conditions inside developing country municipalities that may explain performance differentials when service delivery becomes increasingly complex. It also seeks to inform policy by potentially revealing that municipalities, and civil society, can adequately deliver simple services affecting climate change and should thus not be marginalized in global sustainability efforts. It may also underscore that strengthening local administrative capacity, and not macro-level governance arrangements, might be more strategic for increasingly complex services.

Author

• Renzo de la Riva Aguero, Indiana University - Bloomington