Municipal governments in the Global South vary in their ability to provide not only complex social services, like environmentally proper solid waste disposal, but even simple services, like trash collection from the streets. This paper examines whether variation in service provision outcomes is associated with service-specific municipal administrative capacity, locally embedded civil society organization (CSO) presence, and collaborative governance for local planning and budgeting (or cogovernance). Using a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities, I find that while all three factors are associated with better outcomes for simple services, only greater public administration capacity is associated with higher service outcomes when the service is more complex. This suggests that CSOs may face some difficulties to supplement the state in the provision of relatively complex services and that local cogovernance venues tend to prioritize more immediate service issues. These findings have policy implications for managing relatively complex services in Global South cities that struggle with service-specific administrative capacity and relatively complex service provision, particularly those with climate change consequences. They convey that strengthening this type of capacity at the office level is crucial to providing increasingly complex services, and supporting community-based CSOs and cogovernance venues may help as a strategy to address simple service delivery.

Municipalities in the Global South confront significant implementation challenges for the delivery of services, especially as service complexity increases. Waste management, which includes services of different complexity such as simple waste collection and complex waste disposal, is a useful sector to study. This article conducts an exploratory case study in four Peruvian municipalities to learn about the relationship between administrative capacity, political influence, and civil society participation and the performance of two waste services. The findings highlight the need to more closely consider service-specific administrative capacity in future research on performance, particularly when analyzing more complex services. Accounting for service complexity may also be important for practitioners when planning measures to strengthen administrative capacity.

Municipalities in the Global South are at the forefront of climate action. They suffer severe weather hazards that have increased their vulnerability and exposed their populations, infrastructure, and operations to unprecedented risk. These impacts are surpassing the local capacity to address them effectively via service provision. However, service performance seems to vary depending on the complexity level of the service itself. Given the implications of waste management for climate change mitigation and adaptation, this article uses a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities to examine whether local governance factors, such as the administrative capacity of waste offices and active, locally embedded Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) involvement, equally influence the performance of two of its services ranging in complexity. Preliminary findings suggest that waste office administrative capacity is associated with improved performance in both services, simple and complex, while neighborhood-based CSOs are crucial for increased simple waste service delivery but not for providing the more complex one. Deliberative governance spaces of local collaboration are not associated with either service. This suggests that strengthening waste management administrative capacity might have primary importance to deliver complex services in particular, and that CSO participation may not have crucial implications for this type of service, contrary to expectations.