Do Cogovernance and CSOs Supplement Municipal Capacity for Service Delivery? An Assessment of Differences in Simple versus Complex Services

Abstract

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.

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