Opening the Black Box: Explaining the Effects and Mechanisms of Municipal Performance in Climate Change

Abstract

"Classic explanations about organizational capacity to respond to climate change focus on issues of political decision-making, governance, and the policy process. However, the relationship between climate change and local government management is hence treated as loosely connected. 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. It may also illustrate the influence that the relationship (or lack thereof) of local political actors and civil society organizations with municipalities has on producing differential outcomes between these two waste management services. 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 mixed method research design, this paper conducts a comparative study based on a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities from eight states between 2014-2016 and interviews and ethnography of four case studies of Peruvian municipalities. This study intends to fill the gap in the political science and public management literatures regarding the conditions, procedures, and relations inside developing country municipalities and how they may explain performance differentials."