Complexity in Service Provision: Unpacking Administrative Capacity to Understand Differential Performance

ABSTRACT Understanding municipalities' local governance conditions is crucial for addressing environmental sustainability worldwide, especially regarding their ability to deliver increasingly complex services with environmental implications. Administrative capacity issues significantly hinder municipal performance. While previous studies have established that general capacity impacts public organizations' performance, the role of service‐specific administrative capacity remains underexplored. Local conditions demonstrate the importance of assessing specific capacity, as some municipalities effectively deliver services of varying complexity due to specialized resources, including political support, while others fail due to uniform allocation and poor task understanding. This research uses nested qualitative fieldwork methods to examine municipal waste management, comparing simple waste collection with complex waste disposal, to explore the mechanisms through which service‐specific administrative capacity influences performance. The study argues that specialized capacity, at three different hierarchical levels, is essential for complex service performance, whereas general capacity suffices only for simpler services.