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Socioeconomic inequalities complicate the local governance process, especially in low- and middle-income countries. With limited public resources and high socioeconomic inequalities, local governments can find themselves in a vicious circle of increasing inequalities, declining ability to address needs, and mounting social problems. Here, we investigate a possible way out of the vicious circle: policy interventions that help reduce the strain of inequality on local government responsiveness. We argue that interventions are effective in dampening the strain when these recognize the leadership role of local government officials. To test our arguments, we analyze longitudinal data on how citizen satisfaction with local governments varies in 56 Chilean territories over a 15-year period. We find that high socioeconomic inequality is associated with lower overall citizen satisfaction with local government performance, but exogenous interventions can dampen this association when local politicians take the lead in planning and implementing the interventions. 

This research article investigates the causes and consequences of municipal institutional arrangements for the provision of resilient critical infrastructure in municipalities. The study explains how the municipal organizational robustness and external institutional dynamics moderate the relation between capacities, leadership, and local government investment decisions. We examine hypotheses on moderating effects with regression methods, using data from 345 Chilean municipalities over a nine-year period, and analyzing the evidence with support of qualitative data. Our results reveal that municipal organizational robustness—operational rules, planning, managerial flexibility and integration, and accountability—is the most quantitatively outstanding moderating factor. The evidence leads us to deduce that efforts to support local governments in the emerging policy domain of resilient critical infrastructure require special attention to the robustness of municipal institutional arrangements. The results are valid for countries where the local governments have responsibilities to fulfill and their decisions have consequences for the adaptation. Since one of the objectives of the Special Issue “Bringing Governance Back Home—Lessons for Local Government Regarding Rapid Climate Action” is to explore how action is enabled or constrained by institutional relations in which the actors are embedded, this study contributes to achieving the goal.