ABSTRACT
While adequate delivery of public services is highly relevant in promoting social urban development and supporting the economic performance of urban spaces, recent research has highlighted increasing problems and disparities in the supply of public services in metropolitan areas. This chapter provides insights on the relevance of metropolitan governance in delivering public services and depicts the problems of fragmentation and collective action in Mexico City Metropolitan Area in comparison to two other metropolitan areas in Mexico, Guadalajara and Monterrey, and to Lima, Peru, and Bogota, Colombia. The analysis of metropolitan governance in the provision of water, waste collection and public transport services finds a common context of jurisdictional fragmentation and decentralisation across the different countries and metropolises, which intersects with local formal and informal legal frameworks and practices. In the absence of formal metropolitan government, governance operating structures can reverse or reduce the negative impacts of fragmentation by accommodating the characteristics of each service it provides within the overall contextual framework.
