Multilevel Governance, Digitalisation and Institutional Resilience: Towards a Framework for the Sustainability of Community Social Services

Abstract

This article analyses the documentary institutional architecture of community social services in Spain through a comparative study of 15 autonomous communities, with particular attention to the formal conditions of institutional sustainability. Its aim is to examine how multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience are articulated in the regional configuration of the system. To this end, a documentary corpus was constructed from three official primary sources: regional social services laws, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, and current strategic plans or equivalent instruments. The findings suggest that, at the documentary level, territorial variation is not explained solely by the age of the framework law, but rather by the degree of institutional closure achieved among regulation, the specification of benefits and services, and strategic planning. Autonomous communities with a more complete law–catalogue–plan sequence display more consistent institutional architectures, whereas deficits in any of these links increase documentary and strategic fragmentation. Likewise, digitalisation appears uneven across territories, and its institutional usefulness depends on whether digital tools are integrated into shared information systems and accessible to both professionals and citizens. Institutional resilience is examined through documentary markers such as planning, evaluation, coordination, organisational learning and adaptation mechanisms. The article concludes that, from a documentary institutional perspective, community social services appear more robust when regulation, planning, digital tools and multilevel coordination are articulated in a coherent and stable way.

1. Introduction

1.1. Community Social Services in Spain: Sustainability, Territorial Diversity and Institutional Coherence

Community social services constitute the basic level of the social protection system in decentralised welfare states. They operate as a gateway to social rights and as a mechanism for detecting, supporting and intervening in situations of vulnerability. Because they operate at the local level, their functioning depends on the interaction between different levels of government, public and non-public actors, and specific territorial contexts. This makes them a particularly relevant field for analysing how social policies are planned, funded and implemented, and how institutional arrangements affect their effective organisation (Andreotti et al. 2012; Kazepov 2010).

In Spain, community social services are embedded in a decentralised and multilevel territorial structure. The autonomous communities play a central role in the management and implementation of social policies, while the State regulates their fundamental aspects. This model has allowed differentiated territorial developments, and it has also generated inequalities in system organisation, modes of provision and effective access to benefits and services, with relevant implications for territorial equity (Díaz-Tendero and Ruano 2024; Marí-Klose and Moreno-Fuentes 2013). These tensions have become more visible in recent years, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed structural problems linked to fragmented protection, uneven territorial articulation and persistent subnational disparities (Arriba González de Durana and Aguilar-Hendrickson 2021; Cordini et al. 2021). Spanish-language scholarship has also highlighted the structural tensions and unresolved transformations of social services in the country especially in relation to their role, identity and consolidation as a coherent pillar of the welfare system (Aguilar-Hendrickson 2023; Fantova 2022).

In this context, the sustainability of community social services cannot be reduced to funding or operational efficiency. For the purposes of this article, institutional sustainability refers to the formal capacity of the system to maintain its essential functions, articulate its instruments coherently and adapt to prolonged pressure. This requires attention not only to resources, but also to the way in which regulation, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, strategic planning and digital tools are connected within each institutional system (Hofstad 2023).

The literature on multilevel governance, public sector digitalisation and institutional resilience offers useful tools for examining this problem. However, these dimensions are often analysed separately. In the field of community social services, this fragmentation makes it difficult to understand how regulation, the specification of benefits and services, strategic planning and digitalisation interact in the production of more or less robust institutional architectures. The problem is therefore not simply the existence of regional diversity, but the need to compare the degree of coherence achieved among the instruments that structure each system.

This article addresses that gap by comparing official documents from the common-regime autonomous communities in Spain. The analysis focuses on three types of instruments: regional social services legislation, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, and current strategic plans or, where no accessible general plan is available, the closest official strategic instrument with system-ordering capacity. Where documentary evidence allows, the analysis also considers the role of digital tools in the formal consolidation of the system.

From this perspective, the article is guided by the interpretive proposition that multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience should not be understood as isolated dimensions, but as interrelated components of the formal and documentary institutional architecture of the system. The concept of institutional closure is used as a proxy indicator of this formal articulation. It refers to the degree of assembly achieved among framework legislation, the specification of benefits and services, strategic planning and, in the more developed cases, operational digital instruments. It does not measure actual implementation, service quality, coverage or outcomes.

Spain serves as an excellent case study to examine how decentralisation generates both institutional diversity and divergent levels of systemic coherence across territories. On this basis, the objective of the article is to analyse the documentary institutional architecture of community social services in Spain during the period 2020–2025, identifying the formal factors associated with the robustness of regional architectures and proposing an interpretative framework that links multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience through a logic of systemic coherence.

1.2. Multilevel Governance, Decentralisation and Local Autonomy

The analysis of the sustainability of community social services in decentralised contexts requires moving beyond sectoral approaches and adopting an integrated theoretical perspective capable of capturing the interaction among institutional, organisational and technological dimensions. In this sense, this study is grounded in the articulation of three interdependent analytical axes: multilevel governance, welfare digitalisation, and organisational and institutional resilience. These dimensions operate not only as analytical variables, but also as components of a structural framework whose coherence helps to explain the formal conditions under which the system seeks to guarantee social rights under conditions of territorial equity.

Multilevel governance has been widely conceptualised as a dispersion of authority and decision-making across different levels of government, characterised by relationships of interdependence, negotiation and coordination (Hooghe and Marks 2003; Piattoni 2010). This approach departs from traditional hierarchical models by recognising the existence of multiple centres of authority and the importance of vertical and horizontal interactions in the formulation and implementation of public policies.

In the field of social services, this perspective is particularly relevant, since the provision of benefits and services is embedded in complex, territorially differentiated institutional configurations that depend on the articulation among different administrative levels. In decentralised systems, this complexity is intensified, so that the formal distribution of competences does not always correspond to the effective capacity for action, coordination and implementation of social policies (Kazepov 2010).

In the Spanish case, the development of the State of Autonomies has given rise to a decentralised model in which the autonomous communities have assumed central responsibilities in key areas of welfare, including social policies, while local governments have progressively expanded their activity in socially sensitive areas, albeit with a limited scope (Navarro and Medir 2021). This institutional configuration suggests that the formal distribution of functions does not, by itself, fully capture the analysis of territorial capacity for action, since the effective role of municipalities also depends on the actual scope of their capacity to complement, develop and sustain their interventions in each context.

From this perspective, the multilevel governance of social services can be understood as a complex institutional configuration in which the formal decentralisation of responsibilities does not eliminate the tensions arising from coordination across levels, the unequal distribution of capacities and the persistence of territorial disparities. In practice, this means that the attribution of competences does not always translate into an equivalent capacity for action across all territories, especially at the levels closest to provision. This situation helps to explain the territorial heterogeneity observed in the organisation and development of social policies and raises questions about the system’s capacity to guarantee comparable levels of protection and territorial cohesion.

Recent evidence on crisis management allows this discussion to be further developed by showing that institutional resilience does not necessarily depend on hierarchical centralisation, but on polycentric configurations capable of combining subnational decision-making capacity, intergovernmental coordination and flexible adaptation. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Behnke (2024) argues that polycentric governance can operate as a resource for resilience, insofar as it enables coordinated decentralisation, fosters horizontal and vertical coordination mechanisms, and supports flexible responses to turbulent scenarios.

In this regard, multilevel governance and territorial resilience approaches acquire particular relevance as an interpretative framework. Broadhurst and Gray (2022) show that crisis response capacity depends, to a large extent, on the fit between the scale of the problem and the scale of decision-making, as well as on the existence of effective intergovernmental relations. From this perspective, place-based approaches and the principle of subsidiarity reinforce the need to adapt policies to local characteristics, make use of available territorial knowledge and mobilise the human and social capital present in each community.

The challenge is not to reduce territorial diversity, but to prevent it from translating into inequality in the enjoyment of rights. The sustainability of the system requires models of multilevel governance capable of combining subnational autonomy, inter-administrative coordination and common guarantees of protection, so that territorial flexibility operates as a resource for adaptation rather than as a source of institutional fragmentation.

1.3. Digitalisation of Social Services and Organisational Transformation

Digitalisation has become one of the main vectors of transformation in the public sector and in contemporary welfare systems. Rather than being a merely technical process, it entails the incorporation of digital technologies, management platforms, self-service interfaces and new forms of administrative interaction that modify the internal organisation of public institutions and their relationship with citizens. Schou and Hjelholt (2018, 2019) emphasise that digitalisation should be understood as a political and regulatory instrument for transforming the State, associated with discourses of efficiency, optimisation, flexibility and innovation, but also with processes of institutional reconfiguration and the redefinition of responsibilities between administration and citizens.

From a functional perspective, digitalisation can contribute to the reorganisation of administrative processes, facilitating new forms of service provision and improving the management capacity of public administrations. In the field of social services, this transformation is especially relevant when it takes the form of information systems, digital case files, tools for inter-administrative coordination or channels for citizen access. However, its impact cannot be reduced to an operational dimension: digitalisation reconfigures professional practices, redistributes tasks between institutions and users, and may alter the way in which effective access to services is produced.

Recent literature has shown that digitalisation can contribute to the resilience of service provision systems, especially in crisis contexts, although its effects depend on the institutional conditions under which it is deployed. Shen et al. (2023) show that government-promoted digital platforms can facilitate the transition from recovery-oriented resilience towards forms of transformative resilience, by enabling the continuity of certain services, expanding citizen participation, encouraging co-production and generating response and accountability mechanisms. From an organisational perspective, Awad and Martín-Rojas (2024) demonstrate that digital transformation can strengthen resilience by fostering organisational learning and innovation, increasing adaptive capacity in changing environments. However, transferring these findings to the field of social services requires considering the specific conditions of interoperability, professional capacities, data governance and equity in access.

This positive reading of digitalisation must nevertheless be qualified. The available evidence shows that its effects on resilience are neither automatic nor homogeneous but depend on the organisational and institutional conditions under which it is deployed. Fischer et al. (2023), in their study of public employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, show that public service resilience in the teleworking contexts does not derive solely from the availability of digital technologies, but from the interaction between individual and organisational resources, including digital competences, autonomy, proactivity, trust in leadership and the capacity to maintain internal and external communication. In this sense, the mere provision of technological infrastructures does not, by itself, guarantee institutional adaptation. Digitalisation should be understood as a sociotechnical process in which technology interacts with professional capacities, organisational culture, leadership and appropriate frameworks for coordination and management.

Moreover, digitalisation introduces new tensions in terms of territorial and social equity. Although municipal digital services may expand options for information, interaction and access to administration, their deployment depends on unequal conditions of infrastructure, funding, technical capacity and user competences. Levesque et al. (2024) show that, in rural contexts, the lack of broadband, the lower availability of specialised personnel, budgetary constraints and differences in digital skills can strongly condition the provision and uptake of digital services. These barriers particularly affect small communities, older people, households without adequate access to the internet or devices, and groups with greater linguistic or technological difficulties. Consequently, digitalisation can contribute to institutional and community resilience, but it can also reproduce or amplify pre-existing inequalities if it is not accompanied by active policies for digital inclusion, accessibility and territorial support.

In the context of decentralised systems such as Spain’s, these tensions are amplified by institutional fragmentation. The coexistence of multiple technological systems, with different levels of development and interoperability, limits the construction of integrated information systems and hinders inter-administrative coordination. Digitalisation should therefore be understood as a common institutional infrastructure, rather than as a mere sum of dispersed administrative tools. Its contribution to the sustainability of social services will depend on the existence of shared standards, data governance, continuous evaluation and digital inclusion, within multilevel governance frameworks capable of guaranteeing systemic coherence and territorial equity. For this reason, this study goes beyond viewing digitalisation as a generic reference to administrative modernisation. Rather, it examines whether official documents identify concrete digital arrangements, such as interoperability, social history records, integrated information systems, digital catalogues, professional or citizen access channels, monitoring mechanisms, and data governance.

1.4. Organisational and Institutional Resilience in Social Services

The concept of resilience has acquired growing relevance in the analysis of public organisations and service provision systems, especially in contexts characterised by uncertainty, interdependence and sustained pressure. From an organisational perspective, McManus et al. (2008) define resilience as a function of an organisation’s situational awareness, the management of its critical vulnerabilities and its adaptive capacity in complex, dynamic and interconnected environments. This approach makes it possible to understand resilience not only as a capacity to respond to crises, but also as a property linked to the ordinary functioning of organisations, their prior preparedness and their ability to maintain the continuity of their essential functions in adverse situations.

This approach implies a dynamic conception of organisations, in which adaptation is not limited to recovery after a disruption, but includes processes of learning, the review of vulnerabilities, the improvement of planning, and the strengthening of decision-making. In this sense, resilience is linked to factors such as the quality of leadership, internal and external communication, resource management, coordination with relevant actors, the capacity to establish partnerships and organisational learning. McManus et al. (2008) also emphasise that a silo mentality, poor communication and lack of flexibility in decision-making can significantly reduce an organisation’s overall resilience.

When applied to the field of community social services, this framework is particularly relevant, given that these organisations operate in highly complex environments, address situations of multidimensional vulnerability and depend on coordination among administrations, professionals, social sector organisations and community resources. Resilience in this field therefore cannot be reduced to the availability of material or human resources but must be understood as the institutional capacity to recognise vulnerabilities, sustain essential functions, coordinate responses, learn from experience and adapt forms of intervention in scenarios of change or prolonged pressure.

However, resilience cannot be understood exclusively as an internal property of organisations. The adaptive capacity of public services is conditioned by institutional factors such as governance structure, the margin of effective autonomy, regulatory frameworks, the distribution of responsibilities and the availability of resources. From this perspective, Ladner (2017) shows that local autonomy and financial sufficiency influence municipalities’ capacity to cope with scenarios of economic pressure, while Keuffer and Horber-Papazian (2020) emphasise that formal autonomy must be distinguished from perceived and effective autonomy, since the latter depends on administrative capacities, resources, governance arrangements and specific areas of public policy.

Applied to community social services, resilience can be conceived as a systemic and relational property, since it depends not only on the internal strength of each organisation, but also on the way in which competences, funding, inter-administrative coordination, planning and local capacities are articulated. This reading makes it possible to connect institutional resilience with multilevel governance, highlighting that the sustainability of the system requires not only adaptive organisations, but also coherent institutional frameworks that enable responses to be coordinated, essential functions to be sustained and territorial inequalities to be reduced.

1.5. Towards an Integrated Approach: Institutional Coherence and Sustainability

Building on the elements outlined above, this article proposes an integrated approach to analysing the institutional sustainability of community social services as the result of the interaction between multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience. These dimensions do not operate in isolation but rather form a framework of interdependent relationships in which weaknesses in one dimension may condition or amplify the limitations of the others. For the purposes of this study, institutional sustainability is understood at the documentary level as the system’s formal capacity to articulate regulatory frameworks, planning instruments, organisational capacities and digital tools in a coherent way.

Thus, fragmented governance may hinder the definition of common digitalisation strategies, limit interoperability between administrations and reduce the coordination capacity needed to guarantee comparable responses across territories. In turn, uneven digitalisation, if not accompanied by professional capacities, data governance and digital inclusion, may increase organisational complexity and reproduce territorial gaps rather than mitigate them. Finally, the absence of sufficient organisational and institutional capacities may prevent the effective implementation of public policies, even when advanced regulatory frameworks, formally developed catalogues or ambitious strategic instruments exist.

This approach makes it possible to formulate a structural paradox in community social services: while normative discourse recognises them as an essential component of the welfare state and as a proximate space for guaranteeing social rights, the institutional configuration of the system does not always provide a sufficiently coherent alignment among competences, funding, planning, digitalisation and local capacities. Consequently, the sustainability of the system depends not only on improving each dimension separately, but on their articulation within an integrated institutional architecture capable of combining territorial autonomy, multilevel coordination, technological interoperability, organisational learning and common guarantees of equity.

Taken together, the literature reviewed suggests that multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience are closely connected, but are often examined as separate dimensions. In decentralised welfare systems, this separation makes it difficult to understand how laws, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, strategic planning and digital tools combine to shape the formal architecture of community social services. This article therefore uses the concept of institutional closure to analyse, at the documentary level, the degree of articulation among these instruments and to compare how different autonomous communities configure the institutional conditions of sustainability.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Epistemological Approach and Research Design

This study adopts a qualitative analytical–interpretative approach, framed within an institutionalist perspective. From this approach, institutions are not conceived solely as formal regulatory frameworks, but as historically constructed configurations of norms, practices, capacities and power relations that condition public action, shape the possibilities for coordination and delimit the response capacity of welfare systems. This approach is particularly appropriate for analysing community social services, given their organisational complexity, their dependence on territorial context and their embeddedness in multilevel governance structures. In historical institutionalist terms, the analysis makes it possible to observe how different normative, operational and strategic arrangements generate differentiated trajectories of institutional development, with effects on the consistency and sustainability of the system (March and Olsen 1989; Thelen 1999).

From a methodological point of view, the research is structured as a theoretically driven comparative study, aimed at identifying territorial variations in the institutional configuration of community social services and interpreting how these variations relate to their institutional sustainability. The design does not seek to measure the effective performance of the system, nor to empirically assess coverage, quality, waiting times or intervention outcomes, but rather to comparatively reconstruct the formally visible institutional conditions upon which its organisation, protective intensity and strategic planning capacity rest. In this sense, the analysis focuses on the institutional architecture observable in current official documents, assuming that the robustness of the system depends not only on the existence of a framework law, but on the degree of articulation among its normative, operational and strategic instruments. Accordingly, all findings should be interpreted as referring to the formal and documentary architecture of the system, not to its actual implementation or performance.

2.2. Methodological Strategy and Construction of the Documentary Corpus

In order to ensure institutional comparability, the study is limited to the autonomous communities included in the common-regime system of the Spanish State of Autonomies. Consequently, the Basque Country and Navarre are excluded, due to the particularities arising from their foral regime, as are Ceuta and Melilla, whose institutional configuration differs substantially from the ordinary autonomous community model.

The universe of analysis comprises Andalucía, Aragón, Asturias, Illes Balears, Canarias, Cantabria, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Cataluña, Comunitat Valenciana, Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Comunidad de Madrid and Región de Murcia. This delimitation makes it possible to work with territorial units embedded in a more comparable framework of competences and funding than that of the foral regimes, while also capturing the internal diversity of the Spanish system of community social services.

The research is based on a qualitative institutional analysis centred on the comparative examination of the normative, operational and strategic frameworks that configure community social services in the common-regime autonomous communities. To this end, a documentary corpus was constructed from official primary sources that were current or available through open access at the time of the review. The full list of documents included in the corpus, together with the official source links and access dates, is provided in Supplementary Table S1. The analysis is therefore based on the institutionally observable documentary architecture, without assuming that the absence of a located instrument necessarily implies the absence of public action or unpublished administrative developments.

The analysis is organised around three types of documents, which reflect different levels of system configuration. First, regional social services legislation, understood as the basic regulatory framework defining principles, rights, system organisation and the distribution of competences. Second, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, which specify the material content of the system in terms of services, economic benefits, access conditions and levels of protection. Third, current strategic social services plans or, where no general plan published in an official open source was located, the closest official strategic instrument with system-ordering capacity.

This triple documentary entry directly responds to the logic of the subsequent findings. The comparison is not aimed simply at inventorying laws or plans, but at examining the extent to which each autonomous community has managed to articulate a relatively coherent sequence among the framework law, the operational instrument specifying benefits and services, and current strategic planning. Consequently, the documentary corpus makes it possible to analyse not only which instruments exist, but also how they are assembled and with what degree of institutional closure. In this study, institutional closure is understood as a comparative documentary proxy of the visible articulation among normative recognition, the specification of benefits and services, strategic planning and, where applicable, operational digital instruments. It should not be interpreted as a direct measure of implementation, service quality, coverage or administrative performance.

The cut-off date for the documentary review was 28 February 2026; therefore, any regulatory amendments, catalogues or plans approved after that date fall outside the scope of the analysis. Where no current general strategic plan was located, this absence was recorded as a deficit in documentary closure, not as the absolute non-existence of sectoral planning or administrative activity.

2.3. Analytical Framework and Coding

The analysis is structured around an integrated analytical framework that articulates three main dimensions: multilevel governance, system digitalisation and institutional resilience. These dimensions are understood as interrelated components of a single institutional system whose coherence conditions the sustainability of community social services. Alongside them, the research incorporates a fourth operational axis—the intensity of the catalogue—not as an autonomous theoretical dimension, but as an indicator of the extent to which the system’s normative recognition is translated into concrete, legible and enforceable benefits and services.

Multilevel governance is examined mainly through regional legislation and associated regulatory developments, paying attention to the clarity of competences, the role assigned to the local level, the existence of formal coordination mechanisms and the presence of references to funding or territorial ordering. Protective intensity is analysed on the basis of catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, considering their scope, level of detail, legibility, access criteria, intensities and their guaranteed or conditional nature. Digitalisation is observed through the identification of elements such as interoperability, social history records, information systems, electronic administration, follow-up, monitoring, and citizen and professional access. Finally, institutional resilience is addressed through documentary markers such as planning, evaluation, coordination, professionalisation, organisational learning, monitoring and mechanisms of functional adaptation. These markers do not measure actual crisis performance but indicate the extent to which each system formally incorporates capacities for anticipation, coordination, learning and adaptation.

On this basis, an ordinal coding scheme from 0 to 3 was designed for four axes: governance, catalogue intensity, digitalisation and resilience. The maximum total score of 12 points does not measure effective outcomes, the actual quality of care or administrative performance, but rather documentarily visible institutional density and coherence. The coding was applied homogeneously to all autonomous communities on the basis of previously defined criteria, recording doubtful cases as situations of partial closure when the instruments existed but showed incomplete, sectoral or insufficiently updated articulation. This strategy made it possible to construct a comparative matrix across Spain’s autonomous communities, identify different levels of institutional closure and group the autonomous communities into clusters of greater or lesser documentary consistency. To facilitate procedural transparency, Table 1 presents the criteria applied at each level of the ordinal scale.

Table 1. Coding matrix of the regional institutional architecture.

Dimension	Operational Definition	0	1	2	3
Multilevel governance	Degree of clarity of competences, recognition of the local role, formal coordination, funding and territorial ordering.	Absence of relevant references or merely declarative formulation.	Basic distribution of competences, with limited coordination or funding mechanisms.	Partially developed inter-administrative coordination and territorial ordering.	Integrated architecture with clear competences, defined local role, coordination bodies, funding and territorial ordering.
Intensity of the catalogue/portfolio	Degree to which the system specifies benefits, services, access conditions, intensities and guaranteed or conditional status.	No current or accessible general catalogue/portfolio is located.	Partial, sectoral or outdated catalogue, or one integrated into other regulations in a way that is not very legible.	General or almost general catalogue, with sufficient detail but partial articulation.	Updated, broad, systematic and clearly legible catalogue in terms of benefits and services, access, intensity and enforceability.
Digitalisation	Presence of interoperability, social history records, information systems, electronic administration, follow-up and citizen/professional access.	Absence of relevant references to digitalisation or information systems.	Generic references to electronic management, administrative modernisation or the use of technologies.	Existence of partial digital systems, strategies or tools, with uneven development.	Explicit interoperability, social history record or integrated system, citizen/professional access and follow-up or monitoring mechanisms.
Institutional resilience	Visible institutional capacity to plan, evaluate, coordinate, professionalise, learn and adapt functionally.	Absence of planning, evaluation or mechanisms of institutional adaptation.	Generic references to quality, training, coordination or continuous improvement.	Partial presence of planning, evaluation, professionalisation or coordination.	Robust strategy with current planning, evaluation, professional capacities, coordination and mechanisms for adaptation to change or crises.

Authors’ own elaboration.

2.4. Coding Procedure, Scoring and Validation

The unit of analysis was each autonomous community included in the common-regime system. For each case, the coding was based on the official documents included in the corpus: regional social services legislation, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, current strategic plans or equivalent instruments and, where identified, digital tools or information systems linked to the organisation of the system. Each autonomous community was assessed across four dimensions: multilevel governance, catalogue/portfolio intensity, digitalisation and institutional resilience. Each dimension was assigned an ordinal score from 0 to 3 according to the criteria presented in Table 1. The four dimensions were weighted equally, producing a maximum total score of 12 points.

The coding followed an iterative documentary review process. No separate pilot study was conducted before the full coding. However, the coding criteria were refined through successive readings of the corpus. Instruments were first identified and classified, then examined according to the four dimensions, and ambiguous cases were re-examined to ensure consistency across the full set of autonomous communities. These scores should be interpreted as comparative indicators of formal and documentary institutional articulation. They do not measure actual implementation, service quality, coverage, effectiveness or administrative performance.

2.5. Interpretative Logic

The interpretation of the findings is based on two central notions. The first is institutional closure, understood as the degree to which each autonomous community articulates, in a relatively coherent manner, a sequence between the framework law, the operational instrument specifying benefits and services, and current strategic planning, complemented, in the more developed cases, by operational digital tools. This notion makes it possible to move beyond a purely formal reading of the system and to explain why the age or recency of the regional law is not sufficient, by itself, to understand the institutional consistency of each case. However, institutional closure is used here as an analytical category referring to the observable documentary architecture, not as a direct measurement of effective performance, actual coverage or service quality. Unlike institutional capacity, governance integration, policy coherence or institutional maturity, institutional closure is used here in a narrower sense: it refers to the observable documentary articulation among framework legislation, catalogue/portfolio specification, strategic planning and, where applicable, operational digital tools.

The second notion is the structural paradox of community social services: the coexistence of broad normative recognition of these services as an essential component of public welfare systems and unequal operational capacity, marked by regulatory fragmentation, heterogeneous developments in benefits and services, differing levels of digital maturity and persistent territorial gaps. This paradox guides the comparative reading of the corpus and makes it possible to interpret interterritorial differences not as mere regulatory variations, but as expressions of different degrees of institutionalisation, articulation and systemic coherence.

2.6. Methodological Rigour and Limitations

The methodological design incorporates several strategies to ensure rigour. First, the explicit definition of the universe of analysis, the documentary units and the coding scheme strengthens the internal coherence of the study and enhances its replicability. Second, the comparative approach makes it possible to identify structural patterns beyond individual cases, avoiding a merely descriptive or case-by-case reading of each autonomous community. Third, the use of official primary sources anchors the analysis in verifiable normative, operational and strategic evidence. Fourth, the homogeneous application of a previously defined ordinal scale allows the cases to be ordered according to common criteria, although without attributing a strict statistical or metric value to the score.

Likewise, the coding procedure was designed to ensure the traceability of the analysis. For each autonomous community, the instruments located were recorded, together with their currency, their function within the system and their contribution to each of the analytical dimensions. In cases where no general strategic plan, complete catalogue or explicit digital tool was located in an official open source, this absence was interpreted as a deficit in documentary closure, not as evidence of the absolute non-existence of administrative activity or sectoral planning.

Nevertheless, the study has limitations. First, it focuses on the institutional architecture observable in current official documents and therefore does not measure actual implementation, effective coverage, financial sufficiency, waiting times, quality of care or administrative performance. Second, the use of open official sources may underestimate autonomous communities where certain documents exist but are not adequately indexed, published or accessible. Third, the category of “strategic plan” is not completely homogeneous across territories, since in some cases there is a general system-wide plan, while in others there are only sectoral instruments, diagnoses, implementation plans or partial strategies.

Finally, the qualitative and documentary nature of the study does not allow causal relationships to be established in a strict sense, although it does make it possible to identify plausible explanatory mechanisms and to construct a comparative typology of regional institutional architectures. The findings should therefore be interpreted as a comparative institutional approximation that needs to be complemented in future research with indicators of expenditure, coverage, staffing, intensity of benefits and services, waiting times, effective digital implementation and the perceptions of professional and institutional actors.

3. Results

To comparatively examine the institutional configuration of community social services in Spain, a documentary corpus was constructed comprising the 15 autonomous communities within the common-regime system. País Vasco and Navarra were excluded because of the singularities arising from their foral regime, as were Ceuta and Melilla because of their different institutional configuration. The comparison was based on three types of official primary sources: regional social services laws, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, and current strategic plans or, where no general plan approved and accessible through an official open source was located, the closest official strategic instrument with system-ordering capacity.

The main finding of the analysis is that, according to the documentary corpus, territorial variation is not explained solely by the age or modernity of the framework law, but by the degree of formal articulation achieved among the different instruments that configure each regional system. In this study, this articulation is conceptualised as institutional closure, understood as the existence of a relatively complete and coherent sequence among the framework norm, the operational instrument specifying benefits and services, and current strategic planning, complemented, in the more developed cases, by digital tools, information systems or interoperability devices. From this perspective, the communities with a more consistent institutional architecture are not necessarily those with the most recent law, but those that have managed to assemble the law–catalogue–plan triad in a more stable way.

The comparative matrix makes it possible to identify four broad groups. The first group, with the highest visible institutional closure, comprises Castilla y León and Comunidad de Madrid. In both cases, greater documentary and functional density can be observed: a reference regional law, operational instruments specifying benefits and services, and digital tools or information systems capable of structuring professional or citizen access. The second group, advanced but not fully symmetrical, includes Andalucía and Comunitat Valenciana. Andalucía presents an architecture strengthened by the combination of law, updated catalogue and strategic planning; Comunitat Valenciana shows a particularly intense regulatory deployment in matters of coordination, mapping, quality and functional organisation, although with a general strategic planning framework that is less clearly visible in open official sources.

A third group, structured but with points of friction, includes Aragón, Canarias, Cataluña, Asturias, Illes Balears and Región de Murcia. In these cases, there is a recognisable institutional architecture, although with partial deficits linked to the age or updating of the catalogue, the absence or transition of the general strategic plan, the sectoralisation of some instruments or still uneven digitalisation. Finally, the group with the greatest documentary fragmentation or lowest strategic closure consists of Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Cantabria and Castilla-La Mancha. In these territories, the analysis reveals deficits in one of the three fundamental links: absence of a current general plan, sectoral or incomplete portfolios or catalogues, lower updating of operational instruments, or lower visibility of digital and evaluation tools.

The first substantive pattern emerging from the corpus is that the documentary visibility and formal specification of protective intensity depend largely on the existence, quality and updating of catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services. Where these instruments are general, recent, systematic and relatively legible, the system offers a higher density of guarantees, by specifying the types of benefits and services, access conditions, intensities, compatibilities and, in some cases, their guaranteed or conditional nature. Conversely, when operational development remains at a generic, sectoral, dispersed or incomplete level, the intelligibility of the system decreases, and protection becomes more exposed to subsequent administrative developments or to unequal territorial interpretations. Consequently, a substantive part of regional asymmetries is produced not only in the framework law, but also at the operational level at which social rights are translated into recognisable benefits and services.

The second pattern concerns digitalisation. The comparison shows that this is one of the most uneven dimensions within the set analysed. However, this unevenness is not captured by generic references to technological modernisation or electronic administration. What differentiates the cases is whether digitalisation is formally linked to concrete system tools, such as interoperability mechanisms, social history records, integrated information systems, digital catalogues, professional access, citizen access, follow-up procedures or monitoring systems. In some autonomous communities, digitalisation appears as part of the institutional infrastructure of the system, connected to traceability, data management, continuity of intervention and inter-administrative coordination. In others, it remains at a more programmatic or administrative level, without being translated into a clearly institutionalised digital architecture. At the documentary level, this suggests that digitalisation does not operate as a homogeneous modernisation factor. Rather, its formal development seems to reflect pre-existing differences in institutional capacity and may reinforce territorial asymmetries if it is not accompanied by shared standards on data, interoperability, evaluation and digital inclusion.

The third pattern pertains to institutional resilience, conceptualised here from a formal and documentary perspective. The findings do not measure actual adaptive performance, rather identifies the degree to which official instruments incorporate markers of institutional resilience, such as strategic planning, evaluation, coordination, follow-up capacity, professionalisation, and mechanisms for functional adaptation. The communities with greater strategic density are those in which plans incorporate defined objectives, timetables, evaluation instruments, priorities for inter-administrative coordination, economic reports, professionalisation or mechanisms of functional adaptation. Conversely, where the general plan does not exist, is under preparation or is replaced by partial instruments, institutional resilience appears less firmly anchored in documentary terms and more dependent on contingent, sectoral or administrative arrangements. Strategic planning thus emerges as a decisive element for assessing the system’s adaptive capacity in scenarios of prolonged pressure.

Overall, the documentary corpus supports the interpretation that the formal institutional sustainability of community social services cannot be assessed solely through the existence of regional laws. Rather, at the documentary level, it is associated with the degree of coherence achieved among normative, operational, digital and strategic dimensions. Where the sequence among law, catalogue and plan appears more complete, the institutional architecture is more legible, stable and potentially capable of sustaining comparable guarantees. Where one or more of these links are missing, fragmentation increases and the possibility that regional diversity may translate into territorial inequality is amplified. Table 2 presents a comparison of the data obtained in relation to the degree of institutional closure.

Table 2. Comparative classification of the degree of institutional closure.

Cluster	Autonomous Communities	Main Feature	Indicative Score
I. High institutional closure	Castilla y León; Comunidad de Madrid	More complete institutional sequence among law, catalogue/portfolio, digital tools and strategic or functional development.	11/12
II. Advanced institutional closure	Andalucía; Comunitat Valenciana	Dense normative and operational architecture, with a strong catalogue or regulatory deployment, although with some point of strategic or digital asymmetry.	10/12
III. Medium-high institutional closure	Aragón; Canarias; Cataluña	Structured systems, with law, operational instruments and/or recognisable planning, but with frictions due to age, updating, incomplete planning or uneven digitalisation.	9/12
IV. Medium institutional closure	Asturias; Illes Balears; Región de Murcia	Partially consolidated architectures, with relevant advances, but also deficits in the general plan, catalogue, digitalisation or strategic articulation.	8/12
V. Medium-low institutional closure	Extremadura; Galicia; La Rioja	Presence of relevant instruments, but with sectoral fragmentation, lower digital visibility or a deficit in fully consolidated general planning.	7/12
VI. Low institutional closure	Cantabria; Castilla-La Mancha	Greater documentary fragmentation or lower closure of the law–catalogue–plan cycle in open official sources.	5/12

Authors’ own elaboration.

To make the clustering procedure more transparent, Table 3 disaggregates the score assigned to each autonomous community across the four analytical dimensions. These scores should be read as ordinal indicators of documentary institutional architecture, not as measurements of actual implementation, service quality, coverage or administrative performance.

Table 3. Scores by autonomous community across the four analytical dimensions.

Autonomous Community	Multilevel Governance	Catalogue/Portfolio Intensity	Digitalisation	Institutional Resilience	Total Score	Cluster
Castilla y León	3	3	2	3	11	I. High institutional closure
Comunidad de Madrid	3	3	3	2	11	I. High institutional closure
Andalucía	3	3	1	3	10	II. Advanced institutional closure
Comunitat Valenciana	3	3	2	2	10	II. Advanced institutional closure
Aragón	3	2	2	2	9	III. Medium-high institutional closure
Canarias	2	2	2	3	9	III. Medium-high institutional closure
Cataluña	2	3	2	2	9	III. Medium-high institutional closure
Asturias	2	2	2	2	8	IV. Medium institutional closure
Illes Balears	2	2	2	2	8	IV. Medium institutional closure
Región de Murcia	2	2	2	2	8	IV. Medium institutional closure
Extremadura	2	2	1	2	7	V. Medium-low institutional closure
Galicia	2	1	2	2	7	V. Medium-low institutional closure
La Rioja	2	2	1	2	7	V. Medium-low institutional closure
Cantabria	2	1	1	1	5	VI. Low institutional closure
Castilla-La Mancha	1	1	1	2	5	VI. Low institutional closure

Note: Scores range from 0 to 3 in each dimension. The total score ranges from 0 to 12. The scores reflect documentary evidence of formal institutional architecture and do not measure actual implementation, service quality, coverage, effectiveness or administrative performance. Authors’ own elaboration.

These findings suggest that the main line of improvement does not lie exclusively in approving new framework laws, but in completing the system’s pending links: general, updated and legible catalogues or portfolios; current and evaluable strategic plans; interoperable information systems; and funding and coordination frameworks linked to guaranteed functions. From this perspective, the central problem is not decentralisation itself, but the unequal institutional density with which each autonomous community has developed its own system of community social services.

4. Discussion

The findings obtained from the comparative analysis of the documentary corpus make it possible to reformulate the sustainability of community social services in Spain as a problem of institutional density, articulation and coherence, rather than as an issue that can be explained solely by the formal existence of competences or by the isolated availability of resources. This interpretation refers to documentary institutional density and should not be read as a direct assessment of actual service performance. The main contribution of the study lies not only in confirming that territorial differences exist among autonomous communities, but in showing that these differences are structured around the varying degree of alignment among three fundamental documentary levels: the regional social services law, the catalogue or portfolio of benefits and services, and current strategic planning. This reading is consistent with recent research that has shown the persistence of regional disparities in social services systems and in outcomes associated with social protection, as well as the need to analyse not only the volume of resources, but also the institutional capacity to translate them into cohesion, access and reduction in social risks (García-Luque et al. 2022; Mateo-Pérez and Murillo-de-la-Cueva 2025).

From this perspective, the findings qualify general interpretations of decentralisation in the field of welfare. Decentralisation does not appear, in itself, either as a sufficient cause of inequality or as an automatic guarantee of territorial adaptation. Rather, the results suggest that its effects depend on the way in which each autonomous community institutionally develops and consolidates the system through normative, operational and strategic instruments. This conclusion is close to recent work on the Spanish territorial model, which has shown that decentralisation can coexist with significant deficits in coordination, funding and response capacity, without this implying that decentralisation should be regarded as an obstacle in itself (Erkoreka and Hernando-Pérez 2023; Navarro and Velasco 2022). The documentary corpus makes it possible to specify the mechanism: inequality does not derive solely from normative diversity in the abstract, but from the different degree of institutional closure achieved by each regional system. Where the framework law is accompanied by an updated operational catalogue and a current strategic plan, the system appears more consistent, more legible and potentially more capable of sustaining comparable guarantees. By contrast, where one or more of these links are missing, fragmented or less developed, the institutional architecture becomes weaker and territorial diversity can more easily turn into effective inequality. This documentary explanation does not exclude other factors that may shape territorial differences, such as fiscal capacity, political priorities, administrative traditions or socioeconomic conditions. These factors fall outside the scope of the present design but should be incorporated into future explanatory research.

This result makes it possible to enrich the discussion on multilevel governance in social services. The comparison does not simply show communities with “more” or “less” decentralisation, but rather different configurations of system institutionalisation. In this sense, the Spanish case suggests that multilevel governance should not be assessed only by the formal distribution of competences, but by the capacity to articulate responsibilities, funding, planning instruments, coordination devices and comparable information mechanisms. This interpretation connects with recent studies on the territorial governance of welfare in Spain, which have pointed to dynamics of partial recentralisation, intergovernmental tensions and new forms of vertical and horizontal coordination in social and health policies (Hernandez et al. 2025). Applied to community social services, the central finding is that regional or local autonomy contributes to the sustainability of the system only when it is translated into institutional architectures that are sufficiently closed, legible and coordinated.

The analysis of the corpus makes it possible to refine the interpretation of the system’s protective intensity. The results show that a substantial part of territorial variation lies not so much at the declarative level of the law as at the operational level of catalogues and portfolios of benefits and services. Communities with more recent, comprehensive and legible instruments tend to show greater protective density, whereas where the catalogue is partial, sectoral, outdated or still in development, protection is less visible and more dependent on subsequent administrative developments. This finding shifts attention from the general proclamation of rights towards the devices that convert them into services, benefits, access conditions and recognisable intensities. In this sense, the catalogue or portfolio operates as an intermediate instrument between the norm and material guarantee, which connects with recent debates on the need to design sustainable, legible welfare benefits and services oriented towards specific social needs, combining transfers, services and public support infrastructures (Bohnenberger 2020). Likewise, comparative evidence on territorialized social policies shows that decentralisation can generate proximity-based responses, but also divergent outcomes when opportunities, institutional capacities and real conditions for inclusion differ across territories (Pinto and Gonçalves 2023). From this perspective, territorial inequality in social services is produced not only at the level of competences, but also in the documentary operationalization of protection.

With regard to digitalisation, the findings also require a more nuanced reading. The documentary corpus shows that the system’s digital maturity does not depend simply on the presence of generic references to modernisation or electronic administration, but on the existence of explicit devices for interoperability, a single social history record, integrated information systems, digitised catalogues, or channels for professional and citizen access. This finding engages with the literature on data-driven public services, which warns that digitalisation can improve efficiency and management capacity, but that its effects on equity depend on how data collection, storage, analysis and use processes are configured (Ruijer et al. 2023). It is also consistent with work on welfare digitalisation showing that digital reforms are not merely technical changes, but processes of organisational and institutional reconfiguration that can shift capacities, alter relations between administration and citizens, and transfer responsibilities to external actors or to users themselves (Bennett and Meers 2025; Collington 2022). From this standpoint, where digitalisation appears integrated into planning, linked to the traceability of intervention and articulated with tools for professional and citizen access, it acts as a structural component of the system. Where its presence is weak, fragmentary or purely instrumental, it is reduced to administrative support and can hardly operate as an infrastructure of equity. Although the documentary corpus does not allow us to measure digital exclusion directly, the uneven formal development of digital tools identified in the analysed documents should be read considering the literature on digital welfare and digital exclusion.

This theoretical extrapolation connects with an increasingly broad critical literature on the digital welfare state. Recent studies have shown that digitalisation can generate new forms of digital poverty, exclusion and inequality when vulnerable populations lack sufficient access, competences or support to navigate digitised administrative environments (Sanders and Scanlon 2021; Sibilla and Gorgoni 2023). Similarly, research on data governance in digital welfare warns that the absence of clear democratic mandates, sufficient data quality, citizen participation and protection safeguards can lead to forms of opaque monitoring and administrative control rather than to fairer and more accessible services (Van Zoonen 2020). The contribution of the present study consists of situating these risks within Spanish multilevel governance: digitalisation does not appear as an autonomous dimension of modernisation, but as an institutionally distributed territorial capacity. Consequently, the differences observed among autonomous communities reveal that digital transformation largely reproduces the different degrees of pre-existing institutional maturity. In fragmented systems, digitalisation may enter a vicious circle: administrations with greater organisational capacity develop more integrated tools, while those with lower institutional closure tend to deploy partial, less interoperable solutions that are more dependent on unequal administrative capacities (Busacca 2025).

The third dimension, institutional resilience, also requires a cautious interpretation in light of the documentary nature of the corpus. The analysis does not assess actual crisis response or the effective adaptive capacity of social services. Rather, it identifies the formal presence of resilience-building mechanisms, such as planning, evaluation, coordination, professionalisation, information systems, monitoring and institutional learning. This reading is consistent with recent approaches to community and public-system resilience, which emphasise that crisis response capacity depends not only on available resources, but on the existence of integrated frameworks for planning, leadership, learning, cross-sectoral cooperation and monitoring mechanisms (Scherer et al. 2022; Suleimany et al. 2022). In the case of community social services, this means that resilience is not exhausted by service continuity during critical situations but requires the incorporation of adaptation and learning into the ordinary design of the system.

This finding is especially visible in the comparison between autonomous communities with a relatively complete sequence of law, catalogue and plan, and those where the strategic dimension remains incomplete, fragmented or under development. Where plans incorporate objectives, timetables, evaluation, inter-administrative coordination, professionalisation, information systems or review mechanisms, resilience appears more institutionally anchored. By contrast, when strategic planning is weak or sectoral, adaptive capacity is more exposed to contingent responses, partial administrative solutions or the efforts of operational actors. Along these lines, the literature on coordination between health and social services has shown that the most effective responses to complex needs require protocols, needs assessment, stable coordination and clear referral and follow-up mechanisms—elements that cannot be improvised only in crisis situations (Albertson et al. 2022). However, a higher degree of institutional closure does not make a system immune to budgetary constraints, staffing shortages, political changes or sudden increases in demand. It only indicates that the system has a more developed formal architecture for organising adaptation.

Consequently, the findings qualify approaches that understand resilience as a predominantly organisational or professional virtue. In community social services, resilience depends on a strategic infrastructure that makes it possible and sustainable over time: current planning, multilevel governance, sufficient funding, shared information, professional capacity and organisational learning. This reading connects with approaches to transformative resilience, which warn that recovery after a crisis should not be limited to restoring previous functioning when that functioning already contained inequalities, coordination deficits or structural vulnerabilities. From this perspective, resilience refers not only to the capacity to withstand or recover ordinary activity, but also to the possibility of introducing institutional learning, correcting accumulated fragilities and orienting the system towards more equitable and adaptive forms of organisation (Haldane and Morgan 2021).

From an integrated perspective, the documentary analysis reinforces the hypothesis of a structural paradox in the system of community social services in Spain. While normative discourse tends to recognise these services as an essential component of public welfare systems, the inter-regional comparison shows that this recognition is not translated homogeneously into equivalent systems of guarantee, catalogue, digitalisation and planning. The paradox, therefore, is not merely discursive and is empirically observed in the documentary corpus through the distance between the general legal recognition of the system and the unequal institutional density with which each autonomous community specifies it.

On this basis, the main theoretical contribution of the study consists of proposing an understanding of sustainability based on systemic coherence. Sustainability does not depend exclusively on the age of the law, the volume of resources or the isolated deployment of technological innovations, but on the degree of alignment achieved among norm, catalogue, strategy and digital and institutional capacities. In this sense, the concept of institutional closure offers a useful tool for comparatively interpreting why some regional systems present more documentarily consistent architectures than others, even when they share the same general State framework.

From the point of view of practical implications, the findings suggest that policies aimed at strengthening community social services should go beyond partial or sectoral reforms. In particular, the analysis points to four priorities. The first is to close the minimum instrumental cycle in those communities where one or more of the law–catalogue–plan links are missing. The second is to strengthen the comparability, updating and legibility of catalogues of benefits and services, since a large part of the system’s protective intensity is played out at this level. The third is to treat digitalisation as an institutional infrastructure, based on interoperability, data governance, traceability and articulated access, and not merely as a procedural layer. The fourth is to incorporate resilience more explicitly into planning, through mechanisms of evaluation, coordination, organisational learning and periodic review of professional capacities.

Finally, the study opens up a future research agenda that would allow this documentary typology to be subjected to further empirical testing. In particular, it would be relevant to complement the comparative analysis of institutional architecture with indicators of actual implementation, regional and local funding, professional staffing, coverage, intensity of benefits and services, waiting times and effective use of digital tools. Likewise, the incorporation of interviews with regional and local officials would make it possible to test the extent to which the documentary density observed corresponds to effective capacities for coordination, management and adaptation. In this way, the typology proposed here could evolve from an explanation based on normative, operational and strategic structure towards a more complete understanding of territorial inequality in community social services.

5. Conclusions

The comparative analysis of the documentary corpus makes it possible to conclude that the formal institutional sustainability of community social services in Spain is associated, at the documentary level, with the degree of coherence with which each autonomous community articulates these three levels of system configuration. More than the mere existence of a regional law or the recency of a regulatory reform, the decisive factor is the level of institutional closure achieved among regulation, the specification of benefits and services, and strategic planning.

First, the study suggests that regional decentralisation has given rise to a plurality of institutional architectures within the common-regime system. This diversity should not be interpreted solely as an expression of territorial autonomy, but also as a potential source of inequality when it is not accompanied by sufficient mechanisms of coordination, comparability and functional integration. The documentary corpus shows that differences among autonomous communities are located not only at the general normative level, but also in their differing capacity to translate the law into clear operational catalogues and strategic instruments with a real capacity to structure the system.

Second, the findings make it possible to affirm that the system’s protective intensity is strongly conditioned by the quality, comprehensiveness and updating of catalogues and portfolios of benefits and services. Where these instruments are general, legible and relatively enforceable, the system acquires greater institutional density and visibility; where they are partial, sectoral or pending development, fragmentation increases and territorial comparability decreases. In this sense, a central part of interterritorial inequality in social services is produced not only in the abstract formulation of principles or rights, but also in the operational materialisation of benefits and services.

Third, the study shows that digitalisation constitutes the most uneven dimension of the set analysed and that its institutional value depends on its integration into the system’s architecture. The communities with higher levels of digital maturity are those in which digitalisation appears linked to interoperability, a single social history record, professional and citizen access, or digitised catalogues. By contrast, when it is reduced to a general reference to administrative modernisation, its capacity to improve equity and coordination is limited. This suggests that, at the documentary level, the digitalisation of social services does not automatically operate as a homogeneous vector of modernisation. Its institutional value depends on whether digital tools are connected to shared systems, accessible channels, data governance and mechanisms of professional and citizen support.

Fourth, the documentary comparison highlights that institutional resilience should be interpreted here as a formal and documentary dimension, not as a direct measure of actual adaptive performance. Its assessment is based on the explicit presence of planning, follow-up, evaluation, coordination, professionalisation and mechanisms of functional adaptation in the official instruments analysed. Where strategic plans are clear, current and connected to the organisation of the system, resilience appears more institutionalised; where they are absent or replaced by partial instruments, adaptive capacity is less visible and more dependent on contingent arrangements. Consequently, resilience should not be understood exclusively as an organisational or professional capacity, but as a property of the institutional assembly that articulates norms, benefits and services, planning and coordination tools.

On the basis of these findings, the main contribution of the article consists of proposing an interpretation of the documentary institutional sustainability of community social services based on systemic coherence. Sustainability does not depend solely on resources, the age of the law or isolated innovations, but on the system’s capacity to assemble its normative, operational, strategic and digital components in a relatively stable manner. From this perspective, the concept of institutional closure offers a useful analytical tool for understanding why some autonomous communities present more robust architectures than others, even while sharing the same general State framework.

In applied terms, the study suggests that strengthening community social services requires at least four lines of action. The first is to close the minimum law–catalogue–plan cycle in those communities where one or more of these instruments remain incomplete or weakly developed. The second is to move towards greater comparability of catalogues and portfolios through common metadata on benefits and services, intensities, eligibility, compatibilities and follow-up. The third is to treat digitalisation as an institutional infrastructure of equity and coordination, and not merely as a layer of procedural management. The fourth is to strengthen the multilevel articulation of the system, linking planning, stable funding and the effective role of the local level in the guaranteed provision of services.

Finally, the study presents limitations that open a clear agenda for future research. The comparison carried out measures institutional architecture observable in official documents, but not effective implementation, actual coverage, financial sufficiency or administrative performance. Therefore, institutional closure should be understood as a comparative documentary proxy, not as evidence of actual effectiveness or service quality. A logical continuation of this work would therefore consist in testing this documentary typology against indicators of expenditure, staffing, intensity of benefits and services, waiting times, territorial coverage and use of digital systems, as well as against qualitative evidence from regional officials, professionals and local authorities. Only through such triangulation will it be possible to move from a typology of institutional density towards a more robust explanation of territorial inequality in community social services in Spain.