Knowledge Hub

The book is launched in the run-up to the World Water Forum in South Korea (12-17 April) and comes in the wake of Jakarta’s decision in March 2015 to annul its privatised water contracts citing the violation of the 9.9 million residents’ human right to water. This is the largest remunicipalisation in the world, suggesting that water privatisation is running out of steam and the pendulum is swinging back in favour of a reinvigorated, accountable and sustainable public control of water. The TNI book is co-published jointly with Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU), Multinationals Observatory, European Public Services Union (EPSU) and the Municipal Services Project (MSP).

From New Delhi to Barcelona, from Argentina to Germany, thousands of politicians, public officials, workers, unions and social movements are reclaiming or creating public services to address people’s basic needs and respond to environmental challenges. They do this most often at the local level. Our research shows that there have been at least 835 examples of (re)municipalisation of public services worldwide since 2000, involving more than 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries. Why are people around the world reclaiming essential services from private operators and bringing their delivery back into the public sphere? There are many motivations behind (re)municipalisation initiatives: a goal to end private sector abuse or labour violations; a desire to regain control over the local economy and resources; a wish to provide people with affordable services; or an intention to implement ambitious climate strategies.

This article engages constructively with the ‘new municipalism’, while cautioning against imposing another set of top-down elite imperatives on ‘left behind places’. It also points out that local does not necessarily mean progressive, citing the example of Tees Valley’s Conservative mayor Ben Houchen in the UK. As an alternative, it draws upon positive experiences from the recent global remunicipalisation trend, and highlights the importance of working with ‘actually existing’ municipalisms on the ground, focusing in particular on Germany. It concludes that productive coalitions and new alliances for a renewed left municipalism can be built through working with continuing, new and diverse forms of municipal values and cultures, both within the UK and internationally.

This book is about more than just numbers. It shows that public services are more important than ever in the face of the climate catastrophe, mounting inequalities, and growing political unrest. Together, civil society organisations, trade unions, and local authorities are crafting new templates for how to expand democratic public ownership to all levels of society and opening up new routes to community-led and climate conscious public services. The Covid-19 crisis has made clear the disastrous effects of years of austerity, social security cuts, and public service privatisation. But it has also demonstrated that public services and the people who operate them are truly the foundation of healthy and resilient societies. As privatisation fails, a growing international movement is choosing (re)municipalisation as a key tool for redefining public ownership for the 21st century.

This peer-reviewed paper offers a novel conceptualisation of remunicipalisation, which draws attention to the open, dynamic, political, and spatially diverse aspects of remunicipalisation as part of a mutating process of neoliberalism. This novel theorisation also has implications for left political strategy and broader transformative projects against a backdrop of global economic, social, and ecological crisis. The paper draws on the experiences of Argentina and Germany to exemplify these points.

This paper looks at the series of plans developed by the UK Labour Party under the progressive leadership of Jeremy Corbyn between 2016 and 2019 for re-establishing public ownership and operation of services and infrastructure which had been privatised over the previous 40 years.

This peer-reviewed publication explores how remunicipalisation often emerges in response to failed promise of neoliberal capitalism to improve the quality and efficiency of public services through the (supposed) competitiveness of the free market. The paper argues that like neoliberalism, remunicipalisations take spatially diverse and variegated forms as market-driven logics interact with other political and economic determinations. The paper draws on the case study of the remunicipalisation of the Thuringian energy provider TEAG, to show how the local state intervened in and diversified the uneven economic geographies in the state of Thuringia to focus on the potential of regional wealth creation in the region whilst stabilising local market dynamics through diversifying ownership forms.

This report intends to capture the current state of play of the global water justice movement in order to strengthen struggles for public and community water systems. It emerges amid growing water crises in many regions, which have come to constitute a global crisis. It is based on conversations that took place at the “Our Future is Public” conference in Santiago, Chile, in 2022, and is part of the movement’s critical response to- and reflections on the UN 2023 Water Conference.

The Energy Democracy Declaration is a result of a two-day Energy sector meeting as part of the international Our Future is Public conference in Santiago, Chile, that involved Indigenous representatives, trade unions, ecofeminists, climate justice organisations, solidarity collectives and NGOs. It outlines six dimensions that can jointly pave the way forward to ensure clean, affordable energy for all.

This peer-reviewed publication explores processes of de-privatisation in rural Germany (Ilm-Kreis, Thuringia), and critically investigates how the shifting political terrain of the local state has led to the de-privatisation of two key sectors: waste and bus transportation (and vice versa). The paper illustrates how the two cases unfolded, highlighting the variegated actors and agencies, the complex contexts, and the dynamic and contested politics of de-privatisation in this rural case study.

After decades of austerity and market-led reforms, local public services in many countries are under strain; fragmented, under-resourced, and too often driven by profit rather than public need. In the face of mounting evidence of the failures of privatisation, a growing number of cities and towns are reclaiming control through remunicipalisation. This briefing explores how bringing services back into public hands can help build more integrated, democratic, and caring local economies, and why this shift is essential for creating more resilient and equitable communities.

This peer-reviewed publications engages with the methodology ‘behind’ the Public Futures database and explores the significance of crowdsourced data to inform and strengthen alternative progressive narratives. Drawing on the Public Futures database as a case study, the paper argues that the building of counter-hegemonic knowledge is particularly important in the current moment where dominant and elite narratives are being called into question and risks of dis- and misinformation are high. The paper also reflects on the role of social movements as (alternative) knowledge producers and disseminators.