7 STEPS TO BUILD
A DEMOCRATIC ECONOMY
The Future is Public Conference ReportThis report is based on the panels, workshops and discussions of the international Future is
Public: Democratic Ownership of the Economy conference that took place on 4-5 December,
2019 in Amsterdam’s South-East borough, the Bijlmermeer.

DATE February 2020
RAPPORTEUR AND WRITER James AngelEDITORS Satoko Kishimoto and Lavinia Steinfort
COPY EDITOR David Sogge
DESIGNER Karen Paalman
PHOTOGRAPHER Jess Graham
PUBLISHED BY Transnational InstituteWith valuable feedback from Daria Cibrario, Thomas M. Hanna and Jan Winde
CONFERENCE CO-CREATED WITH Hart voor de K-Buurt
CONFERENCE CO-ORGANISERS Transnational Institute (TNI), de 99 van Amsterdam,
Multinational Observatory, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), PublicServices International (PSI), Austrian Federal Chamber of Labours (AK), Ingeniería
Sin Fronteras CATALUÑA (ISF), Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU),
We Own It (UK), University of Glasgow (Scotland), Norwegian Union of Municipal
and General Employees (Fagforbundet), Democracy Collaborative (USA), MODATIMA(movement of defence of water, land and environment - Chile), Aqua Publica Europea,
Danish Union of Public Employees (FOA), Municipal Services Project (MSP-Canada),
EPSU (European Federation of Public Service Unions) and the Netherlands Trade
Union Confederation (FNV)
IN COLLABORATION WITH Asia Europe People’s Forum (with financial support
from EC DEVCO), Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), Vigência! (Brazil),
Eurodad (Europe), Platform for Public Community Partnerships in the Americas(PAPC), M-Power project (Municipal Power), Corporate Europe Observatory, Foodand Water Watch (USA), Transform!Denmark, Platform for the Remunicipalisationof Public Services in Madrid, ITF (International Transport Workers Federation), ODG(Observatori del deute en la globalització, Spain), Universidad Abierta de Recoleta(Chile), openDemocracy (media partner) and The Laura Flanders Show (media partner)
To access the conference resources: https://futureispublic.org/
2 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

7 STEPS TO BUILD
A DEMOCRATIC ECONOMY
The Future is Public Conference Report

3 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

1. BACK TO THE FUTURE
Under the grip of an increasingly emboldened
right-wing nationalism, our world is in turmoil.
From India to Turkey, Brazil to the US, a series ofdangerous populists have come to power on a
racist, climate-denying and crony capitalist agenda.
The timing could not be worse. Ecologicalbreakdown looms imminent. Global inequalities
are sharper than ever. Decades of neoliberalism
have torn apart our social fabric, leaving countless
people across global North and South struggling
to access the basics of survival amidst widespreadprivatisation and the marketisation of everything
under the sun. Indeed, it is these crises of capitalismthat have empowered the far right, who haveturned desperation into division in order to ensurethat the position of the wealthy and powerful isperpetuated.
Yet, in spite of all this, something else is happening. Simultaneously, social movements and governments across the world have begun to quietly
build a different future. A public future groundedin solidarity, equality, sustainability and radical democracy.
At the heart of this new public future standtowns and cities. New research from TNI andinternational partners shows that between 2000
and 2019, globally, there have been over 1400 new
cases of “municipalisation” or “remunicipalisation”-- the creation of new public enterprises run by
the local governments or the return of privatised
enterprises to municipal hands. This trend hastaken place across 2400 locales in 58 countries.
Workers and their unions have often been at theheart of these remunicipalisation efforts, striving to
improve workplace conditions while endeavouring
to place their valuable knowledge and experienceat the centre of public services.
This “new municipalism” has not emerged inisolation. Rather, it arises in a broader agenda of
economic democracy pursued across a range ofscales including but not limited to the city. From theworkers co-operative that has taken over cleaning
services in Recoleta, Chile through to the suite ofnationalisations recently proposed by the British
Labour Party, new forms of public and collective
4 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

ownership are being developed in our workplaces,
our neighbourhoods, our towns, our cities, ourcountries, our world.
Why now? Why, after years of being told that there
is no alternative to capitalism, is public ownershipback on the table? What changed to make thispossible? While there are surely many factors
at play here, perhaps the most clear-cut is thatprivatisation now stands more discredited thanever before.
While we were initially sold privatisation on thebasis of its “efficiency”, study after study has foundlittle evidence that private ownership is inherently
more efficient than public ownership. What we haveseen, instead, are increasing costs and declining
quality for service users, worsening conditions
for workers and a total breakdown of democratic
accountability, transparency and control. The myththat “private is better and cheaper” can no longer
be sustained. It’s little wonder, then, that people
are demanding change and that especially local
governments are starting to act.
If the future is public, what will this look like andhow will it be built? This was the question animating
the international conference on 4-5 December
2019 convened by The Transnational Institute, De
99 Van Amsterdam (the city’s new think and dothank) and international partner organisations. For
two days, activists, researchers, trade unionists,
politicians and policymakers from across the world
gathered to share experiences, build solidarityand further plans for economic democracy. This
report provides a brief snapshot into some of the
discussions that took place. While unfortunately
not everything could be captured, the hope is that

a number of the key questions, tensions and ideas
are recorded here, as a basis for further debate.
The report identifies 7 steps that are vital to build
a democratic economy, which emerged out ofthe discussions in Amsterdam. Each of these isaddressed in the pages that follow.
The conference was hosted in the vibrant anddiverse Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Southeast
Amsterdam, a place with an important history of
struggle that resonated throughout our discussions.
As a neighbourhood rich in a multitude of different
migrant communities, subject to ongoing racist
criminalisation and chronic underinvestment,
Bijlmermeer is on the frontline of the processesof gentrification and racial injustice that any new
public future must resist. Defending the right tohousing and education is a particular challenge forthe people of Bijlmermeer, who over the past ten
years have organised collectively to win significant
improvements in this regard. From an opening
welcome from Tanja Jadnanansing, the Chairpersonof the Executive Board of Amsterdam’s Southeast
borough, to a crucial intervention on the history of
black struggle in the Netherlands and beyond from
Mitchell Esajas of the Amsterdam-based Black
Archives, our international gathering endeavoured
to remain rooted in the specific struggles of theplace in which we met.

2. THE NEW MUNICIPALISM
With the majority of the world’s population now living in urban areas, the city has emerged as a vitalterrain of social struggle. As the conference’s keynote lecture from renowned Marxist geographer
David Harvey made clear, cities are key arenas for
wealth generation and capitalist accumulation. If,
as Harvey suggests, the perennial dilemma for thecapitalist is where to profitably invest the surplus
capital they extract, then the urban environment
provides ample opportunities for doing so -- fromlarge infrastructure projects to the stimulation of
new forms of ever-more spectacular consumption.
Yet cities, Harvey noted, are not just vehicles foraccumulation but also sites of resistance -- a notionthat seems particularly prescient in the current
conjecture. National politics in much of the world
have for years appeared to be drifting more andmore to the right. But meanwhile, municipalities
and urban movements have increasingly madecities spaces of social innovation and emancipatory
experimentation. Spaces where policies can takeroot that uphold and advance the interests of local
communities and the environment.
Perhaps the most widely celebrated example inthis regard is Barcelona. Since May 2015, the Catalan capital has been governed by a new “citizen’s
platform” named Barcelona En Comú, led by the
housing activist Ada Colau. Barcelona En Comúseeks to feminise politics1 by transforming the local state into a vehicle for expanding grassroots
democracy and participation and to undo privatisation through forms of municipal ownership thatgive citizens maximal control over the services theyuse. Achievements so far have included measures
to curb gentrification and evictions, the remunicipalisation of gender violence prevention services
and three kindergartens and the establishment of
new municipal entities for dental services, funeralservices and electricity retailing (the latter of which
is discussed in section 5).
1 Feminisation of politics, beyond its concern for increasingpresence of women in decision-making spaces and implementing
public policies to promote gender equality, is about changing theway politics is done. A feminised politics seeks to emphasize theimportance of the small, the relational, the everyday, challenging the artificial division between the personal and the political.
Source: https://roarmag.org/magazine/municipalism-feminization-urban-politics/ written by Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird

5 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

Barcelona is perhaps the most high-profile example
of a broader tendency evident in many struggles
across the world towards radically democratic
urban politics. This movement often referred toas “new municipalism” extends far beyond Spain.
Vienna, Austria, is another impressive exampleof the kinds of gains made possible throughprogressive municipal politics. This is a city famous
for its quality-of-life, ranked for a decade in the top
10 cities in this regard. For Renate Brauner, Special
Representative of the City of Vienna, this highquality of life is achieved on the back of publicly
owned and managed services and infrastructure
including housing, waste management, education,energy and transport. 60% of the city’s residents
live in publicly owned or subsidised housing -not because two thirds of the city are poor, but
because housing here is seen as social good, nota market commodity. On the European level, theHousing for All initiative unites tenant associations,trade unions, human rights organisations, churchgroups and pensioners, among others to collect
more than one million signatures. This European
Citizens’ Initiative urges the European Union totake action that enables affordable housing for all.
Remunicipalisation policies targeting the likes ofwater, energy and waste management are often at
the centre of new municipalist initiatives. Norway
provides an interesting recent case of remunicipalisation. In September 2017, one of the country’s
biggest waste collection companies, RenoNorden,

6 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

declared bankruptcy. Since then, the NorwegianUnion of Municipal and General Employees(Fagforbundet) has won the remunicipalisationof waste services in more than 100 municipalities
across the country. The benefits have been
widespread. For instance, in the case of Kragerø,
the first municipality to take back its waste services,
fees for residents have been reduced by 14% while
waste collection workers are enjoying higher wages
and pensions alongside more permanent contracts
and support in gaining official diplomas for theirskills. Costs for the municipality, meanwhile, havebeen decreased through avoiding expensive
tendering processes while municipalities haverebuilt their internal capacity to ensure quality
service delivery.
Service continuation during a transition fromprivate to public is a critical priority given that public
services must continue to be delivered throughout
the remunicipalisation process. The Global Union
Federation Public Services International membersargue that reciprocal links between national
federations and their local branches are criticallyimportant at a time of change. This was also thecase in Norway. Here, the national head office andlocal branch teamed up to persuade city councils in
the affected municipalities to vote against tenderrenewal, and instead to bring waste services backin house. The Fagforbundet local union in Osloalso turned a private-to-public transition into an
opportunity to increase its membership, recruiting

workers from the private company, many of whomwere migrants and had temporary contacts prior to
remunicipalisation and supported the non-union
workers too. Experiences in Norway illustrate theimportance of grassroots activism by workers -- inthis instance on the part of local union branches
and shop stewards -- in pushing municipalities toact.
As inspiring as these examples might be, many
conference participants from countries of the
global South suggested that the municipalist
agenda is Eurocentric and the relative developmentof states, institutions, and governance structures
around the world is under-appreciated andunder-analysed. For one thing, many of the morecelebrated examples of new municipalism tend
to be from the global North, despite years of
democratic innovation across the global South,
for example Porto Alegre’s development ofparticipatory budgeting and the Zapatista’s selfgoverned territories in Chiapas, Mexico. The role oftheory and practice developed in the global South
must be better acknowledged in the municipalist
movement going forward, as well as a diversity oftactics, strategies, and ownership forms.
Indeed, strong municipal initiatives continue
across the global South. The case of Recoleta,
Chile discussed in section 4 is one strong example.
Southeast Asia has also witnessed a numberof important remunicipalisations. For instance,
Selangor, Malaysia recently remunicipalised
its water system after two decades of conflict.
Following privatisation in 1994, the quality
and stability of service provision declined,
including regular outages in the summer and thenormalisation of water rationing for 10 million
residents. Meanwhile, overcharging, missed targets
and the non-disclosure of crucial information
became commonplace. Various attempts toterminate the city’s contract with private provider
SYABAS were made, culminating in 2014 when a
new public operator was established and acquired
the concession. Subsequently it invested over€237 million between 2016 and 2018 to upgrade
and maintain the system.
Binalonan in the Pangasinan province of thePhilippines is another hotbed of municipal action.
Here, the municipality provides free primary
7 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

healthcare, daycare centres, support for single
parents and older people and financial assistancefor women and children. As a result, it experiences
significant health advantages, for example a 2016
chronic malnutrition rate among children aged
0-2 of 9.06%, compared to the national average of
26.2%. The municipality of Cainta, Rizal is anotherexample in the Philippines, establishing the One
Cainta College to bring free tertiary education andlifetime opportunities for study to low income
households, alongside ambitious investment
in upgrading hospitals and opening new healthcentres.
Despite these municipal successes across theglobal South, conference participants also stressedthat postcolonial states are often highly centralised,affording local government little autonomy andoften seeing municipal politics dominated by
local elites. As such, for Wol-San Liem, Director ofInternational Affairs for the Korean Public Service
and Transport Workers’ Union, municipalities inseveral countries are more frequently antagonistic
targets for people and local community rather
than allies.
This latter point holds true for struggles against
water privatisation in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2014,activists in Lagos learned of plans on the partof the local government to enter into a publicprivate-partnership designed by the International
Finance Corporation arm of the World Bank,around the city’s water supply. In response, theNGO Environmental Rights Action launched the“Our Water Our Right” campaign, which soon
made strong links with AUPCTRE, the trade union
representing workers in the water sector. The
campaign forced the IFC out, yet the government
continued to plan for privatisation, challenging
activists to produce an alternative solution for
the failing state water company. In response, analternative roadmap to democratise the statewater company and transform this into a citizenled publicly owned water utility was developed,
which provides the basis of ongoing struggle.
In Lagos, while the institutions of the local
government are being used to force throughharmful anti-democratic policies, we also see theimportance of struggles waged around urban
infrastructure such as water networks. Thisexperience helps us clarify productive ways to rethink municipalism. The initial architects of themunicipalist project in Barcelona were always
clear that the point was not to fetishise electoral
power or the local state. Instead, the idea was touse a flexible movement between institutionaland grassroots politics in order to see what kindof transformative politics might be possible atthe municipal level. While municipalism, in someinstances, might look like leveraging power of thelocal state to implement remunicipalisations, inother contexts it might be more appropriate towage campaigns and organise communities for
economic democracy from outside the corridorsof government.
A further critique of municipalism arising fromthe conference pertains to the potential risk ofentrenching geographical inequalities. The worry
here is that opportunities for radical urban politics
in poorer municipalities will be far slimmer thanin richer places and that, therefore, municipalism
is an agenda that risks consolidating the powerof already wealthy cities. Moreover, David
Harvey’s intervention made plain the extent towhich localised experiments in radical politics
are embedded in global processes such as thecirculation of capital. How, then, are municipalist
experiments to stand a chance of success?
These two challenges point to the need for amunicipalist outlook that thinks across scales.
Endeavours to build economic democracy mustbear in mind the need to inculcate democratic
forms of ownership and governance, and radical
democracy at all levels beyond merely the urban
environment. This can ensure coordination andredistribution to mitigate against geographicalinequalities while at the same time helping topromote municipalist experiments that prefigure
and contribute to broader scale changes.
Municipalism, then, is always a starting point-- not an end in itself. Yet this is not to devalue
its importance. In contexts where the political
opportunities for radical change at the municipal
level are more open than at the national level, taking
advantage of this political space can translate intomuch-needed gains and engaged local populations
at the grassroots, while simultaneously building
capacity and experience in ways that can translate
8 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

into national and international politics whenchances arise.

3. DEMOCRATISING PUBLIC MODELSOne of the central attractions of new municipalism
is its promise of a radically democratic politics
that pursues participatory democratic control
as opposed to concentrating power in the handsof “experts” or bureaucrats. For Professor Andy
Cumbers of the University of Glasgow, the preneoliberal model of public ownership should not
be romanticised, as this tended to be highly topdown and centralised, affording service users andworkers very little control.
TNI Fellow Hilary Wainwright agreed, arguing thatin the UK context, Thatcher was able to privatise
services without effective resistance because
no democratic ethos or management was everembedded in any serious way. On a similar note,
Cat Hobbs of the pro-public campaign group
We Own It proposed that if we want a model of
public ownership so successful it cannot again
be dismantled, then it must be thoroughly
democratised so that citizens and workers havethe power to say no.
Indeed, traditional publicly owned enterprises
are by no means immune from engaging in highly
dubious activities. One example that stood out
in the presentation of Sylvia Chi from the Asian
Pacific Environmental Network, is the publicly
owned Bank of North Dakota in the United States.
This now operates in a politically conservative state
and was required to provide a loan to the state
government to fund a private security firm thatused brutal force against the Water Protectors andallies challenging the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
On the basis of this, Sylvia concluded: “We needto keep in mind that in public ownership we arelooking for public control. It will not always besolved by becoming a publicly owned enterprise.”This reflection brings up the key question of whatkind of public we wish for.
On the question of public banks and how thesemight be made more subject to popular control,
Dr Thomas Marois of SOAS University, London,

gave the example of Costa Rica’s Banco Popular, apublicly owned bank governed through a series of
democratic mechanisms. The bank is governed bya workers’ assembly constituted by 290 members(half of whom are women) from across 10 socialand economic sectors. The bank operates witha mission to serve the social and sustainablewelfare of Costa Ricans. Its banking decisions are
guided by the goals of gender equity, accessibility
and environmental responsibility. Its governing
board -- accountable to the assembly yet charged
with making key operational decisions -- is also
democratised, made up of three government
representatives and four representatives electedfrom the workers assembly. Building on the Banco
Popular expertise, Marois stressed that the levelof democracy of any public bank depends onsocial struggle, in other words, the extent to whichpeople are able to organise themselves to demand
democratic public banking.
In Terrassa, Catalonia, a civil society platform
called Taula de l’Agua de Terrassa (Water is Life
Terrassa) recently won its campaign for water
remunicipalisation, with a 100% public watercompany established in June 2018. This camealongside the establishment of the Terrassa
Water Observatory, an autonomous organisation
affiliated with the council established to enablecitizens to consult, advise, deliberate, makeproposals, and conduct research around water
management in the city. The Observatory
is governed by a plenary constituted byrepresentatives from each political party within
the municipality, the municipal government itself,
technical staff, business, community groups,
9 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

unions, education and universities. Agreements
and documents produced by The Observatory
must be studied by the municipal government. Yet
an issue so far has been that actors from within
the municipality have been reluctant to give up
control or share information with the Observatory.
This illustrates a point made by Hilary Wainwright,
which is that while democratised services on
their own are important, the potential will not
be realised under a non-transparent hierarchicalstate structure. As such, to democratise public
ownership, we also need to democratise the state
itself. An example of what this might look like,for Hilary, is Uruguay, which has a democratic
constitution enshrining public services and the rightto water as a public good. For example, in 2004,
after massive protests against water privatisation
and a subsequent national referendum, Uruguay
was the first country to prohibit water privatisation
through its constitution. This cultivates somethingof a democratic culture within the country, whichmeans that when privatisation is on the cards,
people are quick to protest. At the local level, asimilar constitutional change (city charter) banningwater privatisation was enacted following areferendum in Baltimore (USA) in 2018.
Professor David Hall looked to Kerala, India, todemonstrate the potential of radical democratic
control running through the operations of thestate. Kerala has a population of 33 million people
and is already famous for a progressive leftist
government that focuses on health care andeducation. The level of education of women is
exceptionally high and mortality rates are betterthan some places in New York City. It is also the
only state in India with more women than men. In
1996, the state passed a law affording power andautonomy to local power structures (panchayats),
who set planning objectives and budgets. An
issue that quickly arose was that women andpoorer groups participated less than average.
Programmes to tackle this were introduced andafter two years, women were participating morethan men. A study conducted five years after thelaw was introduced found that corruption was
reduced and most services were improved.
One way of thinking about these forms of radical
democracy is through the idea of the commons.
If the public has traditionally been conceived ofas the realm of the government, the language ofthe commons is used to depict processes throughwhich people take power themselves by collectively
governing resources or services. Commoning -- thecreation and regeneration of commons -- can takeplace through autonomous (or semi-autonomous)
citizens’ organisations such as cooperatives andcommunity-based non-profit organisations. But
it can also take place through the state in theform of what was referred to throughout theconference as public-commons partnerships inwhich public administration is enhanced anddemocratised through, for example, collaboration
and/or co-ownership with workers and residents.
Neoliberalism has been marked by the emergenceof public-private partnerships or PPPs. These havehollowed out the capacities of the public sector
and placed power in the hands of unaccountableprofit-maximising corporations. Public-commons
partnerships, on the other hand, reconfigure
relations between state, market and society inways that allow for social and environmental goals
to be prioritised.

4. EXPANDING ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
One of the most striking aspects of the discussionin Amsterdam, was the ways in which public
ownership is being expanded beyond traditional
services and utilities. If public ownership has
previously been about healthcare, education,water, energy and transport, the new public

10 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

ownership is arising in the advent of economic
democracy in myriad other sectors.
A fantastic example of this is the Chilean communeof Recoleta. Chile, of course, has long been subject
to brutal neoliberal reform, including a raft ofprivatisations that has created a two-tier system
between those who can afford public services
and those who cannot. Recoleta, a poor migrantcommune in the Metropolitan region of Santiago
is working hard to buck this trend. Since 2012,
Communist Mayor Daniel Jadue has introduced arange of initiatives seeking to reclaim the commons.
The country’s first “popular pharmacy” was createdin 2015 to offer cheap medicines, subsidised for
those on lower incomes, meaning savings of up to
70% for some. The local government supported
the formation of a new workers’ cooperative thattook over cleaning services in 2016, enabling a 50%
pay increase. In 2018, the Recoleta government
established a publicly owned estate agent
providing social housing for its poorest families andpartnering with the Ministry of Housing to ensure
construction of additional affordable housing. And
the municipality even established a new “openuniversity” offering 150 courses to 3,300 students.
In Southeastern France, another innovative
commune is Mouans-Sartoux. In the wake of theoutbreak of mad cow disease of the late 1990s,
the municipality here took drastic action to change
agricultural and eating practices. Over the courseof 10 years, a programme of serving entirelyorganic food in schools was rolled out; it now
delivers 400,000 organic meals a day. These meals
are supplied through a publicly owned organic
farm spanning 6 hectares of previously abandoned
land, tended to by three farmers funded by themunicipality. Waste has decreased by 75% in theschool meal production process, while a survey
showed that 66% of the entire population’s eating
habits have subsequently changed for the better,towards healthier, local and organic food. The
Deputy Mayor of Mouans-Sartoux also pointed
out how municipalities are at a disadvantage andunfairly treated when it comes to the procuring
food supplies for public canteens. Municipalities
are obliged by EU rules to launch a public tender at
a European level but cannot choose to buy directlyfrom the local, small, organic producers next door.
While catering corporations that win a tender are
free to buy from any supplier they like.
In the UK, meanwhile, the public enterprise of thecity council in Preston, in the north of England, has
attracted much attention. Like local governments
across the country, particularly in de-industrialised
parts of the North, Preston has been hard hit bysevere austerity and disinvestment. Refusing
to accept the disastrous social consequencesof this, in 2011 Preston began working with theCentre for Local Economic Strategy think-tank,and developed a model of “community wealthbuilding” inspired by the work of US think tank
The Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Preston model begins by thinking about therole of so-called “anchor institutions”: large-scale
public institutions with an important role in the citysuch as colleges and healthcare bodies. The idea
is to intervene in the procurement practices ofthese important institutions, encouraging anchor
institutions to contract services from local socially
responsible suppliers where possible, as opposedto large corporate actors. A recent study showedthat this work has increased the procurement
spending retained in Preston by £74 million from2012/13.
Finally, if the future is to be public, then there
needs to be a clear strategy by which data might
be democratically owned and managed. The
Economist magazine recently proclaimed that datais the new oil. While there are many dissimilarities,
it is clear that data is now among the most precious
commodities in the world. What’s more, data havebecome increasingly abundant and, worryingly,
prone to enclosure by technology giants. The
conundrum in thinking through how data might
be democratised is that people are extremely waryof affording governments access to their personal
information. Yet public innovation around thecollectivisation of data is beginning to take off. For
example, Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York
City recently launched a coalition for digital rights
built around five principles: universal access to theinternet and digital literacy; privacy, data protection
and security; transparency and accountability;
participation in democracy and inclusion; open andethical digital services. Given the move towards so11 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

called “smart cities” which is set to digitalise muchof our everyday lives, forward thinking action frommunicipalities and governments will be essential inensuring that privacy, social justice and democracy
are protected.

5. CLIMATE EMERGENCY
Privatisation has failed our planet. While we have
known about the devastating consequencesof climate change for decades, corporations
hardwiredfor
profit-maximisation
have
maintained business as usual. Our electricity
grids and transport systems are still dominatedby fossil fuels. Our food and water systems arehighly polluting, wasteful and intensive. And theneoliberal attack on the public sphere has eroded
our society’s capacity to respond collectively. If weare to find our way out of the climate emergency,
we need public alternatives that reorientate
the economy towards social and environmental
justice.
It is in this context that the idea of a “Green New
Deal” has gained popularity. Inspired by many
years of rethinking about public spending andtransformation, along lines of the US’ New Deal of
the 1930s, to achieve a just climate transition, theGreen New Deal recently rose to popularity in the
US. This was inspired by direct action, such as thattaken by the Sunrise Movement, including a highprofile occupation of Democrat House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s office, which demanded drastic
public action to decarbonise the economy with anambitious programme for social justice. This would
include public housing, new jobs, the revaluationof care work and measures to ensure racial justicethat address legacies of slavery, colonialism anddiscrimination. Momentum around the GreenNew Deal has since spread beyond the US. In theUK, the Labour Party and Green Party fought (butsadly lost) an election with an ambitious GreenNew Deal at the centre of their manifestos. This
included a 2030 decarbonisation target alongsidepublic ownership of energy, water and the railways,
mass investment in public housing and healthcare
and the creation of thousands of new green jobs
and apprenticeships.

The concept of “energy democracy” is proving
instrumental in building new public climate futures. Originating in the German climate justice
movement, this idea has since been adopted by arange of activist groups and trade unions acrossthe world. Energy democracy advocates do notpropose one size fits all solutions for the energy
system but, rather, advocate for a range of collective and collaborative alternatives to privatisation
including autonomous citizen associations,
worker cooperatives, (re)municipalisation and nationalisation, as well as country-wide public planning of the energy transition.

Regarding the former, an inspiring example ofautonomous citizen action for energy democracy
comes from Palestine. Here, Friends of the Earthmember PENGON Palestine has responded tosevere energy shortages resulting from the Israeli
occupation -- shortages that disproportionately
affect women, given a gendered division of labourthat sees the feminisation of domestic work suchas energy management. PENGON have fought thisinjustice by supporting women to gain the skills
required to install and maintain household solar
panels, generating energy for 900 households
across Palestine. Its cooperation with the Ministryof Women’s Affairs even led to a gender unit in thePalestinan Energy Authority in order to influence
the national planning process around the energy
sector.
An example of energy democracy at the municipal
level comes from Barcelona, where the City
Council has just launched a new municipal energy
company, Barcelona Energia in 2018. This has
12 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

invested ambitiously in installing new solar panels
on public and private roof space in the city. Theenergy generated is being used to power all of
the municipality’s own public services, buildings
and infrastructures and, as of 2019, to provide
an alternative to the “Big Four” private energy
firms for domestic households as well. Barcelona
Energia attempts to integrate social justice anddemocracy into its operations. It offers fair pricing
and implements a no cut-offs policy. This inparticular serves low-income families and people
without legal documentation. It also connects
those who are occupying non-residential buildings
because of a severe housing shortage. Meanwhile,
a new advisory citizens assembly open to all users
has been established to discuss the company’s
operations and offer advice as to how any surplus
generated should be reinvested.
While Barcelona Energia was awarded the 2019
TNI “Transformative Cities” award in the field ofenergy, it should be acknowledged that energy
activists in Barcelona are not fully satisfied with
the initiative’s progression. In particular, the democratic oversight of the scheme is seen by the Catalan Energy Sovereignty Network as inadequate:
the advisory assembly has thus far failed to attract
much interest or participation and it has no formal
decision-making power within the company. What
becomes clear from this example is that endeavours towards energy democracy – and economic
democracy more broadly – should be conceived ofas part of an ongoing struggle-laden process of democratisation. Successes and victories are usuallyimperfect and partial openings for further contestation, rather than idealised end points.
The case of Eskom, South Africa’s public energy
utility company, gives further cause for reflection
on the challenges of building energy democracy -in particular through state-owned enterprises. This
company is currently in a deep crisis, on the brinkof collapse: years of mismanagement have led tosevere financial difficulties for Eskom. This crisis isreinforced by power purchasing agreements withprivate enterprises as their profits are guaranteedby the government. This financial crisis, together
with needs to decarbonise energy production, is
now used to justify the unbundling (break-up) andeventual privatisation of Eskom as a public utility.

The Eskom Reference Research Group2 is resisting
this neoliberal agenda. Instead of privatisation,
this progressive coalition is currently formulating
a set of proposals to reform and rebuild Eskom
in a way that would maintain public ownershipwhile enhancing democratic management andthe company’s capacity to deliver a just transition.
One of the options being explored by the coalitionis horizontal integration, meaning an integrated
energy system that combines diverse forms of
democratic public ownership and management,from a vertically integrated national powercompany in charge of generation and transmission
to well-functioning municipal utilities responsiblefor distribution and retail.

However we go about decarbonising our economy, a fundamental question remains: economic
growth. David Harvey, in his keynote lecture, noted that the ecological consequences of compound
growth – which sees the economy double in size
every 25 years – are a key reason to be anti-capitalist today. We simply cannot continue to expand
the mass of capital, commodities and carbon emissions that we have in the world: capitalism, in Harvey’s words, “has become too big to fail, but far too
monstrous to survive”. Thus, a key question forus, as architects of new public futures, is how we
can democratically plan an economy beyond compound growth. How might our society function
should things be built to last rather than made to
2 The Eskom Reference Research Group is an alliance of South African trade unions, civil society groups, the international coalition
Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) and TNI.

13 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

break? What other forms of abundance can be
imagined beyond the spectacle of instant consumer gratification? In what ways might new freedoms
be unearthed if we were to slow down, work lessand take more time to care for ourselves and ourcollective improvement?

6. TOWARDS FEMINIST PUBLIC FUTURES
Feminist movements have long stressed that
our struggle must be waged not only aroundconventional economic “production” but, further,around social reproduction. Or, put differently, that
our task is not only to reorganise “the economy”
as traditionally conceived but, more than this,the practices and relationships implicated within
the sustenance of life more broadly. A capitalist
division of labour renders “life’s work” as deeply
gendered and racialised: the unpaid domestic andemotional labour required to make sure “workers”
turn up to work, day-in-day-out, has historicallytended to be done by women, with some white
middle-class women able to outsource cleaning,childcare and other chores to women of colour,
often those migrating from the global South. If
this, then, is the deeply unjust way in which life
is reproduced under capitalist patriarchy, anticapitalist feminisms invite us to remake social
reproduction such that this is rendered moredignified, egalitarian and collective.
This is a helpful outlook when thinking through thekinds of public futures we want. Firstly, it provides
a means of orienting ourselves in debates aroundthe state (section 7). For each time the problem isposed of whether we ought to be attempting to seize
state power or dismantle it, we can stop and think:what course of action is most likely to transform
our everyday lives. This gives us an open, contextspecific and flexible starting point for navigating
our way through thorny political terrain. Moreover,a feminist perspective helps us think throughdebates around scale, abandoning dichotomies
between local and national action by highlighting
the ways in which changing our everyday locallygrounded practices and relationships might
prefigure and begin to enact broader scalechanges. Feminist movements encourage us to
be attentive to the ways we do politics, as well asour long-term goals. The conference organiserssought to emphasise that imperative by grounding
discussions where possible in the local struggles
of Bijlmermeer. The point is not that a feminist
outlook is necessarily limited to a localised
outlook. Indeed, those advocating this perspective
within the conference were absolutely clear on
their aspirations for global scale transformationof the patriarchal capitalist system. What thefeminist lens helps make visible, though, is theways in which our everyday life is a vital terrain of
struggle for enacting broader scale change. For it isthrough our everyday interactions with each otherand the world around us that our common sense
assumptions and political subjectivities are madeand remade. In sum, the feminist perspective
helps us think across levels and among scales
and allows us to make connections between thelocal, national and global that might otherwise be
obscured.
This perspective also offers a distinctive take on
the kinds of values that a public ecofeminist future
might embody. An ecofeminist lense recognises
the equality and interdependence of human beingsand the ecosystems we inhabit. This perspective
builds on theory and practice generated across theglobal South, from India to Latin America, and wasarticulated by many throughout the conference,
particularly by those from within Catalanorganisations such as Engineers Without Borders
and the Observatory of Debt and Globalisation.
Ecofeminism puts the emphasis on care -- carefor human life and, moreover, for the non-humanworld. This, it should be stressed, is not becauseof any innate disposition towards care on the partof women, but, rather, an intimate knowledgeof the importance of care gained by women andnon-binary people through the process of feminist
struggle. Privatisation, after all, has rendered our
public services profoundly lacking in the formsof care that ought to be at their heart. Those
working in hospitals, schools and services for
elderly and disabled people do so under intense
time-pressures and highly precarious conditions,making the formation of nourishing and fulfilling
relationships extremely challenging. Meanwhile,
our energy, food, transport and water systems
are based on perpetual extraction and systematic
14 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

violence towards both humans and non-humans,
resulting in the climate and ecological emergency
we now face.
What if our economy was oriented around life andcare instead of profits and growth? A number ofsteps in this direction might be taken. Examples
raised during the conference included: the deprivatisation of care-based services; new training
for public servants that emphasises the quality ofrelationships rather than market efficiency; andthe reorientation of investment away from sociallyand ecologically destructive industries towards
forms of caring labour which are inherently lowcarbon, as well as being of immense social use.
Finally, the work done by black and decolonial
feminist activists can help us cast a critical eye on
the notion of an alternative future that runs throughthis report and the conference that preceded it.
Colonialism has historically entailed the violent
imposition of a white European worldview on
racialised “others”, meaning the universalisationof one historically and geographically specific setof values in ways that erase other ways of being
and doing. If our alternative to neoliberalism andprivatisation is to be decolonial, we must give up all
aspirations towards the construction of a singularhomogenising future shared by all. It would bebetter, to think in plural terms and to imagine
multiple public futures evolving together.

7. THE STATE OF THE FUTURE
How, then, to move forward with building economic
democracy? The conference illuminated a wealth ofdiverse cases, approaches and ideas that, together,
constitute the foundations for a new political
economic paradigm. Yet there were many very realdisagreements that must be acknowledged. For it
is in working through our differences – always withsolidarity and companionship – that our collective
intelligence and knowledge can best be harnessed.
At the heart of many of the debates during theconference, were questions around the state: Is
the state a vehicle for emancipatory change or an
obstacle? Should the goal be to seize state power
or bypass this? Can the state be democratised

or is democracy something that happens on thestreets? Should our focus be the local state or thenational state? How might the postcolonial state
differ from the northern imperialist state?
That these questions emerged is not surprising.
The question of the state has, of course, animateddebate on the left for centuries. And given ouroverarching task in Amsterdam was to think
through possibilities for public futures, weinevitably had to grapple with the question of who,
in fact, constitutes the public -- a question thatcannot be separated from the operations of state
power and its relationship to broader society.
One danger is that we fall back into old binaries:
we are either for the state or against it; we work
only inside the state or outside of it; we are
either militant municipalists or else committed
centralisers. These kinds of dichotomies haverarely proved helpful in the past and it is unlikelythat they will prove generative in the battles ahead.
For “the state” is not a unitary actor or thing that we
can choose to embrace or ignore but, rather, a setof institutions embedded within broader relationsof power that we are inescapably part of.

in the conference highlight, the state can protect
our rights and open up spaces for real democracy
and freedom. For this reason, we must work withthe state. Yet, simultaneously, we must struggle toend abuse and lawless violence by state agents:
whether through the criminalisation of migrants in
Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam or the brutal attacks onprotestors in recent demonstrations across Chile.
Accordingly, our struggle must ultimately lookbeyond the state and the violence and oppression
it currently perpetuates, always searching for waysthat people can reclaim autonomy and directcontrol over the commons.
This struggle with, against and beyond the state,
for Alexander, can be guided as follows:“Going beyond the discussion of public ownership,
we need to look at how we organise life. All life, notjust human life. How does life reproduce itself? For
this we need to reinvent all the political horizons
we think within.”
Building on this ecofeminist reflection, questions
such as that of the state and scale can only beresolved through struggles situated in particularplaces at particular times. What economic
democracy looks like in Lagos might be very
different to that in London -- and differences likethis must be respected and valued rather thanpapered over or invalidated.
Various forms of future collaboration were
proposed in Amsterdam, from further conferences
and joint research through to the creation of new
networks and even manifestos. The passion forcooperation and collective endeavour that waspresent in Amsterdam was inspiring and must be
channelled into action. Yet, let’s not forget, our goal
is not to replace one false set of universals withanother. Onwards we move, then, towards diverse
and overlapping democratic economies, towards
as many new public futures as we can dream, as
many new public futures as we can win.

Chilean activist and academic Alexander Panez
Pinto’s contribution to the conference’s closing
session offered one productive way forward.
Our challenge, for Alexander, is finding ways tostruggle with, against and beyond the state. As thenumerous cases of public ownership discussed

15 | 7 Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

The Transnational Institute (TNI) is an international research and advocacy institute committed
to building a just, democratic and sustainable planet. For more than 40 years, TNI has served asa unique nexus between social movements, engaged scholars and policy makers.
CONTACT Satoko Kishimoto (s.kishimoto@tni.org) and Lavinia Steinfort (l.steinfort@tni.org)