Conclusion(Re)municipalisation is redefining
public ownership

Noting the inadequacy of national and multilateral policies to tackle theclimate crisis and widening inequality, a growing network of progressive
municipalities has developed its own policies and measures to do so. (Re)municipalisation is one of the key strategies to address the challengesof our time, including pandemics such as Covid-19 which has madepeople realise that medical staff, caregivers, cleaners, waste collectors,
water and energy workers keep our societies alive. Privatisation is such
an ill-advised policy because these are the very services that tend to
be outsourced first. Cities are well-positioned to reverse the tide andprioritise public health and well-being, to explore democratic models
for public services and their management, and to advance innovative
economic models that build community wealth and create decent jobs.
This conclusion highlights key findings from collaborative research on
the 1,408 compiled cases1 and from the 15 individual chapters.

(Re)municipalisation works where privatisation has
failedMotivations for remunicipalisation are diverse, but often include a needto recover from a failed privatisation. Our research confirms the extent
to which privatisation has missed the mark on delivering vital public
services for all and economic efficiencies.
Controlling costs for users and local authorities
Cost is not the only consideration when deciding to remunicipalise apublic service, but it is obviously one of the deciding factors. For decades,

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipprivatisation, PPPs and outsourcing have been sold to officials, politicians
and the public as being more ‘efficient’ than traditional public services,and providing better value for money. Our research convincingly disproves
these claims. We found at least 245 cases where remunicipalisation either
aimed to cut or had effectively reduced the cost of providing services.
Furthermore, in at least 264 cases, municipal companies planned or had
already managed to boost public investment in services and infrastructure.
There are five basic reasons why privatised services are generally more
expensive down the line:
1. Corporations must generate profits and pay dividends to theirshareholders and any parent company.
2. Privatisation brings extra layers of complexity and cost, including
paying high fees to the consultants and lawyers who design thecontracts.
3. Public authorities lose control over the costs of running theservice (private operators tend to outsource some of the work to othercompanies, often within the same corporate group and often at highcost).
4. Private operators lack a long-term vision when it comes to financial
management.
5. Public bodies typically pay lower interest rates on loans than private
entities, which can help finance infrastructure needs for instance.
By contrast, with public ownership of services, tax revenues and any
revenue generated from user fees can be invested directly in the service
and in pursuing broader social and environmental goals. Many examplesof this are featured in this book, from the well-known case of Paris(Chapter 2) to that of Taber in Canada (Chapter 3). Another concrete story
gathered as part of the list of cases is from the capital of South Korea,
Seoul, which created two new city-owned companies in order to hirecleaning workers for the Seoul Metro. The city’s total related expenses

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipdecreased 5 per cent despite the higher labour costs, simply because it nolonger had to pay the management fee and 10 per cent value-added tax
to private companies.
Redressing degraded working conditions, creating decent jobs
When private operators come in to reduce expenses, the first line items
they look at are labour costs. By cutting jobs, eroding working conditions
and undermining collective bargaining, privatisation is a powerful driverof precarious work. This is a problem not only for impoverished workers,
their families and local communities, but also for users because service
quality and access decline.
In contrast, there are many examples of remunicipalisation andinsourcing where local councils have saved money while improving
working conditions and/or pay. Since 2011, London’s Islington Council hastaken back contracts worth about £380 million in cleaning, building andgrounds maintenance, and waste management services. The move has
meant better pay and working conditions for 1,200 frontline employees,
and generated savings of about £14 million (Chapter 6). Another successstory for workers is that of Kragerø, Norway, where remunicipalisation ofwaste management has led to a 14 per cent reduction in fees for residents,
while delivering an increase in workers’ wages and pensions (Chapter 1).
Avoiding major economic riskThis book lists 26 cases of remunicipalisation involving bankruptcies ofprivate operators. The 2018 collapse of Carillion, a company specialisingin outsourcing contracts and privatised infrastructure, jeopardised
420 ‘private finance initiative’ projects as well as the future of 18,000
employees in the UK (Chapter 6). In Denmark, ‘free choice’ policies
introduced mandatory competition in elder care, but a large numberof private companies collapsed (Chapter 4). In Norway, the bankruptcy

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipof waste management company RenoNorden would have stranded 137
municipalities if the union had not anticipated its economic difficulties
and worked with local officials to remunicipalise the services (Chapter 1).
Bankruptcies

andcorporate

collapses

revealthetruthbehindprivatisation’s alleged service efficiency and innovation: the facts showthat many privatisation deals are economically unviable. Typically,outsourcing contracts and PPPs are specifically designed to prioritise
profits and dividends over service quality. When the profits dry up or failto materialise, corporations and investors just walk away, abandoning
the workers and the people who rely on the service.
Another

illustrationofprivatisation’s

economic

failuresistheunwillingness of private operators to deliver services in unprofitableareas or communities and for user groups who cannot afford to pay or
are more expensive to serve. Take the case of Africa where private wastecompanies tend to operate in the wealthiest neighbourhoods of large
cities, excluding the vast majority of the population (Chapter 5). In the
US, major telecommunication companies were not interested in serving
rural areas, smaller municipalities and low-income communities.
Local governments and community-owned companies stepped in anddeveloped high-speed broadband Internet infrastructure in many areas
where corporations were not interested in operating (Chapter 9).

The broader benefits of (re)municipalisation(Re)municipalisation is much more than a reaction to the failures ofprivatised service provision; beyond pragmatism, it is about guaranteeing
and promoting basic rights, and serving the needs of everyone – asall public services are meant to do. Our research demonstrates that
remunicipalisation – and even more so municipalisation, that is, thecreation of brand new public services – are driven by a positive public
interest ethos. This book uncovers even more than that: in many

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipcases, (re)municipalisation drives wider positive changes in the social,environmental and economic areas. It promotes the health and wellbeing of all, including workers; it helps to build resilient local economies
and makes them less dependent on large corporations; and it is in manycases an important building block for a genuine climate transition. As
exemplified by the concept of ‘community wealth building’, a termcoined by the US-based The Democracy Collaborative and used in the
UK’s context as well, municipalities and other anchor institutions can use
procurement and investment decisions strategically to secure ecologicaland equitable economic development.
Upholding and promoting human rights
The 2018 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty andhuman rights found that widespread privatisation of public services andinfrastructure is systematically eliminating human rights protections
and further marginalising people who are living in poverty.2 The report
looks at the human rights implications of privatisation in the criminal
justice system, social services, water, sanitation, electricity, health care,transport and education. UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston criticises
the absence of human rights criteria in most privatisation agreements,
which rarely include monitoring the impact that privatisation has on themost vulnerable people.
(Re)municipalisation can be an antidote to this erosion of human rights.
The global list informing these pages found 138 cases where defending
human rights was a clear policy objective of (re)municipalisation, withmany examples of concrete measures put in place to achieve this goal. In
Chapter 2, the author from the Paris public water company stresses thatits mission goes beyond mere pipe connection. Eau de Paris is committed
to defending the human right to water for all, for instance by maintaining
and expanding a network of public drinking water fountains acrossthe city that provide water access for the most vulnerable population,
including refugees.

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership

In Chile, perhaps the country where neoliberalism is most deeply
embedded, the municipality of Recoleta has swam against the current. It
considers housing, education and access to medicine as human rights andhas created municipal services to provide them to poor citizens (Chapter
8). Chapter 7 also presents initiatives that aim to guarantee health andsocial care for vulnerable groups in Selangor state, Malaysia.
Protecting public health and well-being
Today, the healthcare sector is facing ever-growing pressure to privatise,including through outsourcing and competitive tenders. Profit-making
service providers are enjoying a blooming market thanks to liberalisation
driven largely by international trade and investment agreements.
Research demonstrates there is a much better and viable alternative,
however. As shown by the Covid-19 crisis that was still unfolding as
this book was going to press, the healthcare systems that are publicly
owned, democratically controlled and well-funded – from Costa Rica and
Uruguay to South Korea to Norway – are much better equipped to deal
with the sudden upsurge in patients.
Remunicipalisation and municipalisation in the health sector haveclear public health benefits, especially for the most vulnerable families.
Examples include the remunicipalised emergency ambulance services inSouthern Denmark (Chapter 4), which hired all former employees and an
additional 100 new emergency medical technicians under better working
conditions; this contributed to improving quality of the service and healthoutcomes while the operational costs were reduced by 15 per cent.
Another significant example is found in the municipality of Binalonan,
Pangasinan in the Philippines (Chapter 7) where diverse social services
are provided based on the vision of ensuring ‘that [people who have] theleast in life have the most in law’, with clear positive health outcomes.
Overall, the global list compiled for this book includes at least 142 cases of235

Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership

newly created or remunicipalised public services that did enhance or were
expected to enhance public health and provide harm reduction services3.
Securing better conditions for workers(Re)municipalisation can translate into better conditions for service
workers. The global list of (re)municipalisation documents at least 158
cases where conditions did or were foreseen to improve for workers,
including pay, occupational health and safety, freedom of associationand collective bargaining, freedom of speech and worker participation indecision-making. The presence and role of unions in campaigns and allalong the transition process often prove critical to the achievement of suchoutcomes. As evidenced in these pages, providing quality employment
and improving workers’ conditions while valuing their knowledge andexperience about how services should be organised and operated gohand-in-hand with building economically efficient public services thatare accessible to all (Chapter 12). It is no coincidence that workers andtheir unions are often at the forefront of remunicipalisation efforts.
In addition, remunicipalisation is often linked to the formalisation or
integration of informal workers into public operators or co-operative
structures, effectively realising their human rights and offering better
employment conditions. Chapter 5 by Vera Weghmann on the waste sectorin Africa provides several interesting examples in that regard. In Egypt,privatisation of waste management in the country’s three largest cities
deprived the Zabaleen community of their livelihood and translated into
a significant drop in recycling rates. A much more promising model is tobuild public waste management services based on integrating informal
waste workers and their experiences, given they are often very effectiveat reducing waste.

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership

Building community wealth and local economies
Reclaiming and creating publicly owned services in sectors such as waste,food, cleaning and telecommunication can be a game changer from an
economic perspective. When a public utility is democratically controlled,
it is far more likely than a private corporation to reinvest its profits backinto the community and to ‘localise’ the economy.
For example, through public procurement, local governments cancontract worker co-operatives to keep their cities clean (Valparaíso,
Chile) or partner with local farmers to protect the groundwater and sellorganic food in public school cafeterias (Rennes, France). There are 297
cases in the global list of (re)municipalisation that did or were expected
to contribute to community wealth building and to sustaining the local
economy. Some of these (re)municipalisations enabled using locallyabundant natural resources more wisely, while others created meaningful
local jobs for residents and new, more sustainable business activities.
Together, the chapters in this collection give numerous examples ofhow (re)municipalisation contributes to community wealth building. For
instance, as described in Chapter 6, Stoke City Council in the UK insourced
its housing maintenance work in 2018, increasing workers’ pay by £1,000
per year, and improving productivity and quality of service. The council
then created an arms-length trading company to bid for other work,
which last year produced a surplus of over £4 million for the city, and aproactive procurement policy means that over 80 per cent of materials arepurchased locally. The dozens of municipal broadband Internet services
established in cities across the United States, a story told in Chapter 9,
represent a successful process of community wealth building too. Oneof the primary motivations for establishing a municipal broadband
network is access and affordability, but benefits go beyond that, creating
employment opportunities, increasing economic activity and improving
quality of life by advancing access to health care and education.

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Tackling the climate crisis
Municipalities and public authorities have the ability to prioritise longterm ecological concerns over short-term financial considerations.
Tackling the climate crisis, for example by switching to renewable energy
and reducing CO2 emissions, was a key reason to (re)municipalise a public
service in at least 119 of total compiled cases. The majority of these cases
are from the energy sector, for which the number of (re)municipalisations
increased by almost 20 per cent between 2017 and 2019 to reach 374 cases.
Chapter 15 by Lavinia Steinfort discusses the current role and the strong
potential of cities and communities in driving the energy transition
through (re)municipalisation and in doing away with a dependency on
extractive private corporations, and highlights the obstacles related tonational and supranational strategies still focused on liberalisation andprivatisation.
There are other ways in which (re)municipalisation contributes totackling the climate emergency, beyond setting up or reclaiming energy
providers. By retrofitting public and residential buildings, municipalities
can significantly reduce their energy use, and make energy more
affordable for everyone. The recent remunicipalisations of public
transport in the Dutch cities of Rotterdam and The Hague have enabled
them to partially replace the fleet with electric buses. In another case, theFrench city of Briançon remunicipalised its waste services in 2013 andreduced the amount of waste produced by 33 per cent; it is committed toachieving ‘zero waste’ in the coming years. Rennes, France showcases
another ambitious way of integrating water management, supporting
local agriculture and providing quality food for school children. The
city launched a programme to help farmers switch to organic methods
as a way to prevent water pollution at the source. Simultaneously, theinitiative has created local demand for the farmers’ produce by linking
up with school canteens in the wider Rennes area and by creating a brandnew label under the Terre de Sources label that facilitates commercial salesof the sustainably produced food in local supermarkets.

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership

Both the impacts of the climate crisis and municipal responses to it candiffer widely from one geographical context to another. The Philippines
epitomises how the global South has been on the frontline of the climate
crisis for a long time. The local governments across the country havecreated climate schools to help farmers and fishing communities better
address the impacts of extreme weather events and other climate-related
hazards that are threatening their incomes and livelihoods. By learning
how to monitor weather changes and how to adjust agricultural practices
accordingly, students of the Siargao climate school have already managed
to improve local rice production (Chapter 7).

(Re)municipalisation is an opportunity to build
democratic public ownership
Public ownership is not democratic and efficient by default. As it canhappen in private sector companies, the public sector can be captured
by bureaucracy and inefficiency, by vested interests, by corruption
or authoritarian rulers. Building strong, high-quality public services
requires new forms of public ownership through which residents candirectly and indirectly participate in democratic decision-making.
Establishing democratic control
Positive changes brought about by (re)municipalisation range fromincreased accountability and transparency mechanisms and information
disclosure to establishing participatory governance as observed for water
services in Grenoble and Paris. Representatives of workers and users
sitting on the decision-making body of a public entity are key to improvegovernance and expand the meaning of public ownership. In Denmark,the law enables public companies to reserve one-third of board seats forworker representatives. Research for this book identified 149 cases where(re)municipalisation resulted or was foreseen to result in improved
democratic control and public ownership.

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership

Some cases go further, enhancing representation mechanisms with thecreation of more spaces for users to interact with public companies suchas people’s observatories and assemblies. Terrassa, Catalonia is one of themost advanced experiments to co-govern common resources (Chapter10) through the establishment of the Terrassa Water Observatory, anautonomous body affiliated with the city council that enables citizens
to consult, advise, deliberate, make proposals and conduct research onwater management in the municipality.
Public ownership can also take the form of a collaboration with grassroots
citizens’ organisations and users’ or workers’ co-operatives, or take theform of co-ownership shared between a public authority and a not-forprofit association. In Wolfhagen, Germany the co-operative that helped
fund the town’s wind turbines owns a quarter of the public energy
company, with two seats on the board (Chapter 15).
There are many other examples of public authorities working with nonprofits and co-operatives. These collaborations and partnerships help
reinvent the culture of public institutions. Across Spain, proactive cities
are choosing co-operative energy retailers such as Som Energia, GoiEner
and EnergÉtica over large private companies. In the UK, the City of
Plymouth and its residents established the Plymouth Energy Community
in 2013, a member-owned community benefit organisation whose profits
are reinvested into the community. However, while the involvement oflocal workers’ co-operatives in the delivery of public services can be a
progressive way to enhance community participation in public service
delivery and promote local decent employment, caution is warranted
to ensure that this does not become a way to shortcut costs and lockinformal and co-operative workers into low wages.
One cross-cutting concern analysed in Chapter 14 regards the realisationof the full potential of such democratised services, which may call fortransforming the state itself. Hilary Wainwright argues that the UK’s

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non-transparent hierarchical structure undermines efforts to rebuild
public services. Uruguay’s democratic constitution enshrining public
services and the right to water as a public good offers an inspiring way
forward.
Engaging and learning from workers
Alliances of trade unions and civil society organisations have led
numerous fights against privatisation to victory. In Lagos, Nigeria aunions-communities-NGOs alliance built a shared, citizen-focusedvision and common strategies to reform the state water company, as analternative to privatisation. Likewise, when workers are a driving forceof (re)municipalisation, they often influence positively the design of the
new public services by promoting public interest values and objectives.
In Norway, the municipal workers’ union Fagforbundet developed asuccessful remunicipalisation strategy following the massive bankruptcy
of RenoNorden, which affected 137 municipalities’ waste collection
services (Chapter 1), turning the situation into an opportunity to bring
services back in house and to grow membership. Fagforbundet teams
recruited workers of the private company – many of them migrants withtemporary contracts – prior to remunicipalisation. They successfully
built up solidarity with non-union workers during the transition.
In Chapter 12, Daria Cibrario identifies some lessons learned from tradeunion experience to help plan ahead for successful remunicipalisation,
which necessarily involves and affects the workers who operate theservice. The labour dimension exemplifies that every remunicipalisationcase is unique due to local and national regulations that affect workers’
employment terms and conditions. Based on the experience of members
from the trade union federation Public Services International, sherecommends reaching out early to all affected workers and supportingthem throughout the process, as well as ensuring cooperation between
national union federations and their local branches. She also stresses

241Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipthat it is essential to open a negotiation table with local authorities forall service workers as soon as possible to ensure a fair private-to-public
transition.
Hilary Wainwright also insists that democratic public management must
recognise the value of the knowledge and know-how of every citizen,
services user and worker, and involve them in public sector management
and strategy (Chapter 14). This requires a profound cultural shift in the
public sector itself. She also provocatively argues that ‘workers on theboard’ is necessary but insufficient, as it does not automatically bringabout change in the balance of power between management and workers.
Chapter 1 from Norway provides one concrete way to integrate workers’
ideas. Nina Monsen and Bjørn Pettersen unpack the practice of ‘local
tripartite cooperation’ that exists in more than half of the country’s
municipalities, through which politicians, local authorities and tradeunions work constructively to create a culture of dialogue that promotes
finding the best local solutions to the specific challenges facing themunicipality. The Fagforbundet union finds that, through this approach,workers, civil society and other voices too often unheard are given aplatform to engage in constructive dialogue with local authorities andservice managers to share ideas and proposals.
Enabling ecofeminist public services
Ecofeminist public services put care for people and the planet front andcentre. Private operators’ pursuit of profits tends to worsen alreadyexisting injustices, destroy ecosystems and harm vulnerable residents
who are more reliant on public services, a disproportionate number ofwhom are women.
Privatisation often leads to service rate hikes, compromising access toservices; to make matters worse, when austerity measures cut subsidies

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipthey make child care, elder and other types of care unaffordable. This worktends to fall to women because the division of labour that underpins our
economic model is deeply gendered and racialised. Not only do women still
perform the majority of the un(der)paid care and domestic work, muchof this work is also outsourced to women of colour. In addition, there
is a high concentration of women working in the public care, cleaningand education sectors, and they bear the brunt when these sectors are
privatised. Reversing privatisation and rebuilding public services canincrease accessibility but public ownership in itself is no guarantee forgender justice.
An ecofeminist approach implies profound transformation, enabling
deeper levels of democratisation with public services run from thebottom-up and with care for human and non-human life. Hence, we needto feminise how politics is done.4 This means that politicians and public
administrators must not only listen to residents but also include themon a permanent basis in policy and decision-making processes (Chapters
2, 6, 10, 14 and 15). It should involve new mechanisms through which
marginalised groups can gain real power to ensure that public services
improve people’s everyday life.
Fostering public-public cooperation
Remunicipalisation can be a very uneven battle. Local public authorities
and communities have far fewer resources than big corporations, and thelatter are often backed by international institutions, national governments
and a variety of ‘experts’ and consultants, as explained in Chapter 9
about the French water sector. Olivier Petitjean goes on to argue thatthe only force that could counter-balance an environment so hostile toremunicipalisation is collaboration among public actors. Local, national
and international cooperation among public operators is key to shifting
the balance of power. Both institutionalised and informal public-public
cooperation have been critical to the growth of the (re)municipalisation

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipmovement – not only defensively as a way to overcome obstacles, butalso proactively by helping to build better public services.
Milo Fiasoconaro, in Chapter 13, focuses on the asymmetry of knowledge
between private and public actors in the water sector but also highlights
the fundamentally different motivation and utilisation of knowledge byboth types of actors. According to Aqua Publica Europea’s experiences,public-public partnerships are a useful and essential tool for public
actors to improve their capacity to address current and future challenges
in water resources management. The knowledge generated and sharedthrough public collaboration will remain in the public domain andcontribute to the well-being of society as a whole. Public-public
cooperation and partnerships is now emerging in new sectors such asenergy and telecommunication. Such partnerships are also critical toextending public services to communities or areas that the private sector
has been unwilling or unable to serve, such as rural regions, low-income
neighbourhoods and disinvested communities, as illustrated by theextension of community-owned broadband Internet infrastructure tosmall and rural towns in the US.

Moving forward(Re)municipalisation is a powerful political strategy to push backprivatisation and a promising alternative to move beyond the extractive
economy in general. It is true that most national governments are failingto tackle extreme inequality and the ecological crisis, yet many cities are
stepping up to tackle these challenges and improve the livelihoods oftheir residents. That being said, collective local actions alone cannot solve
systemic problems. Alexander Panez Pinto from Chile rightly argues in
Chapter 8 that the experiences of local governments risk becoming mere
corrections to the neoliberal model to fill essential services gaps where
private companies have pulled out if these initiatives are not informedby the current debate on Chile’s political economy. As a case in point,

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipright-wing local governments in that country are also creating so-called
popular pharmacies but they never question the privately controlled
medicine market and the private health system as such. He concludes
that progressive local initiatives are insufficient; Chile needs political
proposals to transform the health system as a whole.
Nevertheless, courageous progressive municipalities are not waiting
for top-down changes and are prioritising the needs of the mostmarginalised people in our society, including migrants, people withdisabilities and low-income families, among others. For instance, theconstitution of Mexico City adopted in February 2017 gives its authorities
full responsibility to provide waste services free of charge, prohibiting
privatisation and outsourcing, and enshrining mutual recognition
between the municipality and labour unions.5 We see this as a strategic
pathway to mounting collective pressure on national and supranational
governments.
These cities and citizen movements are increasingly designated as‘municipalist’. While the municipalist movement could adopt diverse
strategies depending on local context and need, it unanimously recognises
public services including water, energy, housing and health care as
central issues. The global municipalist movement met for the first timeat the ‘Fearless Cities Summit’ in Barcelona in June 2017, at the invitationof Barcelona En Comú. Today, the Fearless Cities network connects 77
cities that are standing up to defend human rights, democracy and thecommon good.6 It is not a coincidence that de-privatisation of public
services is one of their key strategies. They see de-privatisation as a way
to expand citizenship by sharing decision-making powers and opening
up ownership models to representatives from user groups, workers, civilsociety and research institutions.
Many of the cases presented in this book are at odds with the mainstream
portrayal of public ownership as top-down, bureaucratic and oblivious of245

Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipthe realities on the ground. Quite the opposite, they are pioneering public
service innovations that are building democratic public ownership models
for the twenty-first century. Municipal initiatives from the participatory
mechanisms of citizen observatories to public-community ownershipmodels and genuine worker engagement can inspire a broader, countrywide vision. These collective, bottom-up experiences at the local level
are already improving people’s lives; they are also a powerful foundation
to push for the democratisation of public ownership at all levels, andespecially nationally.
In the United States, numerous cities are advocating for locally owned
and controlled energy and banking services. Since 2019, the youth-led
Sunrise Movement, various trade unions and ex-presidential candidate
for the Democrats Bernie Sanders have been calling for a national GreenNew Deal that centres around public ownership of energy and finance. The
Covid-19 outbreak further increased the urgency and necessity of thesecalls. When municipalities team up with social movements, they can reseta whole country’s political agenda. Other examples include the alliancein South Africa that is calling for transforming Eskom, one of the biggest
electricity companies in the world and currently a failing public utility,
into a fully public and people-serving utility.7 The 2019 UK Labour Party
platform illustrates the type of national support and policy frameworkthat allows local governments to reclaim public services by insourcing
and rebuilding their capacity to provide local services directly.8
Given austerity measures following the 2008 financial crisis have slashedmunicipal and national budgets, it is of utmost importance to transform
how public resources are spent. As the Covid-19 pandemic has proven,public services are the backbone of our society but they need sufficientfunding if they are to rise up to the task in times of crisis. Governments
across the globe have adopted plans to protect workers and companies,
bail out industries and support economic recovery after the fallout. Somehave pledged to increase public spending in the health sector, but there

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownershipshould be safeguards to ensure that this money actually benefits public
services, and is not used to promote further PPPs and other forms ofprivate sector involvement. Public investment must be directed towards
strengthening public services, based on democratic public ownershipmodels, and towards social and environmental objectives such as tacklingthe climate crisis and caring for the most vulnerable.
As Thomas Marois points out in a recent report published by TNI,
worldwide public finance institutions have US$73 trillion in assets,with over half in the hands of public banks.9 This is equivalent to 93
per cent of global gross domestic product. In the current model, most of
this public finance is used to absorb risk by guaranteeing the profits ofprivate investors – at a high public cost. It would be much more effective
if national and municipal governments were to cut out these big privateintermediaries and invest these public funds directly to build publichealthcare systems and other essential infrastructure. Combining directpublic investments with much-needed progressive tax systems could
nurture territorial solidarity by making universal public services a reality.
This book demonstrates that when public services are publicly owned
and democratically organised they can effectively strengthen community
wealth and the local economy. It is time to demand democratic public
ownership at all levels and call for universal access to public services sothat all people can lead dignified and prosperous lives. As racism, fascism
and the far-right are on the rise, offering viable systemic solutions thatwork for people and for the planet can significantly help rebuild oursocieties and economies on a basis of solidarity and cooperation. Our
public future lies in hope, not fear, and rests in the hands of communities,
not corporations.

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Conclusion: (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership

Endnotes
1

The global list of (re)municipalisation consisted of 1,408 cases by the end of October 2019.
The database is available at: https://futureispublic.org/remunicipalisation-global-database/. An
interactive database is under construction in collaboration with the University of Glasgow. It
will be accessible through the above link in the near future. Additional cases and information
will be added to this new database as they are collected.

2

United Nations, Seventy-third session, Agenda item 74 (b) Promotion and protection ofhuman rights: human rights questions, including alternative approaches for improving theeffective enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, Extreme poverty and humanrights. 26 September 2018. https://undocs.org/A/73/396

3Harm reduction refers to policies, programmes and practices that aim to minimise negative
health, social and legal impacts associated with drug use, drug policies and drug laws. It
focuses on positive change and on working with people without stigma and discrimination, or
requiring that they stop using drugs as a precondition for support.

4Roth, L. and Shea Baird, K. (2019) ‘Municipalism and the Feminization of Politics’, Roarmag(6). https://roarmag.org/magazine/municipalism-feminization-urban-politics/

5‘To ensure sustainable waste services, we must value waste workers and make sure they
are in decent jobs’, Daria Cibrario cited in ‘Spotlight on Sustainable Development 2018’.
http://www.2030spotlight.org

6

http://fearlesscities.com/en

7

Eskom research reference group (2018) ‘Our power: achieving a just energy transition forSouth Africa’. https://www.new-eskom.org/

8

https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Democratising-Local-Public-Services.pdf

9

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