Unwinding Privatization (Cities and the Restoration of Public Power)

How remunicipalization can be implemented to restructure urban governance.

Across North America, Europe, and the Global South, public services such as water and energy that were once privatized have returned to public sector functions—an intriguing new development known as remunicipalization. Unwinding Privatization, edited by Alba Alexander, Larry Bennett, Evan McKenzie, and Michael Pagano, explores the sources, scale, and implications of transferring ownership of public services and discusses its prospective impact on cities and metropolitan regions.

At the heart of each service transfer is a crucial reconfiguration of power and responsibility—who gets to participate in making central decisions and which incentives drive these decisions. This collection by leading urban scholars presents alternating perspectives on these shifts in governance, framing remunicipalization as both a pragmatic response to the inefficiencies of privatization and as a democratic resurgence driven by public demands for accountability and sustainability. Drawing on timely and geographically wide-ranging research, the editors assess the highly nuanced task of “unwinding privatization” and, in doing so, how we can achieve an optimal relationship of private to public power.