INTRODUCTION: THE WONDERFUL WORLDS OF MAKING PUBLIC

David A. McDonald

What is a public? It is a curiously obscure question, considering that few things have been more important in the development of modernity.

Michael Warner (2002, 49)

After more than three decades of privatization, the world has begun to see a revival of public provision of essential services such as water, energy and healthcare (Chavez and Torres 2014; Clò et al. 2013;Florio 2013; Wollmann 2011). The reasons for this trend are as varied as the people and places involved, and much work remains to be done in coming to grips with the complexity and diversity of what is happening on the ground.

This book is an attempt to advance our understanding of present-day efforts to (re)make public services, through case studies and an effort to conceptualize what bonds them together. With a focus on countries in the South, and a broad cross-section of actors and sectors, the chapters range from Colombia to Uganda, from bureaucrats to trade unionists, and from waste management to electricity. The people and institutions surveyed here represent a mere fraction of a much larger international reality, but they exemplify the varied – if tension-laden – ways in which essential public services are being (re)construed and (re)constructed around the world.

In some cases these initiatives are a response to failed privatization. In others they are a reaction to weak or non-existent state-delivered services. Some are about latent possibilities awaiting realization. In all cases, the chapters go beyond a mere critique of what is wrong with privatization to an assessment of what constitutes 'good' services, how people 'make' them in the face of ongoing neoliberalization, and what it means to be 'public'. Although it is important to keep a close eye on the ever-shifting nature of private sector engagement in service provision, fulfilling the promise of building alternatives requires more than just criticism.

Following Ferguson (2009, 167), the chapters in this book ask what happens if politics is not just about 'expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? Then we progressives must ask: what do we want? This is a quite different question (and a far more difficult question) than: what are we against?'

What do we want?

There are no easy answers to this query, and the examples in this book serve to demonstrate just how far we are from a coherent, collective response to what constitutes a good public service. Some chapters highlight the potential of revitalizing state resources while others focus on the need to build capacity among quasi-public, non-state actors. Some authors are universalistic in their approach while others emphasize the context-specific nature of change. In some cases the outcomes are the result of long-term, high-profile struggles for a different world view, while in others they are more pragmatic – even accidental. Often they represent little more than people scrambling for something better than the private enclosures they find themselves in, but these too can represent seeds of a new public imagination.

It is these commonplace expressions of public service reform that constitute the majority of cases in this book, and arguably the bulk of pro-public-service movements in the world today. They are not always as dramatic as one might expect from such a highly politicized topic, but they reveal the daily grind of making change, and the nerve-wracking ups and downs of progress. From indigenous communities holding states accountable for better public health services in rural Guatemala, to locally controlled solar electricity in Kenya, to incorporating informal reclaimers into a public waste management system in India, the cases shine light on the complex, often incongruous and always interesting ways in which people are building actually existing alternatives to privatization.

The case studies also help shake up conventional understandings of our landscapes of choice. Many anti-privatization movements have called for state ownership and management of services as a response to the ills of privatization. But what happens when the state does not act in the broader public interest (Budds and McGranahan 2003;Cumbers 2012; Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012)? Although states have extended water, healthcare and other important public services to vast swathes of the world's population (at various levels), they have never been as universal or equitable as sometimes claimed. Many have been top-down, paternalistic systems that could not adequately accommodate for diversity, often intended to address the crises of capital accumulation (via the extension of a commodified mass consumption society) as opposed to any moral commitment to universal access (Esping-Anderson 1990; Offe 1972).

Better resources for strong and more accountable state services should be fought for where appropriate, but we must not wax nostalgic about public management models that have at times been exclusionary, opaque and blindly productivist in their orientation (Newman and Clarke 2009). As Ferguson (2009, 169) notes in the African context, 'calls for reinstating old-style developmental states ... are understandable in the wake of neoliberal restructuring ... but I am skeptical that this is an adequate...