An Emancipatory Paradox: On the Transformative Power of Water Remunicipalisation

Remunicipalisation – or the return of water services to full public ownership, management, and democratic control following a period of full or partial privatisation – is an unexpected consequence of the experience with privatisation and its emergence as a credible policy option does, together with the acceleration in its international diffusion (Kishimoto et al., 2015), represent a paradox of New Public Management. While dissatisfaction with private management is central to the rationale for remunicipalisation and thus confounds mainstream expectations of superior private efficiency (Hall et al., 2013; Lobina, 2015), the impact of remunicipalisation on public service performance remains under-researched (Bel and Gradus, 2018). To address this knowledge gap, the paper looks at the policy process and policy outcome of water remunicipalisation. Drawing on the comparative analysis of prominent cases such, the paper illuminates the potentially transformative effect of remunicipalisation on water service governance. Public ownership may in fact enable the redirection of agency from the prioritisation of value extraction to that of value redistribution. This emancipatory paradox is central to transforming the theory and practice of water service reform, currently premised on notions of organisational efficiency which offer limited support to sustainable development. More precisely, the policy outcome of water remunicipalisation (in terms of progress towards sustainable water development) is seen as a function of the policy process of water service reform, whereby this process is conceived as the combination of morphogenetic sequences of governance transformation. The relationship between the policy process and policy outcome of water remunicipalisation is analysed through the lens of a new “remediable institutional alignment” framework, which operationalises the duality of agency and institutions by exploring the interplay of actors’ motivation, power, organisational arrangements and institutional environments. The framework enables to illustrate how path-dependency causes the temporary lock-in of organisational efficiency under different organisational arrangements. It also enables to identify the following morphogenetic moments of governance transformation as constituents of the transformative power of water remunicipalisation: 1) Axiological transformation (the reinterpretation of organisational efficiency as instrumental to emancipatory outcomes as opposed to profit maximisation); 2) Enabling transformation (the return to public ownership that allows for abandoning the profit maximisation imperative); 3) Teleological transformation (the redirection of agency towards systemic reproduction and progressive redistribution); 4) Performative transformation (the reinvestment of value produced and enhanced achievement of economic, social and environmental development objectives). It is argued that variations in the outcome of remunicipalisation can be explained in terms of variations in the morphogenetic sequence of governance transformation that is variations in the sequencing of the identified morphogenetic moments. For example, the morphogenetic sequence 1-2-3-4 has resulted in “purposive governance transformation” in the case of Paris, whereas the sequence 2-1-3-4 has produced “attritional governance transformation” in the case of Berlin. Finally, the paper considers the implications for the rejuvenation of organisational economics – a field that has made little progress in the last decade – particularly in relation to Oliver Williamson’s (2000) assumption that the public sector is an intrinsically inferior organisational mode.