La experiencia de los ordenamientos europeos: ¿un “retorno” a las gestiones públicas/municipales?
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
In this article I analyse, from an organizational and operational perspectives, the development of institutional ways of management of some public services –water and electricity supply and waste management– in several Member States of the European Union: the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy. First, I identify different ways to manage public services: direct and indirect public management, formal, material and functional privatization and remunicipalization. Second, I carry out an analysis of these different ways of management from an economic (efficiency) and political (general interest: social, environmental, sanitary, and other kinds of welfare) perspectives. Third, I show a historical tendency which illustrates how the management of public services have been moved from the private sector to the public (first to the local level and then to the national sphere) and, subsequently, how them have been returned to the private sector. However, in the last years we can observe how the pendulum oscillates again because of the enlargement of Local Administration. This enlargement is grounded in two considerations. First, in the belief that Local Administration is superior –or at least in the same level– to the private sector in managing public services and, second, in the ethical preference for public management that have citizens/consumers, all of this despite of the unwillingness of the private sector to abandon the market and the launchement of new waves of privatizations in the South of Europe, in the context of the economic and financial crisis.