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Since 2009 Swedish municipalities may apply the Act on System of Choice (LOV) in, among other things, eldercare. About half of the 290 Swedish municipalities have chosen this within home-care services for older citizens, thus creating conditions for a welfare mix where private and public providers compete. Some of these municipalities later made decisions to abolish LOV. This article aims to analyse the arguments put forward by municipal politicians to abolish LOV and discusses if the case of abandoning LOV represents a case of re-municipalization.

Qualitative method was used to analyse decision protocols and media materials from 20 Swedish municipalities that had abolished LOV in home-care services.

The article shows that politics and ideology seem to have only a limited significance in abolishing LOV. The most important arguments found in the empirical materials were instead pragmatic and related to the transaction costs: in smaller municipalities about the weak position of private providers and in larger municipalities about reported cases of welfare crime and extensive needs to control and review. In smaller municipalities, LOV was replaced by public monopoly and in larger municipalities by other types of procurements.

With its focus on eldercare in party-dominated municipalities, the article adds knowledge to the literature on drivers of re-municipalization but also discusses possible delimitations of the concept of re-municipalization.

Rapid economic growth and urbanization in India have increased demand for municipal services. In response, privatization has emerged as a policy solution to a growing deficit in urban infrastructure and service provision. But, privatization assumes prior state ownership of those services. Certain waste management services, specifically doorstep waste collection, have never been truly public in the sense that private informal actors have historically provided them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the tensions and contradictions between two related policy imperatives – universal service provision and privatization – that appear to be guiding the municipalization of solid waste collection services in urban India.

Research for this paper relies on detailed analysis of key government documents (reports of various committees, regulations and laws) that have been important in defining municipal responsibilities for waste management in India from 1990 to 2016. In addition, where appropriate, research materials from the author’s doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Delhi from October 2012 to December 2013 have also been used.

An analysis of key policy documents revealed that the government’s efforts to document deficits in service provision ignored, and thus rendered invisible, the work of the informal sector. While a consensus on the need for universal waste collection service had emerged as early as the late 1990s, it was not until 2016 that municipal responsibility for service provision was codified into law. The rules issued in 2016 municipalized this responsibility while simultaneously opening up spaces for the inclusion of the informal sector in waste collection service provision.

This paper fills a gap in the existing literature on how policy interventions have brought the space of the doorstep into the ambit of the state such that it allows for the opening up of those spaces for the entry of private capital. Under the guise of universal service provision, the shift to municipalization and outsourcing to private corporations is not in fact privatization – service provision is already private – but involves the dispossession of informal workers and the transfer of their resource to the formal, corporate sector.

Existing work on multi-level governance (MLG) has concentrated on decentring of the state (e.g., Rhodes, R. A. W. (1994). The hollowing out of the state: The changing nature of the public service in Britain. Political Quarterly, 65(2), 138–141; Rhodes, R. A. W. (1997). Understanding governance: Policy networks, governance, reflexivity and accountability. London: Open University Press; Rhodes, R. A. W. (2008). Understanding governance: Ten years on. Organisation Studies, 28(8), 1243–1264); growth of non-state actors in governing (e.g., Crouch, 2004; Jessop, B. (2004). Multi level governance and multi-level metagovernance-changes in the European Union as integral moments in the transformation and re-orientation of contemporary statehood. In I. Bache & M. Flinders (Eds.), Multi level governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press); classifying different types of governance (e.g., type 1 and type 2 MLG – see Hooghe & Marks, 2003; Ongaro, E., Massey, A., Holzer, M., & Wayenberg, E. (Eds.). (2010). Governance and intergovernmental relations in the European Union and the United States: Theoretical perspectives. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). The purpose of the chapter is to complement these approaches by focusing on politics and political strategies in multi-level systems.

The chapter draws on an extensive literature in governance and political accountability and on political dynamics, management and strategies within multi-level state systems. Although in international context, particular accentuation is placed on the UK case.

There are three broad findings. First, while the growth of MLG and in particular supra state activities and institutions have undermined conventional conceptions of political accountability, more nuanced interpretations are provided; as are cases of successful popular challenge to a seemingly inevitable application of neo-liberal new public management driven approaches to public service provision, as witnessed in examples of public service de-privatisation and re-municipalisation. Second, as seen in the United Kingdom, political strategies in a multi-state system are presented in terms of zero sum or alternatively win-win scenarios. In Scotland, for example, though there have been difficulties for state wide parties in managing multi-level politics in the devolved arena, yet in that arena win-win strategies have been played out; and in Northern Ireland with a contextual backdrop of conflict, there is also evidence of win-win political actions. Third, some general findings are presented which outline a range of centrifugal and centripetal forces found in some European countries and how these affect the choice of political strategy.

A typology of interventionism can categorize regulations, taxes, and subsidies both theoretically and as they sequentially unfold in practice. This typology is inspired by, but broader than, the Mises interventionist thesis, which, similar to Madison's lament, recognizes the propensity of intervention to expand from its own shortcomings in the elusive quest to achieve economic rationality (Lavoie, 1982, p. 180; Ikeda, 1997, pp. 41–46; Bradley, 2006).

On the other hand the people of Canada have lived essentially on the same type of diet as that employed in the northern United States. It includes all the products of field and garden with which we are familiar, together with meats in liberal amounts and dairy products in moderate quantities. The latter is the kind of diet which supports the civilization of England, and also the most progressive European countries as well as that of the northern United States and all other parts of the world which have been peopled by colonization from European stock, wherever the climate will permit.

This paper aims to contest Mees’ (2010) theory that publicly owned public transport operators normatively target their resources to maximize service rather than profit. Mees argues that neoliberal governments in the Anglosphere were mistaken to privatize their undertakings, yet it is shown that the British ethos of municipal trading meant that municipalities always saw public transport as more of a business than a service.

The author uses an archival microstudy of the municipal tramway undertaking of the English city of York, using municipal archives triangulated with local and industry media sources.

The paper proposes the refination of the Mees spectrum of public transport from public to private (2010, pp. 73-75) to note that public undertakings can be operated within a profit-maximizing framework.

This paper provides a rare historical explication of an individual municipal trading enterprise and tramway system placed in its economic context together with its wider theoretical implications.

The chapter proposes that a new public enterprise (NPE) now characterises developments in local policymaking and service delivery. The NPE places the local public sector in a leading role, either in the direct ‘contracting in’ of services previously contracted out to the private sector, or in the co-ordination of partnerships between public, private and voluntary sector providers. Such remunicipalisation is non-ideological in nature, and international in its scope, being prompted by pragmatic considerations of cost and effectiveness.

The discussion draws from the authors' cumulative primary research on local public services and regeneration and specifically from a series of interviews with local leaders and senior managers conducted in 2018 and 2019.

It was found that traditional conceptions of ‘public’ vs ‘private’ are largely outmoded. Contracting ‘in’ is practised even by those on the Right of the political spectrum. The public sector is a leader of local partnerships and it is no longer assumed that the private sector brings greater efficiency or effectiveness.

The term ‘new public enterprise’ is used in an innovative way to describe the changed relationship between public, private and voluntary sectors. This has significant implications for both practice and theory. The empirical prevalence of the NPE can readily be identified in the UK and internationally. Its theoretical implications are challenging but promising.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the justifying arguments of various Birmingham organisations between 1870 and 1914 in classifying and treating the unemployed. Using a capability approach, the paper will examine how employment policies in Birmingham during this period promoted or limited capabilities of work, life and voice. Finally, implications for labour market policies today will be discussed.

The theoretical framework for this paper will draw on the capability approach to a person's well‐being, developed by Amartya Sen and on theoretical and empirical developments of the capability approach by other authors such as Bonvin and Salais. This paper is based on historical archival research and analysis.

Birmingham was an exemplar of municipal social reform in late nineteenth century England, with the development of a range of public services such as education, electricity and public transport. However, the city's vision of civic reform was closely connected to the Liberal market logic of individual responsibility, and moral judgements of the unemployed served to multiply the categories and punitive treatments of the “undeserving”, separating the valid from the invalid citizen.

This case study of municipal employment policies in Birmingham at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrates the implications of moral judgements, classifications and treatments of the unemployed for people's capabilities in work and life, drawing connections to discourses of responsibility and citizenship today.