Nine - Global norms, local contestation: privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin

Summary

Introduction

The emerging political science literature on de/politicisation has focused mainly on national and economic policy and the processes and effects of depoliticisation. This chapter seeks to broaden the scope of the literature by making two important contributions: focusing on the urban (regional/local) level and examining how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance are repoliticised. Hence, if research into depoliticisation tends to examine how the global norms of liberalisation and privatisation (what Roberts (2010) calls the ‘logic of discipline’) become embedded in public policy through specific ‘principles, tactics and tools’ (Flinders and Buller, 2006), then this chapter examines precisely the opposite – namely, how those global norms can be challenged and rendered contingent through the agency of non-state actors, such as social movements, problematising their effects at the local/regional level of the city. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the partial remunicipalisation of the Berlin Water Company (Berliner Wasserbetriebe – BWB) in 2012.

After 12 years of partial privatisation, one private partner, the German energy utility RWE, agreed to sell its 24.9% share of the Berlin Water Company (BWB) back to the city of Berlin in May 2012. After initial threats of legal action against RWE, French utility Véolia, the second partner, has recently suggested that they are also willing to sell their 24.9% share. Partially privatised in 1999 in the context of fiscal crisis and failed attempts to remake Berlin as a ‘global city’, the privatisation was presented by the city government as a necessity and provoked little public opposition. Gradually, however, it became a focal point for the contestation of neoliberal policy in the city. From inevitable to at least partially reversed, the privatisation case reveals the ongoing potential for political agency. Formerly a goal championed only by activists, remunicipalisation was in the manifesto of three of the four major political parties at the last city elections (2011), despite the fact that Berlin still has large debts. This chapter provides an account of this shift, showing the key processes through which the consensus in the formal political realm was disturbed – how a perceived norm, indeed necessity, of (urban) governance in the context of economic globalisation and fiscal debts, was rendered contingent, repoliticised.

The case is made for a non-deterministic and empirically grounded means of engaging with de/politicisation.