From Public Sector-based to Privatized Service Provision. Is the Pendulum Swinging Back Again? Comparative Summary

Reforming Local Government Institutions and the New Public Management

“…Such policy-related research may be particularly penetrating and revealing. For an attempt at combining cross-country country and cross-policy comparisons see Wollmann and Marcou ( 2010a ;2010b ). While available studies on NPM-inspired local level reforms have largely focused on the concepts and the implementation of such reforms, the evaluative analysis of the results and outcomes has so far been largely neglected.…”

Re-politicisation as post-NPM response? Municipal companies in a Norwegian context

“…While re-municipalisation usually refers to a reversal of outcontracting and privatisation (e.g. German municipalities buying back shares from private electricity companies) combined with a growing scepticism towards privatisation (Wollmann and Marcou 2010;Florio 2013;Wollmann 2016), re-politicisation in the municipal context refers to a specific process where local politicians try to regain control over agentified entities generally, be it in-house firms, municipally owned enterprises or external, private partners.…”

“…Studies of such processes at the local level are still few and include countries that have gone much further in their devolution of local public services than, say, Norway and other Nordic countries. In other parts of Europe, re-municipalisation primarily refers to municipalities taking back control over services, which they have previously sold or outsourced to private sector actors (Wollmann and Marcou 2010;Wollmann 2016). In Norway, re-municipalisation takes on another form, by reasserting and re-centring the municipality's power over agentified municipal entities, including municipal companies.…”

Towards Citizen Accountability of Local Public Enterprises

“…The present tendencies of re‐municipalization in public service provision in some European Countries (e.g. Wollmann and Marcou , Schaefer and Theuvsen , Friedländer , Hall et al. ) can be seen as an indicator that the trust in abilities of the markets to provide a sustainable and affordable provision of public services is declining.…”