Negotiating the public : re-municipalization, water politics and social reproduction

In the context of the global wave of privatization of local public services, remunicipalization has emerged as a viable policy alternative, broadly understood as the return to public management. The paper examines its transformative potential by analysing what ‘public’ means in practice with a particular focus on governance and decision-making. To do so, the paper investigates the re-municipalization of urban water services in Naples (Italy) and Paris (France) by utilizing qualitative methods. Through a critical political economy approach, informed by social reproduction theory and political ecology, I argue that re-municipalization should be seen as a process that different social forces continuously try to shape. The findings not only contribute to the specific literature on water services, but also to that on remunicipalization, within the debate about public versus private provision. More broadly, the research enhances the understanding of water through the lenses of critical political economy.