About Public Services and Democracy

26 September 2009
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The Public Services and Democracy Project (‘New Politics’) is part of the Economic Justice, Corporate Power and Alternatives Programme and seeks to improve public services and strengthen democracy by empowering workers and citizens to take back control of our economic and political institutions.

Read about our activities in 2012 here

Working together with partners in critical networks and movements in particular in Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and Southern Africa, TNI’s Public Services and Democracy Programme aims to:

  • Work with actors both within state institutions and in social movements to strengthen popular sovereignty, especially at a local and regional level, generalising the innovations where appropriate to a national level. This includes the development of a network of municipalities and civil society organisations working for popular sovereignty, as well as the critical analysis of the limits of ‘participatory’ institutions that serve merely to legitimate the existing order and diffuse movements for genuine change. 
  • Provide research support for public sector workers, managers and citizens developing positive alternatives to reform and improve public services and the social efficiency of public sector institutions. The forms of such reforms vary  but share the common aim of releasing and developing the capacity of public sector staff through strong workers' organisations and democratic management. 
  • Work with activists in social movements (including organisations of labour)  and those engaged in building parties of a new kind to explore the problems and potential of rethinking political organisation, the conditions for success and the reasons for failure of experiments so far.
  • Create a space for the development and debate of ‘networked politics’ which draws on innovations and metaphors from the open software community and open web communities, as well as insights from the experiences of social movements and political parties. 
  • Work with engaged intellectuals and activists to understand the implications of the current economic crisis for developing new political institutions.

Recent publications from Public Services & Democracy

Race, space and punishment in urban sociology

Structural circumstances of deprivation and criminalization facing African-Americans and the racialized perceptions of criminality appear to be some of the salient features that recently led to a young black teenager being killed by neighborhood watch patrolman George Zimmerman.

Privatising Europe

This working paper and infographic provide an overview of  a great ‘fire sale’ of public services and national assets across Europe that is providing profits for a few transnational companies but is often fiercely opposed by its citizens.

Participatory alternatives to privatisation

Experience worldwide shows that EC-imposed privatisation on crisis countries will not work. The alternative is not reinforcing the status quo, but using citizen power and labour to reinvigorate public services and democratically transform the state.

 

The future of Public Enterprises in Latin America and the World

An international seminar in Montevideo, co-organised by TNI and the Uruguayan government, shared the latest learning and innovation by state-owned enterprises across Latin America and affirmed their importance as instruments for economic and social development.