This book provides a detailed analysis of the controversial privatisation of the Berlin Water Company (BWB) in 1999. As with other cases of privatisation around the world, the city's government argued there was no alternative in a context of public debts and economic restructuring. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, the analysis presented here steps outside the parameters of this neat, straightforward explanation. It problematises the 'hard facts' upon which the decision was apparently made, presenting instead an account in which facts can be political constructions shaped by normative assumptions and political strategies. A politics of inevitability in 1990s Berlin is revealed; one characterised by depoliticisation, expert-dominated policy processes and centred upon the perceived necessities of urban governance in the global economy. It is an account in which global and local dynamics mix: where the interplay between the general and the specific, between neoliberalism and politicking, and between globalisation and local actors characterise the discussion. Context, themes and strategy. - Privatisation, globalisation and neo-liberalism: governance in the 1990s. - Facts and values in policy-making. - Governmentality, policy discourse and translation. - The global city policy discourse and water policy-making: making the privatisation of BWB 'inevitable'. - From ready-made accounts to a politics in the making account of the BWB privatisation. - Assessing the BWB partial privatisation. - Assessing the theoretical approach.
Dr. Ross Beveridge is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS) in Erkner, Germany.
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