Loading...
Commodifying Public Utilities : EU's New Governance Prescriptions for Rail and Water
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
EU new economic governance
commodification
ordinary legislative procedure
rail
reversed differentiated integration
water
Sociology and Political Science
Public Administration
Marketing
commodification
ordinary legislative procedure
rail
reversed differentiated integration
water
Sociology and Political Science
Public Administration
Marketing
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27372
Abstract
In the mid-2000s, the Single Market Program and European Monetary Union lost momentum, as public services advocates increasingly succeeded in tempering attempts to liberalize public utilities through legislative amendments and Court of Justice rulings. After the 2008 crisis, however, the EU's shift to a new economic governance (NEG) regime provided EU executives with a new tool to advance their objectives. Unlike EU directives, country-specific NEG prescriptions require neither the approval of the European Parliament nor their transposition into law, making it more difficult for social forces to contest them. Our analysis of NEG prescriptions for public utilities in two sectors (rail and water) and four countries (Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania) across 10 years (2009–2019) shows that the shift to NEG provided EU executives with new extra-parliamentarian and extra-juridical tools that allowed them to revive their stalled commodification agenda; at the price of accentuating the EU's democratic and justice deficits.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2025-01-11
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1111/gove.12909