Transferring power from the state to private capital and creating profitable new markets in public services, including for the essentials of life, are driving imperatives of neoliberal globalization. The term ‘privatization’ describes this broad ideological and political agenda. Privatization policies and practices are the primary tools that have enabled transnational corporations and private elites to plunder the public domain for private gain, while the costs and losses are socialized and/or nationalized.

The onslaught of privatization has continued now for more than two decades. The early Washington Consensus template focused on the privatization of enterprises and resources through asset sales. That has since been overtaken by a complex combination of competitive deregulation, user-charges, targeted subsidies, contracting out, concessions, public private partnerships, private finance initiatives, multi-stakeholder partnerships and much more.

Privatization policies have been accompanied by other neoliberal prescriptions, such as fiscal austerity, deregulation and competition, liberalization of foreign investment and limits on capital flows, pro-market regulation of natural resources, labour market deregulation. This integrated package creates the conditions for transnational corporations to dominate these markets, maximize their profits and minimize their obligations.

At the same time the target of privatization has broadened from public services and assets to the institutions and processes of government itself. As markets have expanded, the state’s primary responsibility has been redefined as enabling private capital to expand and profit. Neoliberal definitions of ‘good governance’ take policy choices and responsibilities away from governments and depoliticize both the content of policies and the way they are made. This process transfers political power to technocrats, statutory bodies, private firms, local governments and NGOs, most of whom lack democratic mandates or public accountability. The fundamental social, economic and development rights of the people are eviscerated and their enduring realities of inequality, poverty, powerless and exploitation become invisible.

Some governments in Asia and the Pacific, such as India, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand, adopted this neoliberal prescription voluntarily for ideological and political reasons. In most countries, however, the privatization agenda has been dictated. From the mid-1980s the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and others imposed the Washington Consensus style of privatisation as an integral part of structural adjustment programmes, backed by loan conditionalities.

By the mid-1990s that simplistic model of privatisation was deeply discredited. It was replaced by a more sophisticated layering of obligations that were justified in the name of ‘coherence’ across the international financial institutions, donors and trade agreements. The underlying aim had shifted from the restructuring of national economies to achieving uniform rules that would smooth the path for international capital in an era of ‘globalisation’.

The post-Washington Consensus promoted the new phase of privatization under the euphemism of public-private and multi-stakeholder ‘partnerships’, Policy Reduction Strategies and ‘good governance’. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and a rapidly expanding raft of WTO-plus services and investment agreements sought to lock and advance these rules and fetter the ability of governments to respond to genuine democratic pressures and remedy crippling market failures. Millennium Development Goal 8 designated all these instruments as the pathway for development and delivering people the fundamentals of life: safe drinking water, health care, education and freedom from poverty.

Despite this hegemonic straitjacket, when market activities become unprofitable and corporations exit the state is expected to step back in, absorb the costs of recovery and re-privatize. There are also a growing number of examples where the social and environmental impacts of privatization have created such volatile political conditions that the state has been forced to re-regulate or even resume control. However, a sustained counter-hegemony to neoliberal globalization has yet to emerge.

The Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), a regional network of 50 alternative research institutions working closely with grassroots organizations and social movements, believes that privatization needs to be stopped and public services reclaimed - not because the public sector has always met people’s needs, but because privatization is fuelled by transnational corporate greed that does not pretend to put people ahead of profits and is rationalized by an ideology that shows contempt for the carnage that it leaves in its wake.

The negative impacts are felt in every aspect of daily life across Asia and the Pacific, most severely for the rural and urban poor, women and the elderly. It has also wrought havoc in rich countries, with growing inequality, feminisation of poverty and disenfranchisement.

APRN has chosen the topic of privatization for the annual conference in 2008 out of concern that current research and debate has begun to stagnate. The conference programme deliberately eschews the standard approach that analyses discrete sectors and contrasts state and market models. By confronting the complexities of privatization across the broad spectrum of the public domain, including governance itself, the APRN aims to establish a new level of analysis of its impacts and generate a dynamic debate resistance and alternatives through the lens of ‘people’s services’.

For reasons outlined above, the starting point is to treat the privatization of the public domain as a hegemonic strategy that denies alternatives, and constantly reinvents itself through new language and techniques as the previous version is discredited. The hegemony of ideology, institutions and instruments that drive the privatization model currently hides behind the commitment to ‘coherence’. At the same time, the catchcry of the ‘enabling’ state reduces the state to an agent of capital and requires them to operate through ‘partnerships’ that transfer power and ensure profits to transnational corporations.

Most of the current research and resistance strategies on privatization tends to focus instead on sectors, such as education, health care, water, telecommunications, electricity, pensions, public transport, etc. All those sectors are crucial to people’s survival and quality of life. But communities do not experience public services and privatization in this fractured way. A more profound analysis needs to integrate the social, economic, cultural and environmental dimensions of privatization to understand what it means for people’s daily lives.

The sectoral approach also favours social services and infrastructure, and often ignores the equally crucial assault on economic services and the privatization of governance. Many critiques and campaigns have exposed and opposed the failed market model of social services and utilities - private providers of health care, ‘education dumping’ through foreign franchises, private concessions over power and telecommunications utilities, and more.

Much less attention is paid to how privatization of economic services undermines people’s livelihoods and food systems through the sale of public land and natural resources, legalizing the corporate control of seed banks and R&D, dismantling state marketing boards, the replacement of public lending with private microcredit and commercialization of water for agriculture.

Equally little attention is paid to the privatization of public authority and accountability through public private partnerships and private finance initiatives, ‘free trade’ agreements in services and investment, and debt conditionalities that require a neoliberal version of ‘good governance’. Perhaps the more blatant form is found in India through the creation of Special Economic Zones and the precedent-setting model of private sector governance adopted in Bangalore, India.

APRN hopes to challenge the simplistic market/state dichotomy for three reasons. First, the nature of the state itself has been adjusted as public responsibilities are transferred to corporations and the private sector is imported into the heartland of government. The capture of state functions and the machinery of government by the market are integral to neoliberalism. The nature of the state under neoliberalism is therefore problematic and requires rigorous interrogation.

Second, the nature of the state has always been problematic for the oppressed and exploited. Imperialism and colonization designed a state apparatus to serve the interests of external powers and cultivated local elites with a vested interest in its maintenance. That legal and administrative machinery largely remained in place after formal decolonization, despite the nationalist objectives of many liberation struggles. The economic interests of foreign and domestic capital remained largely intact and property rights were largely protected at the expense of the poor. Rights to public services and the defense of the pubic domain have been hard fought for and are constantly under threat. Neoliberalism reflects the latest phase of this struggle.

Third, the state has traditionally played very different roles in delivering public services around the region. India has a long history of public services and struggles to entrench entitlements in law. The nature of the state in former command economies, such as Vietnam and Mongolia, and the impacts of structural adjustment and the post-Washington Consensus raise very different concerns about capacity and democratic accountability, and there are significant differences even between them. The Chinese government has invited private players to operate in a rigidly regulated public domain, but is subject to GATS obligations. The state in small and remote Pacific Islands face intrinsic problems of geography, scale, government capacity and skilled workers, and high dependency on public sector employment. Richer countries of the region, like Japan, Australia and New Zealand, are also caught within the neoliberal paradigm, but can avoid the wholesale devastation faced in poorer countries. In Indonesia, the state has historically been hijacked by a combination of corrupt and unaccountable governments and private sector cronies for the benefit of local elites; opposition to privatization is often driven by the desire to protect rentier capitalism, rather than the rights of the people.

(Ms. Kelsey is currently the Vice-chairperson of the Board of Convenors of the Asia Pacific Research Network)