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Critically assessing meanings of the term "public", this book situates the emergence and expansion of "public services" within market-based forms of production and consumption. It highlights the potential for making public services more progressive within market societies, but underscores their ongoing capture by private interests and emphasises the inherent limits of reform within a "bourgeois public sphere". The author explores opportunities for more expansive forms of non-marketized public services, examining emerging debates on the theory and practice of equitable, participatory and sustainable forms of publicness that go beyond mere ownership. The book then asks how we can build a robust international "pro-public" movement that juggles universal needs with local context. With a focus on essential public services such as water, electricity and health, the text is global in its scope and written for a broad audience. It will be useful for those interested in social and public policy, public services and public administration, political theory, economic geography, social movements, sustainability and development.

Cape Town as world city -- Cape Town as capitalist city -- Cape Town as neoliberal city -- Respatializing Cape Town (I) : local government restructuring -- Respatializing Cape Town (II) : investments in the built environment -- Privatizing Cape Town -- Cost recovering Cape Town -- Disciplining Cape Town -- (De)Africanizing Cape Town -- Keep left for Cape Town : alternative development strategies

After four decades of privatization, remunicipalization has begun to reverse the trend. This policy phenomenon has been accompanied by a concomitant growth in academic writing on the topic, documenting a wide range of dynamics from different conceptual and methodological viewpoints, resulting in what many see to be a highly polarized debate. This article provides the first comprehensive review of this remunicipalization literature, providing critical insights into its schisms and overlaps, arguing that differences may not be as irreconcilable as some suggest, while also highlighting the need for an expanded scope of geographic and thematic research on the topic.

This thesis seeks to analyze pro-democracy movements in post-Soviet countries through the lens of existing theories of democratization to determine why a particular protest movement succeeded or failed. Through a qualitative analysis of theories of democratization and four case studies – Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Belarus – this thesis finds that the theories of democratization are ultimately applicable and helpful in understanding these case studies, albeit in different ways. Whereas the theories and their predictions might be proven correct in the cases of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the opposite is true in Russia and Belarus, where authoritarian regimes have taken steps to counteract democratic pressure in their countries.

A notable feature of Australian drug policy is the limited public and professional attention given to the financial costs of drug abuse and to the levels and patterns of government expenditures incurred in preventing and responding to this. Since 1991, Collins and Lapsley have published scholarly reports documenting the social costs of drug abuse in Australia and their reports also contain estimates of governments' drug budgets: revenue and expenditures. They show that, in 2004-2005, Australian governments expended at least $5288 million on drug abuse, with 50% of the expenditure directed to preventing and dealing with alcohol-related problems, 45% to illicit drugs and just 5% to tobacco. Some 60% of the expenditure was directed at drug crime and 37% at health interventions. This pattern of resource allocation does not adequately reflect an evidence-informed policy orientation in that it largely fails to focus on the drug types that are the sources of the most harm (tobacco and alcohol rather than illicit drugs), and the sectors for which we have the strongest evidence of the cost-effectiveness of the available interventions (treatment and harm reduction rather than legislation and law enforcement). The 2010-2014 phase of Australia's National Drug Strategy should include incremental changes to the resource allocation mix, and not simply maintain the historical resource allocation formulae.