The Post Growth Institute published a new essay by the Democracy Collaborative’s Thomas Hanna on the potential of democratic public ownership. Read an excerpt below and the full article here.
Strategically, the concept of Democratic Public Ownership suggests that rather than simply ignoring the world’s expansive panoply of existing public enterprises and services — or worse, standing by as they are asset stripped and sold off to wealthy private investors — we should leverage their scope and scale by infusing them with democratic governance structures, innovative missions and mandates, and robust transparency and accountability mechanisms. Moreover, this should be supplemented by creating a new generation of publicly owned organizations in strategically and socially important sectors with various forms of democracy (including commons-based governance), transparency, and accountability baked in from the start. This includes, but is not limited to, municipalizing / nationalizing and then reorienting extractive, exploitive, and ecologically destructive for-profit companies.
