CURA Seminar “On Public-Commons Partnerships and a new commons sense” with Keir Milburn on 20 November

Keir Milburn (@KeirMilburn) kicks off CURA’s 2019-2020 seminars with his latest work on the broad theme of New Municipalism entitled

On Public-Commons Partnerships and a new commons sense

Date: Wednesday 20 November 2019

Venue: Hugh Aston Building, DeMontfort University, room HU3.96,

Time: 2-3.30pm. 

Attendance is free, please RSVP to jenni.cauvain@dmu.ac.uk.

Abstract

The collapse of Carillion, and more recently Interserve, have underlined the bankruptcy of the neoliberal model of public procurement and service provision. Public-Private Partnerships, along with the Private Finance Initiative, became key instruments in the roll out of that model. In this paper, I examine the idea of Public-Commons Partnerships as a model that can usher in a quite different model of governance and provision. Building on the debates around the ‘New Municipalism’ and the ‘Institutional Turn’ in British left political economy I suggest the commons as a new direction of travel for institutional change while addressing the problem of how we might construct a self-expansive dynamic in the circuit of the commons to counter the self-expansive dynamic of capital.

Biography

Keir Milburn is a longtime political activist, as well as a lecturer in Political Economy and Organisation at the University of Leicester. He is the co-author, along with Bertie Russell, of the recent report for Common wealth, Public-Common Partnerships. Building New Circuits of Collective Ownership: https://common-wealth.co.uk/Public-common-partnerships.html

His latest book, Generation Left, is now available from Polity: http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509532230