ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief review of heated debates around the use of the term “commons” versus “public”, reminding us not only of the need for a new conceptualization of our bourgeois public sphere but also our limited choice in linguistic alternatives. As provocative as the commons literature is in proposing substitute notions of public and public services, the chapter argues that it does not offer a sufficiently robust conceptual framework to replace notions of public, while potentially splintering the potential for broad-based partnership-building on a pro-public future. The extended notion of publics can be applied in concrete terms to a rehabilitated definition of what constitutes a public service: first by creating new, non-marketized indices that evaluate how “essential” a service is and to what extent it benefits from “collective provision”; and second by employing objective and subjective criteria to determine whether a service is best provided by a public or private agency in any given context.
