From public service to governance regimes applicable to various goods and services

Session 9 addresses another fundamental issue of governance: what legitimacy does the market have? What should be governed by simple market forces and what by other ‘governance regimes’? What are the other possible governance regimes? Can this debate be reduced to the opposition between private and public goods?

Pierre Calame shows that another approach must be adopted, and suggests using the sharing test to classify governance regimes for goods and services in the four following categories: assets that are destroyed when shared, assets that are divided when shared but are finite in quantity, assets that are divided when shared but exist in an undetermined quantity and assets that are multiplied when shared. To conclude, he briefly delineates the resulting types of governance regimes, but the governance regimes of the future must be fleshed out in the field, taking other characteristics of goods and services into account.