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There is increasing enthusiasm at urban and municipal scales for leading sustainability transitions, amid higher level endorsement and even expectation of such leadership. Yet this downscaling of responsibility for transition requires a greater critical focus. It raises questions of how evenly spread the capacity to lead on this is, and how it relates to the complex and differentiated multi-scalar governance structures and political landscapes within which municipal actors are situated. This article draws upon evidence from a mixed methods comparative and multi-scalar analysis across Europe exploring the different pressures and potential that exist for municipalities. Our central aim is to critically interrogate what municipalities are doing to achieve a post-carbon energy transition beyond lofty aspirations. Departing from the tendency to focus on paradigmatic success stories, our research on the different conditions affecting municipalities across the continent suggests that the focus so far on case studies and techno-social solutions is insufficient for considering the broader geographical patterns and multi-scalar tensions of transition. Our findings suggest that while municipalities are alive to the opportunities to lead on sustainability transitions, we need a clearer understanding of the ways that policy and politics at national and international scales shape political capacities for action. There are clear limits to independent municipal action, particularly without more supportive interventions at higher scales. The increased urgency for sustainability transitions requires far more multi-scalar and trans-local coordination than that exists at present, although the building blocks of such work may be beginning to emerge.

Picking up on the manifestation of state intervention following the 2008 financial crisis, we argue that the recent trend towards remunicipalisation underlines but also problematises the thesis of new state capitalism. Remunicipalisation refers to a process whereby towns, cities and sub-national regions take previously privatised services and infrastructures back into public ownership. Remunicipalisation has led to the emergence of regionally- and municipally-owned state enterprises across a wide range of sectors including water, energy, waste, transport, education, (tele)communications, and health and social care. Engaging with the nature of the ‘new’ state capitalism, and particularly challenging its theoretically restrictive understanding of the state as ‘market enabler’, we highlight that remunicipalisations have often emerged in response to the failed promise of neoliberal capitalism to improve the quality and efficiency of public services through the (supposed) competitiveness of the free market. Like neoliberalism, remunicipalisations take spatially diverse and variegated forms as market-driven logics interact with other political and economic determinations. As such, remunicipalisations often encompass critiques of neoliberal governance and market volatility, and instead focus on the potential of regional wealth creation as well as stabilising local market dynamics through diversifying ownership forms. Drawing upon our ongoing empirical work on German remunicipalisation, we aim to foreground how multiple determinations at work in the German political economy at different spatial scales shape its particular trajectory out of neoliberal mutation. We show how the remunicipalisation of energy provider TEAG has enabled the local state to intervene and diversify the uneven economic geographies in the state of Thuringia.

There is a growing interest in the progressive potential of remunicipalisation, a global trend for towns, cities, and even subnational regions to take formerly privatised assets and services back into public ownership. In this paper, we offer a novel conceptualisation of remunicipalisation, developing a spatialised conjunctural perspective through critical engagement with the work of Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, and recent geographical scholarship on political economy transitions. This draws attention to the open, dynamic, political, and spatially diverse aspects of remunicipalisation as part of a mutating process of neoliberalism. Emphasising the conjunctural insight of neoliberalism’s shifting and variegated terrain on which progressive forces have to mobilise, our theorisation has implications for left political strategy and broader transformative projects against a backdrop of global economic, social, and ecological crisis.