Public Ownership and the Community

Abstract

$NZ5 billion ($NZ1,400 for each New Zealand resident) is held on behalf of consumers and communities as a result of restructuring New Zealand’s trustees savings banks and electricity distributors. For Government, ownership was a purely secondary but necessary consideration in the process of corporatising non-government public assets. The result? A series of trusts the study of whose governance and management sheds new light on issues of public versus private ownership, mandate, legitimacy, and the meaning of community. Addressing these issues may reshape both the role of local government and its relationship both with central government and with the communities to which it is responsible.