Camouflaged privatization: the influence of the Fratzscher Commission and PricewaterhouseCoopers on Berlin's schools

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of Big Four firms in the privatization of infrastructure with a focus on school construction in Germany. As a part of its efforts to cut costs, the City of Berlin decided to transfer responsibility for the construction and renovation of schools to a formally privatized housing association. An expert commission and the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) played a decisive role in facilitating this transfer. This chapter focuses on PwC's assessment report, which proposed to centralize and bundle individual projects in areas such as school or motorway construction and administration in order to build new management, decision-making, and control structures and to involve financial investors. It is argued that the report has helped to legitimize a new model for privatizing public goods in which the burden of maintaining public infrastructure is assumed by taxpayers' money while private firms are guaranteed secure profits.