Join Patricia Burch (University of Southern California) on 2 December 2026 to explore what happens to public authority when the systems public institutions depend on are privately owned. Schools, hospitals, welfare agencies, and city governments increasingly run on commercial platforms for data, decision-making, and now AI. These arrangements rarely look like privatization. Nothing is sold, and nothing appears to change hands. Yet over time, decisions about who is eligible, what counts as success, and who owns the data move into contracts and software that elected bodies seldom see and cannot easily revise.

Using American school districts as a case, the session asks how this kind of dependence builds up, why our usual categories of public and private fail to capture it, and what it means for accountability, equity, and democratic control. It also looks ahead to comparative work on the Netherlands and Denmark: do governance tools, such as funding conditions, inspection, and negotiated autonomy, create conditions for stronger state accountability or hybrid governance forms, specifically around emerging technologies such as AI? This will be an open conversation among researchers and policymakers about where the real decisions now sit, and what it would take to govern them in public again.