Alexander Paulsson

Market failure is a concept invoked in both economics and public policy to justify governmental interventions in the marketplace. Drawing on more than five years of qualitative research on public transport in Stockholm, this paper explores how market failure, operating as a form of folk theory within public policy, informed a legal reform. This reform aimed to reconfigure an established contractual regime, where competition centered around procurement contracts “for-the-market,” with a new regime focused on competition for passengers “in-the-market.” Conceptualizing market failure and the two notions of competition underlying it as a matter of ontological politics, the reconfiguration of the market orbited around conflicts of the nature of it, but also around its temporal configuration. Taken together, this study points to how the boundaries between multiple markets are not only emerging “here and now” but also how markets “now and later” are invoked in market configurations.