Since the 2008 financial crisis in Spain there have been important changes in municipal public administration, which during the previous two decades had been generally in favour of externalizing the management of basic services, mostly through concessions to private companies. In this new stage, there is a turn towards the recuperation of services that had been externalized and their remunicipalization. What has made possible this change in municipal governments’ preferences? What is the relation between this change and t h e social, political, and economic context of the country? What are the institutional implications? What notions of democracy and citizenship can be identified in the process? The article seeks to present and explain the key elements intervening in this process of recovery of basic services, which has become an important trend among municipalities. This issue has been published as Volume 5, Number 1 of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Working Papers (http://waterlat.org/publications/working-papers-series/). This is a special series of the Working Papers, titled “The struggle for democracy in Spain: grassroots initiatives to defend essential water services as a common good”, José Esteban Castro (Ed.), Edurne Bagué (Org.).