http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/221697 Mon, 20 May 2013 07:08:08 GMT 2013-05-20T07:08:08Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/226849 Title: Fixing the national security state: commissions and the politics of disaster and reform Authors: Kirchhoff, Christopher Abstract: In the U.S. federal system, “crisis commissions” are powerful instruments of social learning that actively mediate the politics of disaster and reform. Typically endowed with the legal authority to establish causes of dramatic policy failures and make recommendations to prevent their recurrence, commissions can prompt major governmental reorganizations. Yet commissions are also frequently accused of being influenced by dominant interests and faulted for articulating incomplete or politically expedient narratives of failure. Even when commission conclusions are accepted, the reforms they propose are not always adopted. Using the 9/11 Commission as a conceptual backdrop, this dissertation explores the relationship between disaster, public investigation, and reform by undertaking a detailed study of the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board and Iraq Study Group. Together, the cases constitute a study of the national security state seeking to correct failures across different domains of state power: border security, war-making capability, and dominance in space. I argue that commissions, as one-shot diagnostic and therapeutic instruments, are more effective than standing political institutions at confronting entrenched ways of seeing and knowing in complex systems of the national security state, which are defined by the interaction of ideology, large bureaucracies, and advanced technologies. The ability of commissions to see critically for society itself is not given but rather constructed through investigative and deliberative processes that must overcome the action of political interests. Commission credibility is therefore not an essential trait that derives a priori from the inherent stature of its members, but is rather the output of the investigative phase as commissions identify, compile, and publicize errors made by the state. In this adversarial process, an aggressive professional staff emerges as a determinant of commission success, leading to an important distinction between investigative commissions with “super staffs” and advisory commissions that lack them. Process tracing recommendations over a multi-year period nevertheless reveals dynamics of agency and resistance at play between commissions and the institutions they attempt to reform, highlighting the partial success commissions are likely to achieve at coercing entrenched institutions to implement their recommendations. Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/226849 2010-10-11T23:00:00Z http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/224951 Title: Health and justice: the capability to be healthy. Authors: Venkatapuram, Sridhar Abstract: This is an inter-disciplinary argument for a moral entitlement to a capability to be healthy. Motivated by the goal to make a human right to health intelligible and justifiable, the thesis extends the capability approach, advocated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, to the theory and practice of the human health sciences. Moral claims related to human health are considered at the level of ethical theory, or a level of abstraction where principles of social justice that determine the purpose, form, and scope of basic social institutions are proposed, evaluated, and justified. The argument includes 1) a conception of health as capability, 2) a theory of causation and distribution of health capability as well as 3) an argument for the moral entitlement to a sufficient and equitable capability to be healthy grounded in the respect for human dignity. Moreover, the entitlement to the capability to be healthy is defended against alternative ethical approaches that focus on welfare or resources in evaluating and satisfying health claims. In specific, it is argued that human health is best understood as a capability to be healthy—a meta-capability to achieve a cluster of basic and inter-related capabilities and functionings. Such a cluster of capabilities and functionings is in line with Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities. A theory of causation and distribution of health capability is put forward that integrates the “classic” biomedical factors of disease (genetic endowment, exposure to hazardous materials, behaviour), social determinants of disease, and Drèze and Sen’s econometric analysis of the causation and distribution of acute and endemic malnutrition. Furthermore, the argument critiques Norman Daniels’s revised Rawlsian theory of health justice, and advocates for the capability approach to recognize group capabilities in light of “population health” phenomena. Lastly, the thesis also argues that a coherent, capability conception of health as a species-wide conception will tend to make any theory of justice recognizing health claims a cosmopolitan theory of justice. Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk:80/handle/1810/224951 2009-08-17T23:00:00Z