Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009

How can people and organisations best respond to emergency events that are significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated, expected, prepared for – or even imagined? What forms of organisations are likely to be best able to cope with such events – and what procedures and practices will aid in their ability to do so? Obviously, extreme events – events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of our ordinary experience and expectations – by definition will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely to any given emergency organisation). Nonetheless, when they do occur they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States (US) in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010 – these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.     

DDR and transitional justice: bridging the divide?

This article explores the complex relationship between disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants (DDR) and transitional justice. While both DDR and transitional justice often operate simultaneously, neither process has traditionally been designed with the other in mind. In fact, they are often in tension or competition, pursuing competing demands and potentially drawing on the same scarce donor pools. While scholars and practitioners of transitional justice have become somewhat attuned to the presence of DDR processes in countries emerging from conflict, and the challenges and opportunities they present for transitional justice, we observe that by comparison, it is only fairly recently that DDR policies, if not programmes, have begun to take account of the demands and practice of transitional justice. We argue that while the activities of DDR and transitional justice may often be in tension, in some instances they might be designed to operate in a more complementary fashion. However, for this to even be conceivable, it is essential that scholars and practitioners of each seek to understand the work of the other better.     

PUBLIC ENTERPRISE, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, AND THE IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION: THE EXPERIENCE OF AMERICAN SEAPORTS ON THE PACIFIC RIM

Port authorities perceive their ideas as broadly supportive of regional economic development and are strongly associated with chambers of commerce, economic development agencies and growth oriented citizens groups. However, shifts in American foreign trade and the use of new technologies atid environmental regulation have dramatically changed the seaport industry over the last 15 years. As public enterprises, many ports responded to the new competitive markets by developing efficient but capital intensive container technologies. Environmental regulation also had a role in stimulating more efficient use of port lands. Although frequently viewed as a road block to all development plans, the intergovernmental review processes may have helped turn ports away from their traditional patterns of land expansion development and toward redevelopment of existing facilities. With the constraint of greatly reduced expansion opportunities. the enterprising ports figured out they could greatly increase cargo handling capacity without enacting the wrath of environmental quality interests. This paper examines this contention with both economic logic and inferential data.     

French Canada and the ‘bureaucratic phenomenon’ Saskatchewan

Abstract. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1969) noted in its report that French Canadians, compared with English Canadians, do not have the same way of seeing, settling or discussing problems. How are they different? What is the impact of French-Canadian values on such variables as patterns of bureaucratic behaviour, organizational structures and styles of policy-making? These questions were not really dealt with by the Royal Commission in its discussion of the public service. In this paper an attempt is made to identify so-called unique French-Canadian characteristics and to ask whether they do in fact have an impact on patterns of bureaucratic behaviour and bureaucratic structures. Usage is made of a model, developed by the French sociologist Michel Crozier, on the nature of authority relations among civil servants in France. Crozier has argued that French civil servants avoid face-to-face authority relations as much as possible, the result being bureaucratic structures which tend to be extremely centralized. Historical and contemporary evidence on French Canada is examined to test for the validity of the model. The model can be only partially confirmed with regard to the behaviour of French-Canadian civil servants. Nevertheless, the findings are interesting enough to allow one to speculate on what impact French-Canadian values have on the nature of bureaucratic authority and policy-making.     

Free Market Experiments in the Laboratory of Democracy: The Long Decade of Policy Reform in New Zealand those risks

Books reviewd in this essay:
Christine Cheyne, Mike O'Brien and Michael Belgrave, Social Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Critical Introduction
Brian Easton, The Commercialisation of New Zealand
Paul Dalziel and Ralph Lattimore, The New Zealand Macroeconomy: A Briefing on the Reforms
RC Mascarenhas, Government and the Economy in New Zealand
Raymond Miller (ed.), New Zealand Politics in Transition
Geoffrey Palmer and Michael Palmer, Bridled Power: New Zealand Government Under MMP     

Flow cytometric evaluation of postmortem pulp DNA degradation

During postmortem autolysis, cellular organelles and nuclear DNA break down into their constituent parts. DNA flow cytometric analysis was applied to study the denaturation of splenic cell DNA as a possible method for postmortem interval determination. DNA denaturation continued for 72 hours at a constant rate, with no intact DNA peaks thereafter. The value of using dental pulp tissue for flow cytometric determination of postmortem interval was investigated. The pulps of 57 routinely removed impacted third molars from patients 15 to 30 years of age were obtained. Pulp tissue was removed at 24, 48, 72, 96, 120, and 144 hours postextraction. Debris (degraded DNA) was defined as all signals left of the standardized mean 2n peak and expressed as a percentage of the total number of signals. In contrast to the splenic cell DNA, dental pulp tissue exhibited minimal DNA degradation by 144 hours postextraction, and no constant relation was found between time and DNA degradation during this time. In this study, pulp tissue was found to be unreliable to determine the early postmortem interval but might be of greater value in the later stages.