Responsibilities for Human Capabilities: Avoiding a Comprehensive Global Program

Violence, poverty, and illness are all too prevalent in our world. In order to alleviate their hold systematically, we need normative schemes with a global reach and with definite responsibilities. Martha Nussbaum’s human capabilities theory (Martha Nussbaum 2006) provides us with an insightful example. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (The United Nations 1948), however, already includes most of the human capabilities central to Nussbaum’s theory, and violence, poverty, and illness usually appear as objectionable enough without any additional reference to capabilities. In the current article, the author argues that the primary global responsibilities can mainly be established without Nussbaum’s account of capabilities. The human rights-based approach is more promising for this purpose (Jack Donnelly 2007; Abigail Gosselin, Human Rights Review 8:35–52, 2006; Ivar Kolstad, Human Rights Review, doi:, 2008). However, the author also contends that Nussbaum’s theory may be very instructive as a relatively comprehensive moral approach that supplements the human rights view and inspires its adherents to assume secondary responsibilities in addition to the primary ones. Once we learn to see Nussbaum’s agenda in this way, not as the global program, but as one of the many reasonable and relatively comprehensive views in the global background culture, we can also learn to cultivate the responsibilities it implies in a duly dialogical way.     

The Politics of Competitive Tendering: Political Orientation and Attitudes towards Contracting Out among Finnish Local Politicians

Using survey data on Finnish local politicians (n = 364) we examine the extent to which political orientation affects attitudes towards and perceptions of competitive tendering in social and health service provision. Expectation of cost benefits turns out to be the most important factor accounting for willingness to increase the usage of competitive tendering. The perceived positive impact of tendering on local democracy is also related to local politicians' readiness to implement reforms. However, political orientation does have a strong effect on politicians' perceptions. We also consider whether there are mitigating factors that could mask the relationship between political orientation and attitudes towards tendering. We identify one such factor, municipal employment: public-sector employees form a kind of informal ‘interest group’ resisting public-sector reforms in municipal decision making. In general, our results suggest that macro-level studies on competitive tendering underestimate the effects of political ideology on local decision making.     

Book reviews

The paper discusses two well-organized Nordic gender conferences—one in Bergen and one in Gothenburg—which, however, were remarkably different in character. While the local Norwegian conference opened windows to the world outside the Global North, the windows were kept only ajar at the national Swedish meeting.     

A New Fundamental Freedom beyond Market Integration: Union Citizenship and its Dynamics for Shifting the Economic Paradigm of European Integration

The development of European integration from an economic to a political community has become manifest not just in the continuous addition of non‐economic policy areas to the treaties. The introduction of Union citizenship (and its controversial subsequent development in the European Court of Justice's jurisprudence) has also triggered a paradigm shift in one of the community's core areas, the concept of negative integration hitherto intrinsically linked to the internal market. Thus, neither the individual's quality as a market actor nor his/her involvement in a transnational economic activity is a condition for enjoyment of the market freedoms' core guarantees, these being a right of residence and a far‐reaching claim to national treatment in other Member States, as well as a prohibition on restrictions to the free movement of persons. A new fundamental freedom beyond market integration (‘Grundfreiheit ohne Markt’) has emerged. This process, whose consequences for the welfare systems of the wealthier Member States have been fiercely discussed for some time, however, also threatens to curtail severely the regulatory autonomy at the national level.     

Explaining global governance—a complexity perspective

As patterns of global governance have undergone significant changes over time, there is a need for new theoretical concepts that are less oriented towards formal hierarchies and give more emphasis to social processes. A framework, however, that takes account of complex interactions and tangling relations bears the danger of losing analytical power. The article addresses the question of the extent to which complexity theory can overcome this problem by combining scientific rigour with contextual sensitivity. A dynamic mechanistic approach is explored that addresses the underlying processes that generate new collective patterns based on changed actor constellations and relational orders. An activator–inhibitor interaction model is introduced as a framework for analysing the multi-level processes that drive international change, using the example of climate protection. Global governance is theorized as it grows within the system fleshing out a new logic of collective action based on decentralization and clustering.