Siobhan O’Sullivan

Animal ethics and the political

Some of the most important contributions to animal ethics over the past decade or so have come from political, as opposed to moral, philosophers. As such, some have argued that there been a ‘political turn’ in the field. If there has been such a turn, it needs to be shown that there is something which unites these contributions, and which sets them apart from previous work. We find that some of the features which have been claimed to be shared commitments of the turn are contested by key theorists working in the field. We also find that the originality of the turn can be exaggerated, with many of their ideas found in more traditional animal ethics. Nonetheless, we identify one unifying and distinctive feature of these contributions: the focus on justice; and specifically, the exploration of how political institutions, structures and processes might be transformed so as to secure justice for both human and nonhuman animals.

New public management and the rule of economic incentives: Australian welfare-to-work from job market signalling perspective

ABSTRACT Australia’s welfare-to-work system has undergone radical changes since the 1990s, with service delivery fully privatized in 2003 and incentives of various kinds introduced to underpin jobseeker and employment consultant activation. Informed by New Public Management (NPM), the reforms are intended to improve effectiveness and efficiency by addressing the problems of information asymmetry at different levels of the system. However, operationalizing NPM principles generated technical and regulatory challenges, and in this case, the incentive framework undermines some of the reform’s basic assumptions. This can trigger jobseekers’ and consultants’ rational decision-making behaviours which run contrary to programme expectations, hence generating suboptimal performance.

Governance, public policy and boundary-making

ABSTRACT This symposium draws attention to innovative and emerging research in Australian public policy exploring the interplay of governance, public policy and boundary-making. Conceptually and substantively, boundaries are fundamental to understanding policy outcomes, yet remain overlooked and undertheorised. We aim to contribute to public policy debates, in Australia and beyond, by provoking further reflection on this theme, in particular, the distributive effects of boundaries in policy-making; the blurring of boundaries implicit to governance frameworks; the crossing of boundaries, especially by policy-officials within and between institutions; the construction of boundaries to separate and marginalise; and the existence of temporal–spatial boundaries that demarcate jurisdiction and authority. In short, the study of governance and public policy-making is marked by multiple different types of boundaries but the way in which boundaries get drawn and redrawn is also suffuse with political contestation meaning they raise crucial questions about the exercise of power.

From the interpersonal to the internet: social service digitisation and the implications for vulnerable individuals and communities

ABSTRACT In Australia, e-government is continuously re-defining service boundaries. While this may be good in the case of transactional interactions, for example the online submission of tax returns, it is less clear that interpersonal services, such as working closely with the long-term unemployed, are best delivered digitally. We consider the impact of social services digitisation on vulnerable communities drawing on an analysis of remote Aboriginal communities. Digital uptake affords great opportunities, but it also carries risks. Some communities have no digital infrastructure and in certain cases traditional face-to-face services have been curtailed, leaving those not online with reduced assistance. We find that concerns about the ‘digital divide’ are well founded. Problems generated by e-government flow across boundaries and appear left to the third sector to resolve with the state playing an even more diminished role in the lives of disadvantaged citizens.

Welfare-to-work: experience in the emerging Vietnamese welfare state

The redevelopment of the welfare regimes of former socialist states since the terminal crisis of state socialism in the early 1980s is an emerging field of scholarship. This article contributes to this work by investigating welfare-to-work in a less-studied case, contemporary Vietnam. The research indicates that Vietnam’s newly emerged employment assistance framework represents a blend of certain aspects of the Bismarckian welfare type with earnings-related contributory social insurance measures and the Beveridge-type of flat-rate tax-financed social protection. It is also a little more liberal than the regimes of capitalist welfare states by adopting a so-called “socialisation” approach to fight unemployment. Unlike European, American and some north Asian experience, there are no signs of contracting-out of service delivery informed by new public management principles. Its funding model sits somewhere between a public employment services (PES) system and a private recruitment agency-based system. It is a hybrid model, wherein public offices deliver government-funded assistance but also receive outcome fee payments from employers. It motivates jobseekers to work, thus lowering the unemployment rate. However, its actual implementation is challenged by significant administrative problems, including a considerable amount of red tape.

The Animals & Society Institute Fellowship: Catalyzing Work in Human-Animal Studies

The Animals & Society Institute (ASI) launched its Human-Animal Studies Fellowship program in 2007. The aim of the Fellowship is to support research pertaining to relationships between humans and other animals, thereby helping to establish Human-Animal Studies (HAS)2 as a robust academic field. ASI’s leadership appreciated that a program that created a network and brought researchers together for a short time would be an important tool for building capacity in HAS, an emerging transdisciplinary research area, composed of geographically disparate scholars (many of whom are early in their careers). The inaugural 2007 Fellowship took place in Raleigh, NC, at North Carolina State University (NCSU), which had the added benefit of being the home of Professor Tom Regan (who actively participated and supported the Fellows throughout their time there) and his archive at the NCSU library. Subsequently, the ASI fellowship program moved around the United States, supported by HAS scholars at Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI), Duke University (Durham, NC), and Clark University (Worcester, MA), before establishing a home in 2011 at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT).

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The words above were spoken in 1809 by Lord Erskine, on the floor of the British Parliament. He went on to describe how he purchased the horse in order to ensure the animal was put out of his misery. Erskine was trying to persuade his Westminster colleagues to enact the modern world’s first animal welfare statute. He was able to address Parliament with great passion on the topic of animal suffering because he, like his contemporaries, was regularly and consistently in direct contact with the types of animals the Bill was designed to protect. In contrast, as we have seen, in the early twenty-first century very few people are in direct contact with the subjects of animal protection statutes, and few of us ever bear witness to their suffering. In this chapter I want to understand whether that lack of visibility has an impact on how we create laws that govern the lives of animals.

The Politics of Being a Nonhuman Animal

The epigraph to this chapter is taken from the history of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the United Kingdom. It serves as a reminder of the insidious position many animals occupy. They are a central part of our economic system and work hard on our behalf. Yet they have no capacity to utilise political processes in order to defend their interests. Yes, a glorious change would result if animals were able to take industrial action.

What’s Good for the Goose Should Also be Good for the Gander

In 1892 Henry Salt had little doubt that the emerging modern political state had the capacity to strongly protect the interests of animals, so long as the ‘humanitarians’ had the last laugh. I share his optimism. I am highly suspicious of claims that liberalism is an inherently anti-animal framework or that we must look to an entirely new political paradigm to comprehensively protect the interests of animals. Robert Garner may be correct when he claims that the moral orthodoxy places a higher value on toleration of individual moral choice than on the wellbeing of animals, and as such liberal theorists have traditionally denied that the types of strong liberal democratic principles used to protect humans from harm can be applied to animals.2 But such refusals by orthodox liberal theorists tell us nothing about liberalism per se. They simply tell us how some people have chosen to interpret liberalism at certain points in time. They reveal much more about a particular theorist’s personal bias than they do about liberalism as a political framework. Liberal principles have been successfully deployed for the benefit of so many marginal others; others with whom the ruling class did not wish to share the trappings of power. The persistent ability, on the part of advocates for change, to use the pre-existing tools in the liberal toolbox for the benefit of marginal others gives me great hope that liberalism can be deployed in defence of nonhuman animals.