Enhancing Capabilities

The volume suggests a capability perspective for evaluating welfare and educational policies. Capabilities are conceptualized as people’s freedom to choose and conduct a life they have reason to value. The contributions of this volume analyze what social institutions – in particular in the field of education and welfare – may provide in order to enhance capabilities in particular for most vulnerable people.

In 2002 the International Labour Organization issued a report titled ‘Decent work and the informal economy’ in which it stressed the need to ensure appropriate employment and income, rights at work, and effective social protection in informal economic activities. Such a call by the ILO is urgent in the context of countries such as India, where the majority of workers are engaged in informal economic activities, and where expansion of informal economic activities is coupled with deteriorating working conditions and living standards. This book explores the informal economic activity of India as a case study to examine typical requirements in the work-lives of informal workers, and to develop a means to institutionalise the promotion of these requirements through labour law. Drawing upon Amartya Sen’s theoretical outlook, the book considers whether a capability approach to human development may be able to promote recognition and work-life conditions of a specific category of informal workers in India by integrating specific informal workers within a social dialogue framework along with a range of other social partners including state and non-state institutions. While examining the viability of a human development based labour law in an Indian context, the book also indicates how the proposals put forth in the book may be relevant for informal workers in other developing countries. This research monograph will be of great interest to scholars of labour law, informal work and workers, law and development, social justice, and labour studies.

Science for Peace and Security (SPS) cooperation brings together NATO & partners to address common security concerns reflected in the so-called SPS Key Priorities. These include emerging security challenges such as terrorism, cyber defense or energy security, as well as human and social aspects of security, support to NATO-led mission and operation, advanced technologies with security applications, and early warning. The SPS project “Advanced Civil Emergency Coordination Pilot in the Western Balkans” addresses several of these areas. As a key regional SPS flagship project, it helps to build capacity in response to a concrete security challenge. The Western Balkans is a region frequently affected by natural disasters and the pilot project provides emergency responders in the region with an incident command system that allows sharing information about disasters in a fast and easy way, enhancing situational awareness and building capacity in the area of civil emergency coordination.

Enhancing Human Capacities is the first to review the very latest scientific developments in human enhancement. It is unique in its examination of the ethical and policy implications of these technologies from a broad range of perspectives. Presents a rich range of perspectives on enhancement from world leading ethicists and scientists from Europe and North America The most comprehensive volume yet on the science and ethics of human enhancement Unique in providing a detailed overview of current and expected scientific advances in this area Discusses both general conceptual and ethical issues and concrete questions of policy Includes sections covering all major forms of enhancement: cognitive, affective, physical, and life extension

This book provides a systematic review of the variables and mechanisms that underpin resilience and growth in professions who face a high risk of regular and repetitive exposure to adverse or hazardous events. Given the inevitability of this exposure, promoting the acceptance and practice of this paradigm is essential for facilitating the capability of emergency responders to adapt to, and if possible to grow from, adverse and hazardous experience. By identifying salient dispositional, cognitive, group, organizational, and environmental predictors of resilience and articulating the mechanisms that link them to adaptive and growth outcomes, emergency organizations will have the capacity to intervene prior to exposure to adverse events, rather than waiting until after the event, as is currently the norm. This book thus adopts an approach that is fundamentally preventative in nature and offers practical suggestions to support the development of resilient capabilities. By describing influences on this capability that cover the person, the organization, and factors external to the workplace, it offers a more ecologically comprehensive approach to those working in this area. In addition, it offers a more comprehensive framework for this work by drawing on constructs (e.g. trust, empowerment) that would ordinarily lie outside mainstream traumatic stress research. The contents of this book provide a theoretically and empirically rigorous knowledge base and intervention framework capable of mitigating negative reactions, facilitating adaptation in the face of adversity, and enhancing the likelihood that adverse and traumatic work experiences will enrich the personal and professional lives of those who dedicate themselves to protecting and safeguarding others. It will be of interest to emergency worker counselors, police counselors, disaster workers, mental health professionals, and individuals that work with people exposed to trauma.

The present Maharashtra Human Development Report (MHDR) 2012 keeps the spirit of the Eleventh and Twelfth Five Year Plans of ‘faster, sustainable and more inclusive growth’ at the core of its analysis. MHDR 2002 was the state’s first effort in focusing on the prevailing human development scenario in the spheres of growth, poverty, equity, education, health and nutrition. Since then the state has come a long way in the last decade, achieving near-complete enrolments at the primary school level, a wide coverage of health infrastructure and initiation of new incentives, to name a few. The 2012 Report goes beyond being just a situation-analysis of the current human development scenario to a more analytical exercise in facilitating a deeper understanding of what and where the inequalities are, how capabilities can be enhanced, what has been the progress, where the shortfalls are and where the thrust of efforts to promote human development should be. Recognizing the centrality of inclusive growth processes to human development, the need to study human development outcomes disaggregated by gender, rural–urban, regional and social groups is the focal point of this Report. The outcome would be the identification of specific human development goals, evidence-based policy recommendations and directions to how those excluded from the growth and human development processes can be included to reap the benefits of the same.

Forty years ago Amartya Sen introduced to the world a novel approach to the idea of equality: the notion of 'basic capability' as 'a morally relevant dimension' and the claim that we should focus upon equality of basic capabilities ('a person being able to do certain basic things'). These ideas, as developed by Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum, have launched an academic armada now proceeding under the flag of the 'capability approach' (CA). While that flag has ventured far and wide and engaged many areas of inquiry, this volume of essays is the first to explore how CA might shed light upon labour law. The capabilities approach can illuminate our understanding of labour law across three dimensions. Part I looks at the nature of the basic relationship between CA and labour law-do they share common ground or disagree about what is important? Can the CA provide a normative 'foundation' for labour law? Part II goes further by examining the relationship of the CA and other well-established perspectives on labour law, including economics, history, critical theory, restorative justice, and human rights. Part III examines the possible relevance of the CA to a range of specific labour law issues, such as freedom of association, age discrimination in the workplace, trade, employment policy, and sweatshop goods.