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Summary: This article critically engages with Mol, Moser, and Pols' notion of "tinkering" care (2010) as "attentive experimentation." I explore the limits of tinkering care for United Kingdom and New Zealand military veterans who participated in British nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. Although the British state has assured the men that they were exposed to safe levels of radiation, test veterans continue to believe their ill health is service related. Over fifty years of seeking care and recognition, the test veterans have dealt with multiple state actors and medical professionals who have successively taken over responsibility for their care and their claims. Each new agent seeks novel ways to fine tune service provision, biomedical knowledge about the men's illnesses, as well as their experiences of care. All the while, they offer no final endpoint to claim making, knowledge production, care provisions, and compensation. This approach is starkly in contrast to the urgent temporality within which aging veterans seek definitive decisions, care, and recognition that reduces (rather than extends) their engagements with the state. This article thus considers the moments and circumstances when actors actively work against the unsettled, experimental qualities of care in order to feel truly cared for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New Zealand, systemic negligence claims present a particular challenge to the Crown Proceedings Act 1950, and to the law of negligence. The Act does not provide for direct liability of the Crown, leaving plaintiffs who cannot frame their claim in terms of vicarious liability without a remedy. In this article, I argue that addressing this justice gap requires more than merely legislative change because systemic negligence claims raise significant conceptual issues in the areas of justiciability, proximity and breach. However, I conclude that none of these "doctrinal hurdles" presents a complete bar to systemic negligence claims. Justiciability will generally be available for decisions not to fix fundamental flaws in established Crown systems, while claims involving a static, physical hazard are likely to succeed on the current approach to proximity. Moreover, I argue that courts should also take an active role in shaping the law in this area by adopting a "policy approach" to proximity, and by embracing Christian List and Philip Pettit's theory of group agency. While these approaches may be novel and rather ambitious, they offer a conceptually clean way forward: towards a robust doctrine of direct liability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flood management decision-makers face significant challenges as the climate changes. The perceptions of those affected by floods are critical to the successful implementation of adaptation responses; risk perceptions are affected by how information is communicated and, in turn, perceptions influence expectations on flood risk managers to respond. The links between flood experience, risk perception, and responses by individual households were examined in the Hutt Valley, New Zealand, through a household survey, a workshop and interviews with local government practitioners. Two propositions were tested: (1) that flood experience can influence flood risk perceptions; and (2) that flood experience can stimulate increased risk reduction and adaptation actions where changing climate risk is likely. Perceptions of responsibility for flood management were also examined. The study found that previous flood experience contributes to heightened perception of risk, increased preparedness of households, greater willingness to make household-level changes, greater communication with councils, and more advocacy for spatial planning to complement existing structural protection. Flood-affected households had a stronger preference for central government and communities having flood risk responsibilities, in addition to local government. Those who lacked experience were more likely to be normalised to their prior benign experiences and thus optimistic about flood consequences. These results suggest that harnessing positive aspects of experience and communication of changing risk through engagement strategies could help shift the focus from citizens' expectation that governments will always provide protection, to a citizen-local government-central government dialogue about the changing character of flood risk and its implications, and build a 'risk conscious' society in which 'sharing and bearing' is considered desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of a wider project to assess the effect of tort liability, or other settlements, on government. The hypothesis of this project is that the special nature of the government must be taken into account when examining the effect that liability or settlements might have on government, and that a particularly important part of such liability or of settlements is the information that they can generate. As the research project developed it became clear that a necessary first step in making such an evaluation was to determine how the government goes about settling claims and accounting for tort or ex gratia settlements. This article reviews and explains the basic way in which the New Zealand government accounts for liabilities and settlements and then shows how that framework was employed through a number of case studies. The author hopes that other scholars will use the material gathered as a starting point for more examination of the relationship between private law, traditional public law and the way that Government accounts for its activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1998 a 'Code of Social and Family Responsibility' was proposed by the New Zealand Coalition Government of the time. This paper will examine responsibility from a Derridean perspective, arguing that, while couched in general terms the Code was aimed primarily at welfare beneficiaries' parental responsibilities, and used to justify the possibility of programmes of surveillance and control of the poor. While the Code was subsequently scrapped, I will argue that not only did the Code's notion of responsibility lack respect for beneficiaries, it also enabled the enactment of policies, practices and strategies which have since become integral to government agencies even though there has been an election of a more left-leaning government. Central to these is the Health Funding Authority's 'Strengthening Families' programme, ostensibly aimed at helping beneficiaries achieve better outcomes for their children by helping them meet their care, control and support responsibilities. In effect this programme is an enforcement of parental responsibility-state surveillance of welfare beneficiaries beginning at the very birth of a child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]