Thinking about Homelessness: An Analytical Framework
This work undertakes a comparative institutional analysis of different policy options to address homelessness in Auckland. This allows the report to focus on the ways in which institutional arrangements affect the delivery of strategies to end homelessness. Aspects of arrangements elsewhere are reviewed in order to determine whether they offer insight into how to improve the relationships between key actors attending to the problem of homelessness. Analysing policy options involves first considering rates of homelessness and how policies conceive of the needs of the homeless. From here, their institutional arrangements will be examined.
Nussbaum’s capabilities
To analyse how policy could better achieve a minimum standard of living for all New Zealanders, Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to social justice will be used.[1] Some level of each of Nussbaum’s list of capabilities must then be satisfied in order to provide a minimum standard of welfare for all. This theory helps provide a background to the policy principles and objectives that homeless policy should contain. Respect for human dignity is considered in this work due to its relationship to the key government objective of promoting social equality and human flourishing.[2] Human dignity is derived from being able to fulfil one’s goals in life, and is something of an intuitive ends for a theory of justice.[3] Ten capabilities are given: living to the end of a normal human life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; the emotional capability to form attachments, love and care; practical reason; affiliation in terms of both being able to live alongside others, and having the social bases of self-respect; being able to appreciate the existence of other species; play; and political and material control over one’s environment.[4] Capabilities then create a minimum standard of living for all in Auckland, and work towards a key government goal of promoting human flourishing.[5]
[1] Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice : Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, 76-77.
[2] Michael Mintrom, Contemporary Policy Analysis (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 47, 54.
[3] Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice : Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, 70.
[4] Ibid., 76-77.
[5] Michael Mintrom, Contemporary Policy Analysis (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47-48.