Health beyond medicine. A planetary theory extension.

In Niklas Luhmann's vision of the modern functionally differentiated society, health presents one of the essential function systems, along with politics, law, economy and science. While he devoted much effort to elaborating the theoretical foundations of the latter function systems, his work on the health system was relatively sparse. This research gap has been rendered particularly acute by the recent COVID-19 crisis. In reconstructing and updating the Luhmannian analysis of this system, this article presents a three-dimensional concept of organic, psychic and social health and highlights the risks raised by a potential overexpansion of the health concept to the planetary level. The most important of these risks is shown to be the potential rise of totalitarian social control that exceeds classical forms of medical social control. The proposed argument not only contributes to the public criticism of the political responses to the COVID-19 crisis but also fills in some missing pieces of Luhmann's seminal elaboration of the health system.

The hybridity of waste management: An in-depth exploratory case study from the Znojmo municipality.

In the Western hemisphere, the hybridity of public service delivery is widely acknowledged to generate governance challenges arising from the mutual contestation of the competing institutional logics, such as those of the public and the private for-profit sector. The present paper explores these challenges by means of an in-depth qualitative case study of the waste management service delivery in the municipality of Znojmo, Czech Republic. Encompassing structured interviews of stakeholders and desk research, the case study was aimed at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of waste management hybridity, as well as the impact of hybridity on the relationship between innovativeness and accountability. The overall finding is that the engagement of the private for-profit sector does make this service delivery more innovative, but the useful impact of innovativeness is maximized through a hybrid arrangement. The key benefit of the hybrid arrangement is the stable intersectoral partnership allowing comprehensive control of the waste management service delivery. This benefit possibly rests on the accountability of the hybrid arrangement running on political rather than purely economic lines. Another finding was that the profit maximizing imperative was felt to constrain potential innovation, an outcome that could be prevented by the engagement of the municipality. At the same time, the hybrid mode of waste management service delivery in Znojmo is by no means free of governance challenges, such as the occasional lack of transparency and communication difficulties and disagreements among stakeholders.

East of nature. Accounting for the environments of social sciences.

At the core of ecological economics is the image of the economy as an open system embedded in the natural environment whose carrying capacity is limited. The present paper revisits this image by drawing upon the constructivist implications of Luhmann's social systems theory. To Luhmann, the modern society consists of a multitude of social systems each bringing forth and observing their own environments. If the Luhmannian vision is accepted, then ecological economics can be said to privilege the observational perspective of natural sciences. The unfortunate consequence of this privileging is the underestimation of a broad range of multidimensional sustainability risks which are foregrounded by the numerous alternative observational perspectives which are just as legitimate. It is argued that, rather than relativizing the sustainability concerns of the modern ecological economics, the Luhmannian perspective generalizes and radicalizes them. In doing so, the latter perspective opens new possibilities not only for navigating these risks but also for envisioning new resources and solutions.

Rationalizing the GMO Debate: The Ordonomic Approach to Addressing Agricultural Myths.

The public discourse on the acceptability of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is not only controversial, but also infused with highly emotional and moralizing rhetoric. Although the assessment of risks and benefits of GMOs must be a scientific exercise, many debates on this issue seem to remain impervious to scientific evidence. In many cases, the moral psychology attributes of the general public create incentives for both GMO opponents and proponents to pursue misleading public campaigns, which impede the comprehensive assessment of the full spectrum of the risks and benefits of GMOs. The ordonomic approach to economic ethics introduced in this research note is helpful for disentangling the socio-economic and moral components of the GMO debate by re- and deconstructing moral claims.