Governing urban resilience: Insurance and the problematization of climate change

Abstract

This paper examines the growing importance of private insurance in urban resilience, drawing on research in three US cities that are bellwethers of climate adaptation: New Orleans, New York and Greater Miami. A number of scholars have suggested that insurance shifts the management of climate risks from governments to private actors and places the burden of risk on the shoulders of individuals. Drawing on and extending Michel Callon’s work on the problematization of climate change, we suggest that such analyses overlook a significant dimension of the insurance industry’s role in urban resilience. Namely, the tools and techniques of insurance are increasingly central to the constitution of climate change as a public problem that can be addressed by collective decision-making institutions.

Keywords:

• insurance
• climate change
• resilience
• risk society
• problematization

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the comments on prior drafts made by Kevin Grove, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Rebecca Elliott, Sarah Vaughn and two anonymous readers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Greater Miami includes the City of Miami, the City of Miami Beach and other municipalities in Miami-Dade County.

2 In the US context, the term ‘state’ is not generally used to refer to the organizations engaged in the exercise of political sovereignty, which are more commonly referred to as ‘government’. Instead, ‘state’ refers to a particular territorial scale in the US federal system. We use ‘governing’ or ‘technologies of governing’ to refer to the functions analyzed in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality – which operate both through and outside the state – and limit use of the substantive ‘government’ to the actual institutions of public administration, whether these are territorial-administrative entities or public authorities, like a power or water utility.

3 This concern with the breakdowns and unintended consequences of government measures to manage catastrophe risk parallels a broader tendency described by Baker and Simon (2002, p. 4) in their analysis of ‘embracing risk’.

4 On this point, our account is in tension with scholars who associate the increasing prominence of insurance with a broad turn to market-based forms of adaptation, and consistent with the account of Baker and Simon (2002) who also argue that recent changes in risk governance cannot be understood simply as a matter of ‘more market, less state’. See Section IV of this paper.

5 Problematization might include the calling-into-question of existing practices and understandings (e.g. Bridge et al., 2020). But Callon’s (2009, p. 544) emphasis is elsewhere: on the ways that undefined issues are made ‘manipulable and manageable’. Although pitched at a different register, this emphasis in Callon is resonant with Foucault’s definition of problematization as ‘the ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)’ (quoted in Rabinow, 2003, p. 18; see also Koopman, 2013).

6 The task of linking Callon’s analysis to government and politics was taken up by a number of other authors (e.g., Barry, 2002; Marres, 2007; Mitchell, 2008). On this point see Barry (2021).

7 Callon et al.’s (2009) Acting in an uncertain world, published in the same year as the essay on carbon markets, indicates a more general concern with the governmental and the political.

8 In this sense it provides useful tools to address a tendency in some studies of ‘governmentality’ to treat governing as a kind of impersonal and agent-less process, and to portray history in terms of a succession of forms of ‘governmental rationality’ rather than in terms of contingent, situated processes (see Collier, 2009).

9 Covariation refers to situations in which many policies in an insurer’s portfolio are exposed to a single event.

10 For a description of catastrophe bonds, see Bougen (2003) and Johnson (2015).

11 Yields are beginning to decline as the MTA undertakes vulnerability reduction initiatives (Artemis, 2017).

12 Homeowners with federally insured mortgages must carry flood insurance, though compliance rates are low.

13 This is not true in all cases – some officials have sought to defend existing subsidies that benefit their constituents (see Elliott, 2021).

14 Our claim is not that our findings point to a better definition of resilience. Rather, we follow Anderson (2015) and Grove (2018), among others, who suggest that resilience has no inherent ontology or politics but may take diverse forms and be mobilized in various political projects.

15 Our case stands in contrast to Lucas and Booth’s (2020) account of Australia, where catastrophe insurance is dominated by private providers. Lucas and Booth report that government ‘solutions’ are now being considered in Australia in light of persistent market failure, a development we might expect given Beck’s (1992) theoretical analysis and our empirical account of the US case. Indeed, we would anticipate that the future of Australian catastrophe insurance will look more like the US case, rather than the other way around.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen J. Collier

Stephen Collier is a Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California. His recent work has examined the genealogy and contemporary forms of emergency government in the United States.

Savannah Cox

Savannah Cox is a PhD candidate in City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley. She studies how changing market practices on climate risk are shaping adaptation pathways and politics in Greater Miami, Florida.