Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Insurance and the problem of loss in a climate-changed United States -- Transforming the management of loss : the origins of the National Flood Insurance Program -- Losing ground : values at risk in an American floodplain -- Visions of loss : knowing and pricing flood risk -- Shifting responsibilities for loss : national reform of flood insurance -- Floodplain futures : trajectories of loss -- Conclusion: What do we have to lose?

Abstract
States not only govern markets, but they also create them, often with the intention of expanding or improving the delivery of specific policy objectives. This article outlines one way they do this: prefiguration. States prefigure markets, and private market actors, when they imagine and instantiate new market products, logics, and practices. I illustrate prefiguration through an analysis of the history of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the federal program that underwrites flood insurance in the United States. From the time of the NFIP's establishment, policymakers and officials have fashioned and continuously reformed a public program, and an insurance product, in ways that emulate an imagined primary private flood insurer. In doing so, though, they have gradually established the conditions under which private flood insurers can do business. This article contributes to scholarship on state 'marketcraft'. Whereas many scholars have addressed why governments turn to markets in the first place, and the consequences of doing so, this article offers a closer examination of what takes place in between: the specific activities that governments undertake as they pursue market creation.

AbstractThis essay explores the theorization of moral valuation outlined in Stefan Bargheer's Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany when extended to the climate crisis. It considers, first, how 'nature' is valued when it confronts people and societies as a source of threat, rather than of recreation or resources. Second, the essay critically examines the role of moral discourse in the collective work of addressing climate change and its relationship to practice.

How is knowledge about future climate change operationalized in governance of the present? This paper addresses this question by examining efforts to repurpose the US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for climate change adaptation. Policymakers and officials initially imagined the challenge to be principally a technical one of accounting for uncertainty in risk assessments and insurance tools. But the conduct and outcome of their efforts reflected instead politically charged normative tensions related to the temporality of climate ethics. NFIP policyholders, constituted as a 'risk public' by the instruments of flood insurance, exposed these tensions in mobilizations targeting practices of risk governance. The case shows that practices of 'accounting for' climate change and governing it through insurance work out—in however tentative or provisional a fashion—larger moralized disputes over the distribution of burdens, benefits and responsibilities over time.

In preparing for and responding to natural hazards and disasters, the welfare state establishes a social contract, distributing responsibilities for what will be collectively managed and what will be individually borne. Drawing on archival, interview, and ethnographic data, this article examines the renegotiation of that social contract through the lens of contested efforts to reform the massively indebted US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) from 2011 to 2014. In the face of a morally charged debate about deservingness and individual choice, Congress passed legislation that committed to incorporating need-based considerations to the NFIP for the first time. The result defined "deservingness" in terms of ability to pay for risk exposure, qualifying an individualization of responsibility for addressing the problem of flood loss—a problem that might instead demand broader risk sharing, particularly as climate change worsens the threat of flooding.

Is climate change insurable? Can insurance, as a technology of risk and governance, organize an adequate social and economic response to the complexity and scale of this modern, global risk? The dissertation assesses the insurability of climate change risks through the lens of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the public insurance program that underwrites virtually all flood insurance for homes and small businesses in the U.S. The NFIP is under intense financial strain, struggling to pay claims from recent flooding events and $23 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Federal reforms to the NFIP in 2012 and 2014 revisited the question of financial responsibility for flood risk, bringing renewed scrutiny to risk classification, pricing, and distribution in the NFIP, and how these insurance processes should change with the expectation of rising sea levels and stronger storms. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, the dissertation traces these processes: the political contestation that shaped them and their social effects. I find that these processes serve as channels through which this particular climate change burden, of more frequent and severe flooding, is individualized. Specifically, updated official risk classifications, combined with changes to the calculation of insurance premiums, shifted more financial responsibility to individual policyholders, who had to find ways to mitigate the risk and its cost in the short term, and grapple with the price of flood risk as a "signal" of climate change in the long term. The dissertation uncovers the social and political challenges of using insurance to manage the risks associated with climate change, of using old programs to meet new threats.Much of the scholarly debate on the insurability of climate change has emphasized technical and epistemological problems related to risk knowledge. Based on the case of the NFIP, I argue instead that distinct and significant limits to insurability derive from contentious risk politics and the social uncertainties that enhanced risk assessments generate. I develop this argument with chapters on risk classification, about establishing boundaries, physical, social, and symbolic, that set categories of risk; on pricing, the use of practices and tools to calculate the cost of risk; and on distribution, the social and spatial allocation of risk and responsibility. Preceding these chapters, a historical chapter traces the origins of the NFIP, how it governs flood risk, and how it arrived at its crisis point. In addition to intervening in the insurability debate, Underwater also seeks to break new ground in the sociology of climate change. Sociologists have shown that the natural disasters—floods, storms, wildfires, heat waves, and so forth—we connect to climate change have fundamentally social sources, and the threats now facing individuals and communities intersect with social differences, such as gender, race/ethnicity, class, and age. However, it is not simply the social production and distribution of hazards themselves that are sociologically important. It is also the representation of those hazards as risk, their economization, and how they are used to govern societies and shape behavior. In other words, we can build our sociological understandings of climate change not solely from investigating the social production and effects of floods, but also from examining the policies and programs that govern them. These policies and programs both shape how our society adapts to the physical, economic, and political pressures of climate change and structure how individuals experience these pressures in their daily lives.

"Communities around the United States face the threat of being underwater. This is not only a matter of rising waters reaching the doorstep. It is also the threat of being financially underwater, owning assets worth less than the money borrowed to obtain them. Many areas around the country may become economically uninhabitable before they become physically unlivable. In Underwater, Rebecca Elliott explores how families, communities, and governments confront problems of loss as the climate changes. She offers the first in-depth account of the politics and social effects of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which provides flood insurance protection for virtually all homes and small businesses that require it. In doing so, the NFIP turns the risk of flooding into an immediate economic reality, shaping who lives on the waterfront, on what terms, and at what cost. Drawing on archival, interview, ethnographic, and other documentary data, Elliott follows controversies over the NFIP from its establishment in the 1960s to the present, from local backlash over flood maps to Congressional debates over insurance reform. Though flood insurance is often portrayed as a rational solution for managing risk, it has ignited recurring fights over what is fair and valuable, what needs protecting and what should be let go, who deserves assistance and on what terms, and whose expectations of future losses are used to govern the present. An incisive and comprehensive consideration of the fundamental dilemmas of moral economy underlying insurance, Underwater sheds new light on how Americans cope with loss as the water rises"--

This special collection examines insurance as an increasingly central mechanism in shaping how the effects of climate change are transforming local economies and ways of life. The papers study a range of exemplary cases, ranging from agricultural micro-insurance in development policy and regional sovereign risk facilities in the Caribbean to public and private insurance in the United States. This framing essay situates these papers in a longer tradition of scholarship on the government of risk and security. It also describes three themes that run through the papers: the economization of climate change; the moral economy of risk and responsibility; and the plasticity of insurance as an abstract technology that may be taken up in various governmental assemblages, in the name of various political projects.

Current research on flooding risk often focuses on understanding hazards, de-emphasizing the complex pathways of exposure and vulnerability. We investigated the use of both hydrologic and social demographic data for flood exposure mapping with Random Forest (RF) regression and classification algorithms trained to predict both parcel- and tract-level flood insurance claims within New York State, US. Topographic characteristics best described flood claim frequency, but RF prediction skill was improved at both spatial scales when socioeconomic data was incorporated. Substantial improvements occurred at the tract-level when the percentage of minority residents, housing stock value and age, and the political dissimilarity index of voting precincts were used to predict insurance claims. Census tracts with higher numbers of claims and greater densities of low-lying tax parcels tended to have low proportions of minority residents, newer houses, and less political similarity to state level government. We compared this data-driven approach and a physically-based pluvial flood routing model for prediction of the spatial extents of flooding claims in two nearby catchments of differing land use. The floodplain we defined with physically based modeling agreed well with existing federal flood insurance rate maps, but underestimated the spatial extents of historical claim generating areas. In contrast, RF classification incorporating hydrologic and socioeconomic demographic data likely overestimated the flood-exposed areas. Our research indicates that quantitative incorporation of social data can improve flooding exposure estimates.

Current research on flooding risk often focuses on understanding hazards, de-emphasizing the complex pathways of exposure and vulnerability. We investigated the use of both hydrologic and social demographic data for flood exposure mapping with Random Forest (RF) regression and classification algorithms trained to predict both parcel- and tract-level flood insurance claims within New York State, US. Topographic characteristics best described flood claim frequency, but RF prediction skill was improved at both spatial scales when socioeconomic data was incorporated. Substantial improvements occurred at the tract-level when the percentage of minority residents, housing stock value and age, and the political dissimilarity index of voting precincts were used to predict insurance claims. Census tracts with higher numbers of claims and greater densities of low-lying tax parcels tended to have low proportions of minority residents, newer houses, and less political similarity to state level government. We compared this data-driven approach and a physically-based pluvial flood routing model for prediction of the spatial extents of flooding claims in two nearby catchments of differing land use. The floodplain we defined with physically based modeling agreed well with existing federal flood insurance rate maps, but underestimated the spatial extents of historical claim generating areas. In contrast, RF classification incorporating hydrologic and socioeconomic demographic data likely overestimated the flood-exposed areas. Our research indicates that quantitative incorporation of social data can improve flooding exposure estimates.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Introducing Critical Disaster Studies -- Part I. Knowing Disaster -- 1. The Voyage of the Paragon: Disaster as Method -- 2. Acts of God, Man, and System: Knowledge, Technology, and the Construction of Disaster -- 3. When Does a Crisis Begin? Race, Gender, and the Subprime Noncrisis of the Late 1990s -- Part II. Governing Disaster -- 4. Concrete Kleptocracy and Haiti's Culture of Building: Toward a New Temporality of Disaster -- 5. Risk Technopolitics in Freetown Slums: Why Community- Based Disaster Management Is No Silver Bullet -- 6. Spaces at Risk: Urban Politics and Slum Relocation in Chennai, India -- 7. Plan B: The Collapse of Public- Private Risk Sharing in the US National Flood Insurance Program -- Part III. Imagining Disaster -- 8. Mediating Disaster, or A History of the Novel -- 9. The Tōkai Earthquake and Changing Lexicons of Risk -- 10. Translating Disaster Knowledge from Japan to Chile: A Proposal for Incompleteness -- Afterword -- "Acts of Men": Disasters Neglected, Preventable, and Moral -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgments