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- Convenors:
-
Marissa Smith
Irmelin Joelsson (University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Time
- Location:
- Examination Schools East School
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
As new forms of insurance backed by international financial institutions and development organisations are implemented throughout the world, we ask how the roles and practices of different organisations and communities, acting as international, national, and local are reinforced or redefined.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores financialisation as hedging in contexts where institutionalised insurance programs are being newly implemented or reformed. We explore how future-oriented expectations and idealisations, as well as past- and present-grounded critiques, of these programs and their effects, are involved in the way that parallel practices as well as the programs themselves thus become involved in wider politics and economics. What kinds of "risk" are articulated and assigned? What forms of "infrastructure" are assumed and assembled? What communities define, take up, redefine, and broker concepts and practices such as "investment," "asset valuation," "viability," and "catastrophe?" To the extent that these programs are directed towards reform and/or development, who and what are reforming what aspects of what kind of actors, institutions, and social forms?
With the global expansion of - whether it is state or corporate, private or financed by development aid - insurances (not the least in "developing" world) are we also experiencing an ontological shift of temporality in relation to the concept of crisis? While crisis has been perceived as a short-term episode of hardship, now hedging is often against an imminent risk. Does insurances, then, engender an altogether restructuring of individual financial behaviour against a new horizon where the proliferation of risks is a mode of state, corporate, and self-governance?
As new forms of insurance backed by international financial institutions and development organisations are implemented throughout the world, how are the roles and practices of different organisations and communities, acting as international, national, and local reinforced or redefined?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the case of index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia and its failure to materialize as an effective form of pastoral risk management. In order to understand this failure, the paper explores how insurance is utilized and understood by herders.
Paper long abstract:
From 1999 to 2001 and again in 2010 Mongolian pastoralists experienced widespread, catastrophic winter disasters called dzud in which millions of livestock perished and thousands of households abandoned a pastoral lifeway. These events are an outcome of harsh winters and a rapid shift away from state-based pastoral risk management to market and community-based forms of risk management emerging from neoliberal shock therapy policymaking across the post-socialist world. In Mongolia, this shift is best exemplified by a series of World Bank-supported initiatives that aim to financialize risk through banking products such as loans and insurance. This paper considers the case of index-based livestock insurance (IBLI), a form of catastrophic insurance inspired by and linked to weather-based derivatives and catastrophe bonds. Though this unique form of insurance was widely considered innovative by the development industry, it has failed to materialize its promises and, for some, is considered a failure in its goal of effectively managing pastoral risk. In order to understand this failure, this paper will explore how insurance is utilized on the ground and its impact on herding livelihoods. Moreover, this paper will also considered how herders understand insurance and its articulation with Mongolian notions of fate and fortune. Given the limited adoption of index insurance by herders and its failure to reach the poorest, the paper will also briefly discuss the reframing of IBLI as a kind of 'business interruption insurance'.
Paper short abstract:
Mongolian insurances (daatgal) include shamanic and Buddhist practices as well as those of privatized state agencies. Intensified by development actors' reforms figuring climate change and loss as universal risk, daatgal remains concerned with the use of state-power to ensure continued production.
Paper long abstract:
In the Mongolian cultural region, daatgal refers to a person being "entrusted" by a lama or shaman to a particular powerful nonhuman for protection from catastrophe (Balogh 2011, Hangartner 2007, Humphrey and Ujeed 2013, Pedersen 2011). Daatgal also refers to car, health, and livestock insurance sold by companies and implemented by international development agencies and financial institutions. In 2011, while I was conducting fieldwork at the Erdenet Mining Corporation, the Mongolian government mandated that all personal automobiles be insured. Though we had had many conversations about how government officials channeled money into their own and their associates' businesses, my friends and interlocutors approved of the initiative, which they argued would force irresponsible citizens who caused damage to others' property to take responsibility, a key function of state power (tur) in the Mongolian context. Statistics demonstrate that car insurance was widely purchased in the first year after the law was passed, but steeply declined afterwards. By discussing this case, as well as videos produced by the World Bank about their index-based-livestock program in the Darkhad region where I conducted fieldwork in 2016, I explain how legitimate Mongolian governments (zasgiin gazar) are not provisioners of goods per se, but rather regulators of producers and their production. In contrast to the Western development agency and financial institution-led insurance initiatives, which are framed as hedging against inevitable climatic risks, and position relations between individuals as irrelevant, Mongolian insurances are about controlling relations among and between humans and nonhumans, an ability of state-power properly wielded.
Paper short abstract:
In India, there is a growing market of life insurance targeting women, pointing to the undervalued work of "wives and mothers." This paper examines how emergent policies life insurance for women reconceptualises the value of women's domestic and reproductive labour in an era of financialization.
Paper long abstract:
Life insurance has long been marketed to income-earners—typically men—the loss of whose salary would affect the wellbeing of survivors. Thus, life insurance companies have long targeted policies to "responsible" husbands and fathers who seek to secure the future of their families. In India, however, there is a growing market of life insurance targeted toward women, including housewives. In their promotional material, insurance companies point to the undervalued work of "wives and mothers," as well as the responsibility for women to financially ensure the future of their children. This paper examines how life insurance for women reconceptualizes the value of women's domestic and reproductive labour in an era of financialization.
Drawing on promotional materials selling life insurance to women in India, personal finance advice columns, policy documents, as well as interviews with life insurance representatives, this paper argues that on the one hand, these policies render visible the gendered labour of domestic work. Thus, they actually recognise the hidden value of domestic work, which has long been noted by feminist scholars. At the same time, however, the policies embed forms of health insurance that focus on women's health in ways that concretise women's reproductive labour. It argues that the value of domestic and reproductive labour is rendered knowable through the capitalist and increasingly financialized logics of insurance and related actuarial techniques.
Paper short abstract:
This paper conceptualise the broad scope of repertoires manoeuvring economic governance through anticipation as "popular insurance", by exploring hedging strategies at play in Dar es Salaam, a city where the access to finance is highly constrained, savings are scarce; yet investment are made.
Paper long abstract:
Short after moving out of the pink house at Diamond Street in Kinondoni, a heavy flow to and fro the compound next door begun. Vitz, IST, and Ractis - the full range of Toyota's small car models - jammed the narrow street located in the central district of Dar es Salaam. The neighbours complained. Who were these young, well-dressed people suddenly shaking up this quiet corner of town?
After weeks of inquiry, I learned that the house operated under false pretence of hosting a local university branch, teaching business market management. In reality a group of young opportunistic urbanites were running a pyramid scheme, attracting members from near and far to try their luck. But as sudden as they had arrived, they left. On the dusty street, the only sign of their existence was a bunch of posters left behind; "mood board" collages depicting the member's "dream lives." Bold interiors, paper money, cars, gemstones, and giant mansions, were glued to colourful sheets of paper.
Spectacular moves of imaginary, as if images of wealth would miraculously attract real wealth without actual work performed, shows how high the stakes are, investments speculative, and the failure always lurking, in cities today.
Drawing on 17 months of fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, I will conceptualise the broad scope of repertoires manoeuvring economic governance through anticipation as "popular insurance", by exploring hedging strategies at play in a city where the access to finance is highly constrained, savings are scarce; yet investment are constantly made.