Governing urban resilience: Insurance and the problematization of climate change

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.