Renaturalising sovereignty 41
insurance contracts, they enable insurance actors to create catastrophe
insurance products that leverage planetary volatility into new fields of capital accumulation and state security practice (Lobo-Guerrero 2011; Grove
2012; Johnson 2013).
In this chapter, I will examine the political effects of ex-ante risk management (EARM), a relatively novel form of insurance that has become
increasingly influential in development and disaster management fields. In
general terms, and as I will detail below, EARM directly refers to a suite
of risk management and budgeting tools and techniques, which include
various risk transfer instruments such as catastrophe insurance, weather
derivatives, contingency funds, and the like. However, EARM also signals
a distinct governmental rationality, a way of understanding disaster events
as contingent financial liabilities, that seeks to transform how developing
states plan for unpredictable financial impacts of catastrophes (Grove 2021).
EARM attempts to enable states to ‘thin[k] and prepar[e] like an insurance
company’ (Clarke & Dercon 2016, p. 101). Thinking like an insurer involves
approaching disasters as events that generate contingent financial liabilities that developing states need to build financial capacity to manage independently, without the assistance of foreign aid or development lending.
In recent years, development economics have heralded EARM as a paradigm shift in disaster management and development, away from reliance
on ex-post, relief and response activities, and towards proactive, risk mitigating behaviours (Ghesquiere & Mahul 2007; Wilkinson 2012). To draw
out the political effects of this shift, I explore how EARM is recalibrating
the capacities and competencies attributed to states and donor agencies in
a volatile environment through a case study of Dominican disaster budgeting. In Dominica, the government of Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit
(the Government of the Commonwealth of Dominica, or GCD) has utilised
EARM techniques, such as catastrophe insurance, since the mid-2000s.
However, the GCD’s efforts to plan for catastrophic fiscal impacts cannot
be divorced from the repetition of plantation violence – what Sharpe (2016)
calls the plantation’s ‘wake.’ Caribbeanist scholars have demonstrated how
vulnerability in the Caribbean involves unresolvable tensions between
two parallel but interrelated dynamics: on the one hand, mechanisms and
techniques of racialised exploitation and colonial extraction that fuelled
modernisation in (formerly) colonial metropoles through the production of
underdevelopment in peripheral regions; and on the other hand, the ongoing struggle of marginalised peoples – including, at certain times and situations, local elites – to advance alternative modernisation projects (Baptiste
& Rhiney 2016; Werner 2016; Thomas 2019).
Development in the Caribbean is thus a tragic site where the modernist
promise of sovereignty, autonomy, and independence from colonial control
repeatedly runs up against the persistence of the plantation economy that
uses mechanisms of debt and structural adjustment to foreclose alternative
development pathways and lock in colonial-era dependencies (Scott 2014;
insurance contracts, they enable insurance actors to create catastrophe
insurance products that leverage planetary volatility into new fields of capital accumulation and state security practice (Lobo-Guerrero 2011; Grove
2012; Johnson 2013).
In this chapter, I will examine the political effects of ex-ante risk management (EARM), a relatively novel form of insurance that has become
increasingly influential in development and disaster management fields. In
general terms, and as I will detail below, EARM directly refers to a suite
of risk management and budgeting tools and techniques, which include
various risk transfer instruments such as catastrophe insurance, weather
derivatives, contingency funds, and the like. However, EARM also signals
a distinct governmental rationality, a way of understanding disaster events
as contingent financial liabilities, that seeks to transform how developing
states plan for unpredictable financial impacts of catastrophes (Grove 2021).
EARM attempts to enable states to ‘thin[k] and prepar[e] like an insurance
company’ (Clarke & Dercon 2016, p. 101). Thinking like an insurer involves
approaching disasters as events that generate contingent financial liabilities that developing states need to build financial capacity to manage independently, without the assistance of foreign aid or development lending.
In recent years, development economics have heralded EARM as a paradigm shift in disaster management and development, away from reliance
on ex-post, relief and response activities, and towards proactive, risk mitigating behaviours (Ghesquiere & Mahul 2007; Wilkinson 2012). To draw
out the political effects of this shift, I explore how EARM is recalibrating
the capacities and competencies attributed to states and donor agencies in
a volatile environment through a case study of Dominican disaster budgeting. In Dominica, the government of Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit
(the Government of the Commonwealth of Dominica, or GCD) has utilised
EARM techniques, such as catastrophe insurance, since the mid-2000s.
However, the GCD’s efforts to plan for catastrophic fiscal impacts cannot
be divorced from the repetition of plantation violence – what Sharpe (2016)
calls the plantation’s ‘wake.’ Caribbeanist scholars have demonstrated how
vulnerability in the Caribbean involves unresolvable tensions between
two parallel but interrelated dynamics: on the one hand, mechanisms and
techniques of racialised exploitation and colonial extraction that fuelled
modernisation in (formerly) colonial metropoles through the production of
underdevelopment in peripheral regions; and on the other hand, the ongoing struggle of marginalised peoples – including, at certain times and situations, local elites – to advance alternative modernisation projects (Baptiste
& Rhiney 2016; Werner 2016; Thomas 2019).
Development in the Caribbean is thus a tragic site where the modernist
promise of sovereignty, autonomy, and independence from colonial control
repeatedly runs up against the persistence of the plantation economy that
uses mechanisms of debt and structural adjustment to foreclose alternative
development pathways and lock in colonial-era dependencies (Scott 2014;