The Next Wave: Flood Risk and Insurance in the United States

• In Event: 046 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Risk and Risk Perception

Abstract

The paper examines recent contestation over the designation and pricing of U.S. coastal flood risk in the wake of federal reform legislation, in order to identify key mechanisms through which risk gets distributed across the market, the state, and individuals and communities. Based on qualitative evidence, the paper provides an empirical account of how social actors try to establish who is at risk for flood, the appropriate price of insuring that risk, and how that price should be distributed. Building on scholarship on “risk shifts” and the welfare state, I argue that in unsettled moments of “risk shifting” like this one, actors mobilize technical, cultural, and political resources to influence the policies that would establish new distributions of financial risk and responsibility. Specifically, actors take aim at the tools and techniques of risk assessment in order to complicate the designation of being “at-risk”; articulate moral conceptions of fairness to challenge distributions of financial responsibility; and intervene in political processes to attempt to codify their visions. Given already rising sea levels, the issue of flood risk is implicated in climate change more broadly. The mechanisms through which flood risk is established and distributed may represent a frontier area in which the treatment of climate change as an economic and social problem, particularly in a vocabulary of risk, is beginning to take shape.

Author

• Rebecca Elliott, University of California-Berkeley