Geopolitics

ISSN: 1465-0045 (Print) 1557-3028 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fgeo20

Insuring “Our Common Future?” Dangerous

Climate Change and the Biopolitics of
Environmental Security

Kevin J. Grove

To cite this article: Kevin J. Grove (2010) Insuring “Our Common Future?” Dangerous
Climate Change and the Biopolitics of Environmental Security, Geopolitics, 15:3, 536-563, DOI:
10.1080/14650040903501070

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040903501070

Published online: 25 Aug 2010.

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Geopolitics, 15:536–563, 2010
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650040903501070

Insuring “Our Common Future?” Dangerous

Climate Change and the Biopolitics
of Environmental Security

KEVIN J. GROVE
Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Dire warnings on the “dangers” of climate change are reinvig-

orating past debates over environmental security. However, one
strain of this debate is exceeding the state-based logics of security
found in more conventional environmental security approaches.
The UNFCCC’s goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change” that,
inter alia, threatens sustainable development has inspired vol-
umes of research on climate change mitigation and adaptation,
and has increasingly become incorporated into World Bank and
UN development programmes. However, much of this research
has yet to examine the cultural and political effects of framing
climate change through the loaded language of security. As a
result, there has been little critical analysis of the emergence of a
variety of disaster risk management and insurance-based adap-
tation strategies that attempt to offer security against the effects
of dangerous climate change. This article articulates the insights
of critical environmental security studies with recent research on
biopolitical security and post-structural critiques of development to
unpack the biopolitical and geopolitical assumptions that animate
discourses on dangerous climate change and disasters. My argu-
ment here is twofold. First, I suggest that risk management and
catastrophe insurance have political effects: these biopolitical tech-
nologies sustain the global social and political order that the history
of Western-led “development” has produced. Second, along these
lines, dangerous climate change discourses extend the project of
earlier environmental security discourses, specifically, the attempt
to secure Western ways of life against the effects of environmen-
tal change. In securing “sustainable development,” discourses on

Address correspondence to Kevin J. Grove, Department of Geography, The Ohio State

University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. E-mail: grove.80@osu.edu

536
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 537

dangerous climate change combine biopolitical technologies of risk

management with geopolitical technologies of security to sustain
the exclusion and containment of underdeveloped populations,
and the mobility of the global elite, that characterise contemporary
practices of development.

Throughout the 1990s, doomsday accounts of environmental degradation as

a security threat captivated audiences both lay and professional with night-
mare scenarios of environmentally induced conflict and migration from the
global South to the global North.1 The events of 11 September 2001 pushed
these concerns off the security map. However, there has since been a resur-
gence of interest in the environment as a security issue, largely through
explorations of the so-called “dangers” of climate change.2 Today, a grow-
ing number of academic, government, and military officials are reanimating
discourses and themes associated with the 1990s environmental security
literature to explore how climate change may drive violent conflict, alter
geopolitical relations, and threaten US and EU national security interests.3
However, this reanimation of environmental security discourses exceeds
its erstwhile state-based security logic. The UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) has made avoiding “dangerous climate change”
the central pillar of its mission.4 Although the UNFCCC’s definition is noto-
riously vague,5 this concept generally refers to atmospheric changes that
threaten basic functions of social and ecological systems. This encompasses
threats to individual livelihoods and “sustainable development” along with
more traditional security issues. International organisations such as the World
Bank and other UN agencies have begun to incorporate these issues into
their development agendas.6 The intersection of dangerous climate change
with disasters has become one of their chief concerns. According to this
discourse, the increasing frequency and intensity of catastrophic weather
events destroys valuable infrastructure, diverts scarce resources into recov-
ery efforts, and creates financial risks that can deter investment, all of which
can hinder or set back development.7
Despite volumes of research that operationalise “dangerous climate
change”,8 there has been little critical analysis of the cultural and politi-
cal effects of speaking about climate change as “dangerous.” Critical security
studies have shown that metaphors of security are political resources bound
up in the creation and reproduction of power relations and particular forms
of social order.9 The need to critically interrogate the “politics of security”10
at play in dangerous climate change discourses is especially pressing given
the recent emergence of new adaptation measures designed to reduce expo-
sure to hazards and mitigate the effects of dangerous climate change. Risk
management and insurance-based adaptation strategies such as catastrophe
insurance offer a case in point. Catastrophe insurance has gained attention
as a potentially potent adaptation strategy in small island developing states
538 Kevin J. Grove

(SIDS) and other regions exposed to the threat of hurricanes. Insurance is

said to enable SIDS to transfer disaster risk to global financial markets, which
reduces each states’ financial vulnerability and allows an influx of capital
after a disaster to spark recovery efforts. Through the setting of premiums,
insurance also creates financial incentives to modify behaviour in ways that
reduce risk exposure.11
However, even as new insurance technologies such as the Caribbean
Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) are unveiled to much fanfare,12
there is an unacknowledged politics at play. Insurance is, in Dillon’s phras-
ing, a “widely underrated” biopolitical technology – that is, a mechanism of
government that regulates and produces life – that operates through com-
modifying and managing contingency.13 The emergence of insurance as a
security mechanism thus reflects rearticulations of environmental security
discourses through biopolitical rationalities of security. Rather than offering
security through geopolitical strategies that identify and exclude sources,
of danger, insurance maximises the productive potentials of emergent life
through managing the contingent forces and relations that constitute a milieu
of action.14
As Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero argue, biopolitics is a problem to be
explained rather than a catchall explanatory condition.15 In other words, the
emergence of biopolitical mechanisms of security reflects context-specific
social, ecological, and political problems of government that give rise to
new security concerns. In this light, the emergence of insurance and risk
management as adaptation strategies raise a number of questions about the
nature of environmental security. What are the various biopolitical logics
and rationalities of power that enframe climate change as a security prob-
lem that can be solved through risk management and insurance? How do
risk these biopolitical technologies attempt to create security against the
threats of dangerous climate change? And finally, what are their cultural and
political effects?
This paper unpacks the biopolitical assumptions that structure dis-
courses on dangerous climate change and disasters and advances two central
arguments. First, it argues that risk management and catastrophe insurance
have political effects. Drawing on post-structural critiques of development,
security, and biopolitics, I argue that, as deployed within the institutional
discourses of the World Bank and UN, risk management and insurance sus-
tain the forms of social and political order that Western-led “development”
has produced. This is accomplished through enrolling risk management
and climate science in the development industry’s efforts to transform an
unruly world of difference into techno-managerial spaces of control and
domination.16
Second, in making this claim, this paper also expands critical environ-
mental security studies through articulating this field with recent research on
biopolitical security. In this light, far from being apolitical and “technical,”
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 539

institutional discourses on dangerous climate change extend the project of

earlier environmental security discourses – specifically, the attempt to secure
Western ways of life against the effects of environmental change. Discourses
on dangerous climate change put biopolitical technologies of risk manage-
ment to work alongside and through geopolitical technologies of security
to sustain the exclusion and containment of underdeveloped populations,
and the mobility of the global elite, that characterise contemporary prac-
tices of “development.” Insuring “our common future” – to borrow the title
of the Brundtland Report that put sustainable development on the map17
– here involves transfers of risk management knowledge, technologies and
resources to underdeveloped states, which strengthen their ability to contain
and manage their populations in an emergent socio-ecological setting.
This paper is organised as follows: The first section reviews academic
and policy work on dangerous climate change and disasters, and puts for-
ward an argument for examining these through the lens of critical security
studies. The second, third, and fourth sections analyse World Bank and UN
discourses on dangerous climate change and disasters. The second section
unpacks the biopolitical and geopolitical assumptions underpinning these
discourses. The third section situates these visions of security within the
contemporary social and political context of development; specifically, an
ongoing “global civil war” between competing modes of “species life.”18
A key argument here is that climate change poses a direct challenge to
the legitimacy of Western-led development interventions organised around
“eradicating poverty.” The fourth section then examines how risk man-
agement and insurance address this challenge through constructing a new
cartography of environmental security and creating so-called “cultures of
insurance” in underdeveloped states. A short conclusion suggests possibili-
ties for further critical engagements with biopolitical technologies of climate
change security.

THE NEW SECURITY PROBLEM: “DANGEROUS CLIMATE

CHANGE” AND DISASTERS

There is no shortage of references to climate change as a security prob-

lem. While there have been a number of recent analyses showing how
climate change affects more traditional security concerns such as national
security and violent conflict,19 a larger literature has drawn on broader
so-called ‘human security’ issues pertaining to sustainable development as
well as individual livelihood and well-being.20 These studies project that
changes in mean atmospheric temperatures, sea-level rise and tempera-
ture increase, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather
events such as hurricanes, droughts, and heat waves – to say nothing
of more extreme events such as the collapse of the West Antarctica Ice
540 Kevin J. Grove

Shelf or the disruption of the North Atlantic thermohaline cycle – will

have significant effects on the functioning and stability of social and eco-
logical systems. Indeed, the UNFCCC explicitly drew on the imagery and
language of human security when it made avoiding ‘dangerous’ anthro-
pogenic interference in the climate system its ‘ultimate objective’.21 Such
concerns have spurred a considerable amount of research and debate over
how best to slow climate change through mitigation and adapt to the envi-
ronmental risks that result from a changing climate now and in the near
future.22
One such area of research proposes links between climate change
and catastrophic events such as hurricanes. Since the 1960s, economic
and human losses from disasters have steadily increased,23 a trend that
both climate scientists and risk analysts suggest is in part attributable to
an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather associated with
climate change.24 Such assertions have given rise to a discourse that posi-
tions climate change and disasters as threats to sustainable development, the
ability of states to function effectively, and individual livelihood and well-
being. There are two overarching concerns here. First, the negative financial
and physical effects of disasters are said to affect basic state security func-
tions. Extremely large events may potentially bankrupt a state, leaving it
unable to meet its financial responsibilities, respond to the needs of its cit-
izens, and prevent looting and other forms of disorder in the wake of a
catastrophe.25 A slow or nonexistent state response may trigger international
migration and create environmental refugees whose movement undermines
the sanctity of state borders.26 In the extreme, disasters and sea-level rise
threaten the sovereign existence of small island atoll states.27 Second, by
far the most prevalent concern is the threat disasters pose to sustainable
development. Not only do disasters destroy infrastructure, which is often
financed through outstanding international loans, the use of new loans to
finance disaster recovery coupled with the diversion of financial resources
into recovery efforts often leaves states further in debt and hinder macroe-
conomic development efforts. Additionally, disasters are also said to undo
recent gains made towards improving human development, such as health
care, education, and employment.
Taken together, these concerns have spurred a considerable amount
of research into the possibilities for adapting to climate change in ways
that reduce vulnerability to disasters. One such line of work combines risk
management approaches with climate science in order to develop adap-
tation strategies based on the principles of expert-driven “scientific” risk
assessment.28 This presents catastrophe insurance as an untapped resource
that strengthens state responses to disasters while proactively reducing
exposure to extreme weather events.29 This is so on three counts. First,
catastrophe insurance programmes such as the CCRIF transfer risks to
global financial markets, which opens the door to new sources of disaster
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 541

financing and limits the burdens placed on governments to cover catastrophe

costs.30 Second, insurance contracts enable governments to access funds
quickly after a disaster, because insurance payments materialise more
rapidly than other forms of finance.31 This influx of funds enables states
to quickly rebuild and repair infrastructure and address citizens’ needs,
thereby minimising the economic and human consequences of disaster.32
Third, insurance also encourages governments and individuals to adopt
risk-mitigating behaviour.33 For example, insurance contracts can offer gov-
ernments reduced premiums for enacting and enforcing building codes or
land use plans that reduce loss exposure. In sum, insurance is understood as
an economic tool that supports adaptation to climate change and sustainable
development through enabling people and states to cope with the economic
burden of disasters.
Another line of inquiry departs from the recognition that vulnerabilities
to disasters and climate change reflect place-specific social, political, and
economic conditions.34 Research here attempts to develop adaptation and
vulnerability reduction strategies that account for these factors. Quantitative
methods, such as the “hazard-of-place” approach, use indicators such as
race, gender, and income to map uneven geographies of vulnerabilities,
identify hazardous areas, and project the effects of future disasters.35 The
goal here is to develop a “complex” account of hazards that allows for
targeted and efficient use of disaster management funds – significant word-
ing, as we will see below.36 Other approaches such as sustainability science
and vulnerability analysis combine the above insights with qualitative and
participatory ethnographic approaches that stress collaboration with local
peoples to identify hazards and develop vulnerability reduction strategies.37
This recognises the importance of local involvement not only to create a
sense of “ownership” of resulting policies, but also because local knowl-
edge offers under-utilised disaster management experience and ingenuity.38
This research offers a potentially radical shift in the politics of knowledge
on vulnerability and hazards that works against a tendency in expert-based
risk management to silence local peoples and their immediate concerns.
However, these two approaches also frame insurance in an instrumentalist
light. To be sure, insurance gets scant mention, but where it is discussed it is
presented as a tool that allows people to transfer risks and access financial
resources that were not previously available.39
Although risk management and various vulnerability approaches have a
number of ontological, epistemological, and even political differences, they
find common ground on the utility of insurance for adaptation to dangerous
climate change. The common treatment of insurance as a benign economic
instrument used to produce security against climate change means that the
growing incorporation of insurance within development and climate policies
has proceeded largely without reflection on its potential social, cultural, and
political effects.
542 Kevin J. Grove

The naming of climate change as “dangerous” offers a useful avenue

around this myopic focus. Critical research into security studies has shown
how invocations of danger are political resources that instantiate power
relations, construct identities, and legitimise particular ways of life through
delimiting who or what is threatened and who or what is threatening.40
Rather than a technical problem, security is a metaphysical principle that
mediates the relation between life and death, the known and the unknown,
the familiar and the different.41 Security discourses attempt to create a stable
foundation on which truth, meaning, identity, and order can be based. In
a world of flux and change, this foundation is only possible through locat-
ing the source of indeterminacy, change, and existential suffering outside
the self in the social or environmental other and excluding this destabilising
and dangerous other. However, an objective state of security is impossible,
for the consolidation of any identity or way of life is always partial and
premised on the continued insecurity of others rendered legitimate targets
of exclusion or transformative intervention.42 Security discourses are thus
performative enactments of particular forms of socio-ecological order that
reiterate the distinction between self and other.43 In this light, following
Foucault, we might define security as a kind of constitutive discursive fact:
rather than naming an ontological condition of insecurity, it is a “truth” gen-
erated through discourse that consolidates and naturalises a political order
and power relations.44
The seemingly straightforward act of identifying climate change as “dan-
gerous” thus opens an arena of political and philosophical struggle that has
been largely overlooked by the technical focus of the research outlined
above, which takes for granted the need to secure sustainability. Indeed,
security is the founding principle of much of the academic work on dan-
gerous climate change: the insecurities attributed to climate change and
disasters are the launching pad from which research on climate change and
disasters departs; the pursuit of security is the fuel that powers these diverse
analyses. Treating security as a power-laden effect of discourse rather than a
technical problem destabilises the assumed solid ground of analyses of “dan-
gerous” climate change, and directs attention instead to the thorny political
and cultural issues at play in framing climate change and disasters through
loaded metaphors of security. This should not be read as an attempt to deny
the seriousness of climate change and the need for creative solutions to the
myriad problems it raises. Indeed, I see climate change as without doubt the
most pressing socio-ecological issue today. However, this should not place
efforts to respond to climate change beyond the pale of critical reflexive
analysis45 (and indeed, one of the strategic attractions of security discourses
is precisely how labelling something a ‘security’ issue curtails negotiation
and debate!). Instead, following Foucault’s lead, thinking critically about
the “dangers” of climate change means asking what political work is being
done through this performative act: What forms of socio-ecological order
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 543

are established, and what relations between different elements, institutions,

and actors are constituted? In other words, how does this function as a secu-
rity discourse? The remainder of this paper seeks to unpack this “politics of
security”46 found in the institutional discourse that has sounded the call for
insurance schemes such as the CCRIF.

THE BIOPOLITICAL LOGIC OF CLIMATE CHANGE SECURITY

Although much of the current policy and academic work on adaptation to

climate change and disasters derives from the UNFCCC’s stated intent to
avoid “dangerous climate change,” this research also draws on and mod-
ifies earlier environmental security debates and discourses. Environmental
change rose to prominence as a security issue in the 1990s on the back
of Neo-Malthusian accounts of environmentally induced violence that could
threaten state security in the developed West. This research painted a disqui-
eting image of degradation, overpopulation, and underdevelopment in the
developing world that could ignite internal conflict and create humanitar-
ian emergencies that release a flood of international refugees and draw the
West into dangerous military interventions.47 Although these studies were at
times vague on the linkages between environmental change and state secu-
rity, they suggested that irrational land use practices in the underdeveloped
South could be the source of much environmental insecurity.48 This provided
fodder for arguments that market-based reforms in underdeveloped states
would build resilience to environmental change, reduce the pressures that
spark internal violence, and enhance the state’s ability to maintain order.49 In
recent years, security analysts studying the relation between climate change
and violent conflict have adopted many of these themes.50
A number of critical analyses have drawn attention to the problematic
ontological and geopolitical assumptions that structure these neo-Malthusian
arguments. Foremost among these are realist tropes about safety and
threat that specify security in terms of control, domination, and rival
blocs of state territory. For example, Dalby draws on the insights of crit-
ical geopolitics51 to suggest that neo-Malthusian analyses are premised on
geopolitical assumptions of a rich, developed North that masters nature and
a poor, underdeveloped South that is unable to do so.52 These assumptions
have two effects. First, the object of security becomes the modern (Northern)
state, whose borders and integrity are threatened by the movement of peo-
ple caused by the South’s inability to manage environmental degradation.53
Second, scripting global space in terms of an environmentally benign North
and destructive South inhibits consideration of how Northern production
and consumption might be implicated in Southern environmental degrada-
tion. This move absolves the North, and Northern ways of life premised on
carboniferous capitalism, of any responsibility for environmental degradation
in the South.54
544 Kevin J. Grove

Such visions of global order articulate realist visions of security with

geopolitical imaginations of development to locate the source of insecurity
outside the Northern Self in the Southern Other. As post-structural critiques
of development have shown, the meanings and relations of “development”
rely on geographical imaginations that inscribe places with moral, cultural,
and political attributes.55 These acts of “geo-graphing”56 extend back to the
first European encounters with cultural difference at the dawn of the modern
era. Unfamiliar ways of life were and still are made legible and manageable
through development narratives that translate spatial difference into tem-
poral difference. Development discourses situate spatial differences within a
unitary and global history of progressive, evolutionary growth, the end result
of which is a modern capitalist society made up of self-governing individ-
uals free from economic scarcity and authoritarian political rule.57 This is a
story the West tells itself about its own history, a narrative that at once posits
a common humanity and defers this commonality to a far-off future.58 The
developed world occupies a special position in this narrative: As the only
cultural group to complete the development trajectory, it becomes the West’s
burden to guide and direct others along this path until they too realise their
historical potential. This vision legitimises excluding the non-Western Other
from the supposedly universal values and rights of the liberal subject, and
constitutes “underdeveloped” subjects and spaces that are legitimate targets
of transformative interventions led by the “developed” West.
Critical approaches to environmental security deconstruct the various
geopolitical and geographical assumptions embedded within environmental
security discourses to show how invocations of environmental dangers are
political strategies designed to secure the continuation of Western ways of
life in the face of various insecurities this way of life creates. Environmental
security discourses create a field of objects for government (developing
countries that are the source of threats), legitimise particular actors to govern
these objects (state and academic security “experts”) and legitimise particular
forms of action (military and economic interventions to spread modernity)
that will secure threatened objects (states and modern ways of life). At a
fundamental level, these discourses promise security through the identifica-
tion and exclusion of threats; security here involves prevention, protection,
and exclusion.59
On the surface, discourses on disasters and dangerous climate change
bear scant resemblance to these doomsday predictions of environmen-
tally driven conflict: realist security concerns with territorial integrity and
state-based violence appear to have little in common with securing sustain-
able development and the basic functions of social and ecological systems.
However, I want to suggest that discourses on dangerous climate change
construct similar narratives of environmental security through articulating
geographical imaginations of development with a fundamentally different
set of assumptions about the nature of security. These assumptions position
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 545

disaster risk, rather than environmental change, as the fundamental problem

for environmental security, thus creating a new series of problematisations
in which climate change becomes legible as a security issue.
Discourses on disasters and dangerous climate change are characterised
by two important departures from realist and geopolitical specifications
of security. First, there is an assumption of complex global interconnec-
tion in the experience of climate change and catastrophes rather than the
realist emphasis on state-based territorial division. For example, the UN
Development Programme (UNDP) argues that “contemporary disaster risk
can be linked to historical development decisions and to development deci-
sions taken by actors in distant places. Disaster risks associated with global
climate change . . . exemplify these relationships operating at different
scales.”60 This conjures visions of a complex and interdependent ecosystem61
that shares more in common with “ecopolitical” visions of world order based
on connection and cooperation than realist geopolitical assumptions of ter-
ritorial separation and conflict.62 Second, there is an assumption that the
effects of climate change will be unpredictable and uncontrollable, a depar-
ture from the pursuit of control and mastery over modernity’s Other, in
this case nature. According to the UNDP, “The growing complexity of risk,
due to both economic globalisation as well as to global climate change,
greatly reduces the predictability and increases the uncertainty surrounding
the occurrence of particular climate related disaster events.”63 The lack of
predictability inhibits human control over environmental outcomes. Writing
in the context of SIDS, a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) paper suggests that “the question is whether climate change
might go beyond what traditional coping mechanisms can cope with.”64
This vision of global order defined by complex global interconnection and
uncertain futures renders causality and responsibility indeterminate:

Processes of global change are adding new and even more intractable
dimensions to the problems of risk accumulation and disaster occur-
rence and loss, associated with climatic events. Due to global change
rapid and turbulent changes in risk patterns in a given region are rarely
autonomously generated and may, in numerous cases, be caused by
economic decisions taken on the other side of the globe. This territo-
rial complexity of causal factors extends down to include the impacts
of national, sectoral and territorial development policies on regions and
localities.65

No longer does danger derive from the South’s inability to master nature as
the North has done. Instead, climate change security is a problem of “rapid
and turbulent” shifting patterns of disaster risk that confound lay and expert
efforts to impose some form of control on future socio-ecological outcomes.
546 Kevin J. Grove

As Dillon notes, risk is not a pre-existing condition waiting to be uncov-

ered by expert analysis, as the union between climate science and disaster
risk management strives to accomplish; nor is it exclusively a property of
particular social formations, which vulnerability analysis, sustainability sci-
ence, and hazards-of-place theory attempt to study and address. Instead,
risk can be seen as a “governmental phenomena”, a principle of formation
that inscribes the world with meaning and gives rise to a set of biopoliti-
cal technologies that guide the conduct of people and instantiate particular
forms of order.66 “Biopolitics” is a complex signifier imbued with multiple
and potentially conflicting meanings,67 but for our purposes here I follow
Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero’s Foucauldian use of the concept as rationalities
and mechanisms of government that take “species life”, or the life of popula-
tions, as its object.68 This “life” is an effect of power/knowledge complexes
that define and categorise human and non-human beings in ways that con-
stitute a realm of reality open to novel forms of regulation and management.
The emergence of statistics offers one example here: Statistical methods of
observation and calculation constitute regularities that exist at the level of
the population, and at the same time constitute individual abnormalities
subject to normalising regulation.69 These truth-telling practices constitute
species life in terms of contingency and risk.70 “Life” exists within a space
of contingent circulation, combination, and exchange with other elements
and forces; each being exists in a perpetual state of becoming in relation
to its surroundings. Risk is a fundamental feature of this life: The form life
takes is contingent on this transactional economy in which outcomes are
uncertain and necessarily fleeting. But this is not necessarily threatening,
for risk offers both threat and opportunity, specifically, the opportunity to
adapt with changing conditions and unleash one’s own emergent potential.
This forms the essential problem of biopolitical security: Given an ontol-
ogy of contingent life, how can opportunities be maximised and threats
minimised? In other words, rather than exclusion, prevention, and protec-
tion from contingencies that threaten the sovereign subject of geopolitics,
biopolitical security technologies work within and through contingency to
profitably manage a risky and emergent transactional economy between a
disjointed “subject” and its surroundings.71
Experiencing the effects of climate change – and recognising them as
such – redefines “life” in terms of connection, complexity, contingency and
risk and sets the stage for the appearance of risk management and insurance
as biopolitical practices of security. A World Bank report neatly summarises
this condition: “This evolution to risk management did not happen spon-
taneously. It was prompted by a series of significant hazard events and
increasing physical and economic damage over recent decades, as well as
by a growing understanding of the links between development practices,
environmental degradation and hazard impacts.”72 Risk management is a
response to complex “links” drawn between the experience of contingent
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 547

hazard events and evolving understandings of social-ecological processes.

At a fundamental level, risk management recognises that human control of
catastrophic events is impossible: “Since little can be done to reduce the
occurrence and intensity of most natural hazards, hazard risk management
activities and programs necessarily focus on reducing existing and future
vulnerability to damage and loss.”73 The profitable reduction of vulnerabil-
ities requires the active management of an ensemble of social, economic,
political, and environmental forces that create risks:

Although natural phenomena must be understood in terms of their phys-

ical attributes, magnitude and recurrence in order to provide information
for risk managers and the population in general, it is human vulnerabil-
ity, location and lack of resilience that are at the centre of the explanation
of many large-scale disasters. And, it is these factors that must be consid-
ered and modified in order to decrease disaster risk and incidence in the
future . . . . Risk and disaster do not exist as separate and autonomous
conditions but are intimately related to ongoing social processes and
must be dealt with in this context if any major advances are to be
achieved.74

These “ongoing” – or rather, emergent – socio-ecological processes form a

milieu of vulnerability, a space of circulation, combination, and exchange in
which disasters may be possible.75 As a biopolitical technology of security,
risk management proactively manages these processes to maximise “transac-
tional prosperity.” A 2005 World Bank report is explicit about the biopolitical
value of risk management: “While disaster risk will never be eliminated, an
approach that combines risk identification, reduction, and transfer offers
the best possibility of minimizing losses and repeated and expensive relief
and reconstruction efforts.”76 Indeed, the economic efficiencies offered by
risk management activities are touted throughout World Bank and UN dis-
courses: Risk management “reveals where investments in risk reduction are
most needed and likely to have the biggest payoff in terms of reduced
losses,”77 “can be cost-effective in preventing disaster losses and increasing
disaster preparation, leading to quicker, better planned recovery,”78 and “are
far more cost-effective in strengthening coping mechanisms than is primary
reliance on post-disaster response and recovery”.79
Dangerous climate change discourses are thus grounded in a funda-
mentally different set of assumptions about the nature of security than
those found in earlier environmental security debates. These biopolitical
assumptions shift the object of security from territorial (state) borders to
emergent species life. For example, a World Bank report notes that the
“combination of human and economic losses plus the additional costs of
relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction make disasters an economic issue
as well as a humanitarian one. Disaster risks, therefore, deserve serious
548 Kevin J. Grove

consideration as an issue for sustainable development.”80 “Sustainable devel-

opment” here incorporates both quantitative indicators of macroeconomic,
state-based development and qualitative considerations of the development
of “life” within an uncertain environment: “Disaster losses may setback social
investments aiming to ameliorate poverty and hunger, provide access to
education, health services, safe housing, drinking water and sanitation, or to
protect the environment as well as the economic investments that provide
employment and income intensification over diversity and sustainability.”81
A UNDP report conveys this register of “development” in stark biopolitical
terms: “Human development is about more than the rise or fall of national
incomes. It is about having space in which people can develop their full
potential and lead productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs
and interests.”82 This renders development in terms of the quality of species
life – that is, the degree to which members of the population are free to
“productively” circulate and realise their “full potential” within an emergent
socio-ecological milieu.
Even as dangerous climate change discourses constitute a new object
of environmental security, Western ways of life and the existing global order
that supports this life continue to hang in the balance. Exploring how these
biopolitical assumptions extend the neo-Malthusian project of protecting
“the West” against environmental change requires shifting our focus, from
the discourses on dangerous climate change to the broader field of power
relations in which these discourses circulate. The next section situates these
discourses within the system of subjections constituted through “sustainable
development,” for it is the sustainability of these power relations that climate
change and disasters threaten.

SITUATING DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE: DEVELOPMENT

AND “GLOBAL CIVIL WAR”

Although nominally about poverty reduction and increasing standards of liv-

ing, in practice development has come to involve promoting mobility and
growth for an elite few and cramped subsistence for much of the global
poor. Numerous critiques of development have shown that the freedom and
circulation that characterises developed life is dependent on the contain-
ment and exclusion of others.83 In a provocative analysis, Duffield argues
that development marks a moving zone of struggle over how “life” can
be lived, a war between “different modalities of life itself.”84 This battle is
not open conflict; rather, following Foucault, it is a form of “private war-
fare”, a system of relations of domination and resistance to government
enacted through war-like strategies, tactics, and alliances between differ-
ent groups within a society.85 Duffield suggests this “global civil war” is
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 549

fought between developed and underdeveloped species life, what he calls

“insured” and “non-insured” life, respectively. Developed life is a mode
of collective existence in which members of the population are free to
circulate, interact, and maximise the potentialities of contingent life. Risk
reducing and compensatory (biopolitical) technologies such as social welfare
and private insurance minimise the risks of these transactions. In contrast,
underdeveloped life is characterised by the absence of such institutions;
a combination of self-reliance, creativity, and humanitarian interventions
maintains the basic subsistence of non-insured species life. Left to their
own devices, underdeveloped populations will engage in radical forms
of self-reproduction, such as undocumented migration, that undermine the
technologies that support developed species life. Because the state’s legiti-
macy as the primary institution and ordering principle of modern political
life has come to hinge on its ability to minimise the dangers of collective
existence, autonomous forms of reproduction not only erode the sustain-
ability of insured life, they also threaten state-based forms of social order.
At stake in this global civil war is thus the maintenance of a global system
of domination enacted through modern technologies such as the state and
insurance.
Western-led development projects have emerged as a key weapon
in this struggle. For example, Duffield argues that humanitarian aid pro-
grammes acting in the name of “sustainable development” channel inno-
vation and circulation in ways that promote the in situ reproduction of
non-insured life. In this reading, sustainable development is a strategy of
containment that sustains the capacities of underdeveloped peoples to sub-
sist in place, a cultural and economic project of entrapment that targets both
physical mobility and any creative ‘movement’ that transgresses social cate-
gories of control.86 This defuses a potent challenge to the technologies that
support developed life while bolstering the ability of the underdeveloped
state to control, manage, and regulate subaltern modes of species life.
Climate change and disasters open a new front in this global civil
war: In threatening sustainable development, climate change undermines
a vital resource used to corral the movement and creativity of non-insured
species life. Nowhere is this threat more acutely felt than in the frequent
assertion in World Bank and UN discourse that “climate change is . . . a
serious threat to poverty eradication.”87 “Poverty” is the versatile Swiss Army
knife in the development industry’s arsenal. As a truth-effect of regimes
of power/knowledge, discourses on poverty and poverty eradication per-
form three different operations. First, the “existence” of poverty creates
a moral and ethical imperative to eradicate poverty that binds together
disparate actors and knowledges into a development apparatus, or a sys-
tem of relations between statements, regulations, laws, institutions, scientific
knowledge, and so on that structures the possibilities for understanding and
acting within the world.88 Second, the development apparatus channels the
550 Kevin J. Grove

possibilities for social, economic, and cultural practice through constructing

truths about poverty and underdevelopment that frame these as problems
that can only be solved by Western-led modernisation and development. The
“truth” of poverty provides an epistemological framework for understanding
and managing different places and peoples that fits these within broader
historical narratives of development and underdevelopment.89 The discov-
ery and territorialisation of “poverty” in so-called underdeveloped countries
by the machinery of the development apparatus turns these spaces and their
populations into objects that can and should be controlled and managed by
the various academic experts, bureaucrats, and development officials who
comprise the development industry.90 Third, poverty also acts as a marker of
threat to capitalist order. Within both development and security discourse,
poverty is constructed as a key source of resentment and alienation that can
lead to radical forms of individual and collective action that threaten both
the security of foreign capital flows and global geopolitical and economic
order.91 There is thus an entire discursive economy that circulates around the
“truth” of poverty and creates a field of possible interventions. The imper-
ative to “eradicate poverty” is a battering ram that breaks through barriers
to the development industry’s massive socio-ecological transformations that
remake underdeveloped countries and species life in ways that quell eco-
nomically driven instability, lubricate global capital flows, and secure the
circulatory spaces and infrastructure of developed life.
In threatening to stymie poverty eradication, dangerous climate change
imperils the raison d’être of the development apparatus: “Climate change
poses a new challenge to the World Bank Group’s great goal – a world free
of poverty.”92 This threatens to erase years of work that have pried open
non-Western societies to Western systems of rule:93 “Climate change is a seri-
ous risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development
efforts.”94 This not only threatens the historical efficacy of Western-led devel-
opment, it also threatens future efforts to corral the creativity and mobility
of non-insured life: “A natural catastrophe can suspend poverty reduction
and other central development objectives for years following the event.”95
The danger here is that in the absence of a fully functioning development
apparatus that supports the capacity of underdeveloped states to manage
their populations, alternative forms of social organisation will appear in
response to the challenges of more frequent and intense disasters. Indeed,
both policy and academic literature have noted the recent emergence of
alternative forms of disaster management, development, and social organ-
isation in the developing world in response to climate change. A UNDP
report writes, “Disruptions caused by disasters can open political space for
alternative forms of social organisation. Often this is a negative experience,
as with looting, but there is the possibility for more egalitarian forms of
organisation to manifest.”96 Likewise, this condition is noted by much of the
more critically minded vulnerabilities literature. For example, Adger et al.
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 551

suggest that individuals and communities throughout the developing world

are “autonomously” adapting to climate change in ways that fall outside
the purview and control of capital and the state.97 As disasters become
more prevalent, peoples exposed to disaster risk in developing countries
increasingly draw on local knowledge, experience, and resources, rather
than the state or capital, to develop coping capacities to shifting environmen-
tal conditions.98 In other words, disasters create a milieu that enables forms
of self-reproduction that lie outside disciplinary and biopolitical weapons
that control and contain underdeveloped species life.
At this point, we can see how discourses on dangerous climate change
and disasters extend and modify the concern within earlier environmental
security discourses over the threat environmental change poses to Western
ways of life, rendered biopolitically as developed species life. They point
to a fundamental problem that socio-ecological interconnection and contin-
gency pose to existing social, political, ecological, and cultural relations that
comprise modern global order. Securing sustainable development against
climate change thus involves sustaining the efficacy of technologies of
government that exclude and contain non-insured life within an emergent
socio-ecological context. The next section explores how the incorporation
of risk management into development practices attempts to address these
potentially destabilising effects of climate change.

THE BIOPOLITICS OF RISK MANAGEMENT AND CLIMATE

CHANGE ADAPTATION

The uncertainty and massive devastation caused by disasters undermines the

ability of Western-led development efforts to eradicate poverty, which, as
above, challenges the legitimacy of the apparatus and its ability to intervene
in the global South and secure developed species life. The turn to risk man-
agement as an environmental security strategy is a strategic response to this
challenge. This move enrolls risk managers and climate change researchers
into the development apparatus, enlisting their knowledge and expertise in
the struggle to secure development against the potentially threatening possi-
bilities for self-reproduction disasters create.99 A UNDP paper explicitly calls
for such an expansion of the development apparatus: “Risk and risk man-
agement must be placed squarely in the centre of the equation [of disasters
and sustainable development] . . . . This must be achieved guaranteeing a
close, synergic and interactive relationship between existing risk manage-
ment, climate adaptation and sustainable development practitioners.”100 This
enlarged apparatus enables a sort of division of labour in the struggle to
secure sustainable development. For example, risk transfer schemes such
as catastrophe insurance that connect the public and private sector are a
beneficial adaptation strategy because
552 Kevin J. Grove

the private sector has significant experience in identifying, reducing, and

transferring catastrophe risk. By harnessing the private sector experi-
ence to cope with catastrophe risk, the international aid community frees
itself and its resources to implement its broader agenda of development
policies.101

This strategic alliance frees up the development industry’s forces to focus

on their goals of “sustainable development” and “poverty eradication” while
risk managers and climate scientists stand guard against unpleasant surprises.
This strategy of divide and conquer produces a variety of technologies of
government that contain non-insured life while promoting the circulation
and growth and insured life. Three can be identified here.
First, risk management augments geographies of underdevelopment
and poverty that structure development discourse to create a new cartog-
raphy of environmental security that sustains the legitimacy of Northern
interventions in the global South. According to this discourse, successfully
adapting to the uncertainties of climate change requires knowledge about
disaster risk exposure and proper risk management techniques: “In order to
reduce its vulnerability, a country needs to understand the risks to which
it is exposed and the potential damage such risks can cause.”102 However,
this is information that escapes developing countries, and SIDS in particular:
“In most SIDS, there is a lack of baseline information for understanding the
complex interplay between and within natural and human systems. This is a
considerable gap in information on likely changes in climate and human
systems at the small-island scale.”103 The presence or absence of “com-
plex” knowledge mobilises a key concept from quantitative approaches to
vulnerability reduction, outlined above, to segment developed and under-
developed species life. These power-laden assertions, and their biopolitical
effects, are on full display in a World Bank report on SIDS in the Caribbean:

There is a variety of knowledge and experience with hazard risk man-

agement within the Caribbean, but this knowledge and experience, for
the most part, is not well developed, has not been widely shared and
is currently not effectively incorporated into mainstream development
decisions in either the public or private sector.104

The result is that people and governments who do not possess “well
developed” knowledge will engage in maladaptive behaviours, or “activ-
ities which reduce the ability to cope with and recover from hazards
or shocks.”105 The absence of “complex” understandings of risk exposure
threatens the potential for future development, as it leads to “improper
development practices, such as building in flood plains or unstable slopes,
[that] threaten environmental quality and exacerbate hazard effects.”106
Climate change thus threatens development wherever the geographies of
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 553

risk management, disasters, and underdevelopment coincide: “In high risk

areas, where disasters are most frequent and losses highest, failure to reduce
risks allows disaster losses to continually drain off hopes of economic
development”.107
Discourses on dangerous climate change thus diffract geopolitical
visions of a developed North and underdeveloped South through a prism
of risk management. This strategic mapping positions developing states as
“weak allies” enrolled in the struggle for control and order, partners whose
contribution to producing and securing developed life is hindered by their
lack of risk management. A World Bank paper cuts to the heart of the matter:
“In the developed world, governments do not have a probability of ruin,”
following a disaster, but conversely, “governments in poorer countries do
not often have the domestic resources to absorb catastrophe risk”.108 In such
conditions, transferring (Northern) scientific risk management knowledge
and resources to underdeveloped states boosts their capacity to function
in conditions of uncertainty and helps secure sustainable development:
“The actions for the international community . . . include the develop-
ment, transfer and dissemination to SIDS of appropriate technologies and
practices to address climate change; [and] building and enhancing scien-
tific and technological capabilities.”109 Writing in the context of promoting
the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a UN Millennium Project report
suggests that enhancing scientific capacities will “help drive economic devel-
opment and . . . help forge solutions to developing countries’ own scientific
challenges,” which include “specific challenges facing the poor in disease,
climate, agriculture, and environmental degradation.”110 These arguments
refine neo-Malthusian calls, outlined above, for development programmes
and reforms that strengthen developing states’ abilities to control and man-
age their populations:111 Enhancing risk management enables developing
states to focus on “avoiding future problems by ensuring that growth and
development are properly adapted to prevalent hazards and environmental
systems.”112 Adaptation can be seen here as a precondition for sustainable
development,113 a measure of environmental security that the spread of risk
management increases: “Natural disaster risk reduction can provide a useful
basis for adapting to climate change . . . . Risk management practices have
the potential to greatly help SIDS in preparing for climate change impacts.”114
Second, this expanded development apparatus creates new technolo-
gies such as catastrophe insurance that realise the dissemination of risk
management knowledge and resources. In the case of the former, insurance
provides a vehicle for transferring risk management knowledge from the
developed and “adapted” North to the underdeveloped and “maladapted”
South. Insurance professionals, by their very nature, possess the expert
risk management knowledge lacking in vulnerable developing countries.
Writing on the utility of insurance as an adaptation strategy for develop-
ing countries, Mills argues that “insurers, especially those likely to partner
554 Kevin J. Grove

with public-sector entities, have considerable experience with risk manage-

ment, possess key data, and are the ultimate judges of which projects will
make a material difference in reducing losses and increasing the insurabil-
ity of risks.”115 Emphasising the extent to which the South has become the
target of insurance-based intervention, the UNFCCC argues that “since any
insurance or insurance-related system requires knowledge of the risks, the
international community could provide support to developing countries in
collecting the requisite data and in building analytical capacity.”116
Catastrophe insurance also facilitates access to new sources of disas-
ter financing. Echoing the arguments of risk management-based research
on adaptation outlined above, dangerous climate change discourses suggest
these resources enable states to quickly rebuild critical infrastructure in the
wake of a disaster: “In small island states, there are often critical components
of the nation’s infrastructure for which no replacement is readily available. In
such cases it is important to reduce financial risk through risk transfer mech-
anisms, which ensure that funds are readily available to rectify the damage
or replace the facility, should a loss occur.”117 The articulation of this knowl-
edge within the development apparatus gives a biopolitical edge to these
arguments. On one hand, this is infrastructure – roads, utilities, government
buildings, airports, and so forth – that supports capital investment and the
mobility of insured life within developing states. On the other, this infrastruc-
ture also enables developing states to efficiently manage their populations.
The capacity to repair infrastructure after a disaster is thus directly tied to
the capacity of the state to maintain order in turbulent times. For example,
a recent World Bank grant application to cover the Haitian government’s
participation in the CCRIF argues that

An immediate infusion of capital will enable [the government] to

jumpstart recovery efforts quickly, limiting the liquidity impact on the
government budget. The liquidity provided immediately after the event
will allow the Government to focus its efforts on providing direct assis-
tance to the most affected citizens instead of working to raise funds from
the international community to start the recovery.118

The ability of underdeveloped states to provide their populations with aid

and assistance defuses the motivation to experiment with autonomous forms
of disaster recovery. Catastrophe insurance thus enables developing states
to contain non-insured life and ensure insured life’s circulation in the wake
of a disaster.
Third, discourses on dangerous climate change and disasters produced
through this expanded apparatus constitute “culture” as a terrain on which
non-insured life can be governed. In recent years calls from policy mak-
ers and researchers for what is referred to alternatively as a “culture of
risk management”119 or a “culture of insurance”120 have become legion. This
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 555

theme figures prominently throughout the UN’s 2005 report on the Hyogo
World Conference on Disaster Reduction. Promoting the benefits of dissem-
inating risk management knowledge, the report argues that a priority for
action should be to “use knowledge, innovation and education to build
a culture of safety and resilience at all levels”, because “disasters can be
substantially reduced if people are well informed and motivated towards
a culture of disaster prevention and resilience.”121 However, the circula-
tion of this knowledge and innovation within the apparatus of development
sharpens these resources into biopolitical weapons that carve a culture of
risk management out of the constituent possibilities of disasters: This cul-
ture directs the “motivation” to adapt to climate change towards practices
that reproduce rather than challenge the development industry’s vision of
sustainable development.
Struggles over what counts as proper adaptation practices are illustrative
here. For example, a 2002 World Bank paper draws on biopolitical imagery
to suggest that

Through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(UNFCCC), efforts have been initiated to develop and increase the adap-
tive capacity of poor people and the poorer countries to the impacts
of climate change. The UNFCCC decisions accept that sustainable
development must be the framework for adaptation activities . . .122

Of course, this is a framework that channels the possibilities for adapta-

tion in some ways rather than others. The spread of expert forms of risk
management to underdeveloped places and peoples attempts to modify
behaviours in ways that will ensure “proper” adaptation: “Some [adaptation]
actions will require significant funding and will require a change in the
way in which things are done; other actions will be small step changes
that require some behavioural modifications while other actions will barely
be noticed.”123 This struggle over defining proper behaviour attempts to
ensure that the adaptation activities of non-insured species life supports the
goals of the development industry: “Risk management aims at providing
instruments that allow the poor (but also the non-poor) to minimize the
impact of exposure to risk and change their behavior in a way that helps
them exit poverty and lower vulnerability.”124 Once again, insurance pro-
grammes such as the CCRIF play a key role in this discourse. Insurance
is said to reduce vulnerabilities through promoting proactive disaster risk
management practices. Tompkins et al. offer a clear and concise argument
on this account: “Collective pressure is needed to encourage behavioural
change in a regional organisation, e.g. regional insurers offering incentives
to those who reduce their exposure to hazards.”125 Through connecting
premiums to risk exposure, the insurance contract provides financial incen-
tives to engage in behaviours that minimise the impact of future disasters
556 Kevin J. Grove

on development. A UNFCCC report illustrates such incentives: “The [risk

management] approach offers the potential to influence the level of risk,
through linking insurance prices and conditions with government policy on
hazard mitigation, implementation and supervision of building codes, which
in turn can reduce a country’s financial vulnerability and improve prospects
for investment and economic growth.”126
This interest in “cultures of risk management” reflects a scramble
to reconstitute order and control out of the potential chaos and uncer-
tainty climate change and disasters introduce. It is an effort to direct the
constituent possibilities of life towards forms of social organisation that
reproduce capitalist order. Risk management and insurance thus attempt
to impose some direction on the arrow of time through modifying socio-
ecological transactional spaces to improve the chances for “development.”
These are key biopolitical security technologies, sets of practices, strate-
gies, and knowledges deployed within emergent spaces to guide individual
conduct and sustain a particular vision of the future – that of “sustain-
able development.” Risk management and insurance are thus bound up
in the government of contingent life; they problematise the “development”
of this life and create a moral imperative to live so as development is
sustained.

CONCLUSIONS

While alarmist reports on the future dangers of climate change to state

security interests will continue to grab headlines, there is an ongoing
mobilisation of forces off the radar that seek to address the immediate biopo-
litical challenges climate change and disasters introduce. This analysis of
the biopolitical dimensions of “dangerous climate change” discourse draws
attention to the politically loaded deployment of insurance-based practices
of risk management against the constituent possibilities opened by the threat
of disasters. These strategies of security draw on and rearticulate geopolitical
assumptions of an advanced, developed North and a backwards, underde-
veloped South to legitimise the development and dissemination of insurance
as an adaptive security mechanism.
This analysis points towards the emergence of an insurance-
development-security complex (IDS complex), a network of international
organisations, regional and international insurance companies, researchers,
and state actors that produces a particular socio-ecological order through
de-legitimising localised knowledge and experience on how to adapt to
climate change. The struggle over how to behave and act in an unpre-
dictable environment reaches down to the core of existence, to the basic
ways in which every body interacts with the surrounding world. Through
the IDS complex, biopolitical technologies of risk management intersect
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 557

with geopolitical practices of exclusion and containment to produce “flex-

ible spaces” of entrapment that channel the possibilities for adaptation to
secure the existing global capitalist order. The increasing institutionalisation
and normalisation of catastrophe insurance through the IDS complex calls
for further critical research into the biopolitical and geopolitical scenes of
struggle over adaptation to climate change.
At the same time, it is important to recognise the limits of this research.
The argument put forth here amounts to a critique of technologies of sub-
jection, or the discursive creation of subject positions that both constrain
and make possible a horizon of action. No attention is given to the vari-
ous processes of subjectivisation through which individuals bind themselves
to these subject positions.127 This analysis thus unfortunately remains blind
to the broader politics of resistance to these forms of government that are
shaped by a variety of conflicting and overlapping motivations, drives, and
interests. Indeed, those targeted by the IDS complex may take up, modify,
and utilise the transfers of knowledge, technology and funding in surpris-
ing ways that meet their own needs and interests; the outcomes generated
on the ground may well be quite different from those envisioned by the
international agencies that organise and fund these transfers. Here, research
that draws on feminist and ethnographic approaches128 offers possibilities to
expand the scope of critical environmental security studies beyond a focus
on mechanisms of subjection. Such research could also enable much-needed
constructive critical engagement with the politics of adaptation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Mathew Coleman and three anonymous reviewers, as

well as participants at the Critical Geopolitics 2008 conference in Durham,
England, and the “Political Geographies of Disaster” session at the 2008
Annual Meeting of the AAG in Boston, for their helpful comments on earlier
versions of this paper. I would also like to thank David Newman for his
insightful editorial advice.

NOTES
1. R. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy (New York: Vintage 2000); S. Dalby, Environmental Security
(Minneapolis: UMP 2002); J. Barnett, The Meaning of Environmental Security (London: Zed 2001).
2. For a concise summary of recent arguments, see J. Scheffran, ‘Climate Change and Security’,
Bulleting of the Atomic Scientists 64/2 (2008) pp. 19–24, 59–60.
3. See, for example, R. Schubert, H. J. Schellnhuber, N. Buchmann, A. Epiney, R. Greibhammer,
M. Kulessa, D. Messner, S. Rahmstorf, and J. Schmid, Climate Change as a Security Risk (Berlin: German
Advisory Council on Global Change WBGU 2007); K. Campbell et al., The Age of Consequences: The
Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change (Washington, DC: Center for
Strategic and International Studies 2007).
558 Kevin J. Grove

4. UN, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992).

5. S. Dessai, W. N. Adger, M. Hulme, J. Turnpenny, J. Köhler, and R. Warren, ‘Defining and
Experiencing Dangerous Climate Change’, Climatic Change 64 (2004) pp. 11–25; M. Oppenheimer and
A. Petsonk, ‘Article 2 of the UNFCCC: Historical Origins, Recent Interpretations’, Climatic Change 73
(2005) pp. 195–226.
6. These arguments are by now quite common, but are exemplified in World Bank, Natural
Hazard Risk Management in the Caribbean (Washington, DC: The World Bank 2002); UNDP, Reducing
Disaster Risk: A Challenge for Development (New York: UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery
2004); UNFCCC, ‘Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change in Small Island Developing States’,
background paper for the expert meeting on adaptation for small island developing states, Kingston,
Jamaica, Feb. 2007.
7. M. Dilley, R. Chen, U. Deichmann, A. Lerner-Lam, and M. Arnold, Natural Disaster Hotspots:
A Global Risk Analysis (Washington, DC: The World Bank 2005); World Bank, Managing Climate Risk:
Integrating Adaptation into World Bank Group Operations (Washington, DC: The World Bank 2006).
8. Dessai et al. (note 6) and Oppenheimer and Petsonk (note 6) provide concise summaries of this
research.
9. D. Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity
(Minneapolis: UMP 1992); M. Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental
Thought (New York: Routledge 1996); Dalby, Environmental Security (note 1).
10. Dillon, Politics of Security (note 9).
11. P. Freeman and H. Kunreuther, ‘Environmental Risk Management for Developing Countries’,
The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance 27/2 (2002) pp. 196–214. See also the contributions to the
special issue of Climate Policy 6/6 (2006) on catastrophe insurance.
12. The recent development of the CCRIF has buoyed hopes within the climate policy and science
communities for the further development of catastrophe insurance programmes. The CCRIF represents
the first insurance mechanism of its kind. It is a public-private partnership that pools the disaster risks
of sixteen member states in the Caribbean. Pooling diversifies the disaster risk portfolio at the regional
scale, which lowers the cost of coverage for individual states and enables these risks to be transferred to
global financial markets through the World Bank, Caribbean insurance brokers, and European reinsurance
houses. In the event of a catastrophe, members may collect payouts to help rebuild critical infrastructure
like roads and utilities. The CCRIF was named “Transaction of the Year” at the 2008 Insurance Day London
Market Awards, and “Re/Insurance Initiative of the Year” at the 2008 Review Worldwide Reinsurance
Awards.
13. M. Dillon, ‘Governing through Contingency: The Security of Biopolitical Governance’, Political
Geography 26 (2007) p. 45. “Government” refers here to mechanisms used to shape the conduct of
persons and groups; it is concerned with the conduct of conduct, to use Foucault’s famous phrase.
See, for example, N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1999); A. Agrawal, ‘Environmentality: Community, Intimate Government, and the Making
of Environmental Subjects in Kumaon, India’, Current Anthropology 46/2 (2005) pp. 161–190.
14. M. Dillon, ‘Underwriting Security’, Security Dialogue 39/3 (2008) pp. 309–332; M. Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan
2007).
15. M. Dillon and L. Lobo-Guerrero, ‘Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: An Introduction’,
Review of International Studies 34 (2008) pp. 265–292.
16. On the effects of “development,” see, for example, J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine:
“Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press 1990); A. Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995); T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of
California Press 2002); J. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998).
17. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1987).
18. M. Duffield, ‘Global Civil War: The Non-Insured, International Containment and Post-
Interventionary Society’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21/2 (2008) pp. 145–165.
19. P. Schwartz and D. Randell, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United
States National Security (Washington, DC: Environmental Media Services 2003); Campbell et al. (note 3);
see also the contributions in the special issue of Political Geography 26/6 (2007).
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 559

20. Concise summaries can be found in J. Barnett and W. N. Adger, ‘Climate Change, Human
Security, and Violent Conflict’, Political Geography 26/6 (2007) pp. 639–655; and J. Barnett, ‘Security and
Climate Change’, Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) pp. 7–17. Schubert et al. (note 3) offer a more
in-depth summary.
21. UNFCCC (note 6).
22. The Fourth IPCC report provides overviews of research concerning both mitigation and adap-
tation. See IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: Contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III to
the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Geneva: IPCC 2007).
23. J. Linnerooth-Bayer, M. Mace, and R. Verheyen, with K. Compton, ‘Insurance-Related Actions
and Risk Assessment in the Context of the UNFCCC’, background paper for UNFCCC workshops, 2003.
24. I. Lorenzoni, N. Pidgeon, and R. O’Connor, ‘Dangerous Climate Change: The Role for Risk
Research’, Risk Analysis 25 (2005) pp. 1387–1398; J. Linnerooth-Bayer and R. Mechler, ‘Insurance for
Assisting Adaptation to Climate Change in Developing Countries: A Proposed Strategy’, Climate Policy
6/6 (2006), pp. 621–636; P. Hoeppe and E. Guerenko, ‘Scientific and Economic Rationales for Innovative
Climate Insurance Solutions’, Climate Policy 6/6 (2006) pp. 607–620.
25. World Bank, ‘Project Appraisal Document on a Proposed Grant in the Amount of SDR 6 Million
(US$9 Million Equivalent) to the Republic of Haiti for a Haiti Catastrophe Insurance Project’, World Bank
Report No. 38540-HT (2007); UNDP, Reducing (note 6).
26. UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), Adaptation and Vulnerability to Climate Change: The
Role of the Financial Sector (Geneva: UNEP Finance Initiative 2006); World Bank, Natural Hazard
(note 6).
27. UNEP (note 26); UNFCCC (note 6).
28. See the contributions in the special issues of Risk Analysis 25/6 (2005) and Climate Policy 6/6
(2006).
29. C. Bals, K. Warner, and S. Butzengeiger, ‘Insuring the Uninsurable: Design Options for a Climate
Change Funding Mechanism’, Climate Policy 6/6 (2006) pp. 637–647; Hoeppe and Guerenko (note 24);
Linnerooth-Bayer and Mechler (note 24).
30. E. Mills, ‘Insurance as an Adaptation Strategy for Extreme Weather Events in Developing
Countries and Economies in Transition: New Opportunities for Public-Private Partnerships’, Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory Report No. 52220 (2004); H. Kunreuther and J. Linnerooth-Bayer, ‘The
Financial Management of Catastrophic Flood Risks in Emerging Economy Countries’, Risk Analysis 23/3
(2003) pp. 627–639.
31. Mills (note 30).
32. World Bank, ‘Project Appraisal’ (note 25).
33. Freeman and Kunreuther (note 11).
34. A field-defining text here is P. Blaikie et al., At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability,
and Disasters (London: Routledge 1994).
35. S. Cutter, J. Mitchell, and M. Scott, ‘Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case
Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90/4
(2000) pp. 713–737; S. Cutter, B. Boruff, and W. L. Shirley, ‘Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards’,
Social Science Quarterly 84/2 (2003) pp. 242–261.
36. A “complex” account of hazards is defined here as a quantified and “objective” account
that moves beyond subjective experience of environmental threats. See S. Cutter, ‘The Vulnerability of
Science and the Science of Vulnerability’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93/1 (2003)
pp. 1–12.
37. B. L. Turner, R. Kasperson, P. Matson, J. McCarthy, R. Corell, L. Christensen, N. Eckley et al.,
‘A Framework for Vulnerability Analysis in Sustainability Science’, Proceedings of the National Academy
of Science 100/14 (2003) pp. 8074–8079; W. N. Adger, ‘Vulnerability’, Global Environmental Change 16
(2006) pp. 268–281.
38. B. L. Turner, P. Matson, J. McCarthy, R. Corell, L. Christensen, N. Eckley, G. Hovelsrud-Broda et
al., ‘Illustrating the Coupled Human-Environment System for Vulnerability Analysis: Three Case Studies’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 100/14 (2003) pp. 8080–8085.
39. For example, see S. Cutter et al., ‘Revealing the Vulnerability’ (note 35); also R. Leichenko
and K. O’Brien, ‘Is it Appropriate to Identify Winners and Losers?’, in W. N. Adger, J. Paavola,
S. Huq, and M. Mace (eds.), Fairness in Adaptation to Climate Change (Cambridge: MIT Press 2006);
M. Mace, ‘Adaptation under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: The International Legal
560 Kevin J. Grove

Framework’, in W. N. Adger, J. Paavola, S. Huq, and M. Mace (eds.), Fairness in Adaptation to Climate
Change (Cambridge: MIT Press 2006).
40. Campbell (note 9); Dalby, Environmental Security (note 1).
41. J. Huysmans, ‘Security! What Do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier’, European
Journal of International Relations 4/2 (1998) pp. 236–255; W. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic
Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1991); Dillon, Politics of
Security (note 9).
42. S. Dalby, ‘Security, Modernity, and Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security
Discourse’, Alternatives 17/1 (1992) pp. 95–131; Campbell (note 9).
43. Campbell (note 9); G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby, ‘Rethinking Geopolitics: Towards a Critical
Geopolitics’, in G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (New York: Routledge 1998);
K. Grove, ‘Rethinking the Nature of Urban Environmental Politics: Security, Subjectivity and the Non-
Human’, Geoforum 40/2 (2009) pp. 207–216.
44. I am referring here to Foucault’s discussion of domination in the final pages of his essay
‘The Subject and Power’. Here, Foucault argues that domination is a ‘strategic situation more or less
taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries’. The
unproblematised circulation of ‘domination’ as a description of power relations removes the strategic
element from these relations, limiting the possibilities for thinking resistance and enabling subjection
to particular forms of order. See M. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow
(eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1982).
45. On the value of critical research on contemporary environmental issues, see P. Wapner,
‘The Importance of Critical Environmental Studies in the New Environmentalism’, Global Environmental
Politics 8/1 (2008) pp. 6–13.
46. Dillon, Politics of Security (note 9).
47. Kaplan (note 1); M. Connolly and P. Kennedy, ‘Must it be the Rest Against the West?’, Atlantic
Monthly 274/6 (1994) pp. 61–84. Less alarmist accounts are provided by T. Homer-Dixon and J. Blitt
(eds.), Ecoviolence: Links Among Environment, Population and Security (Lanham: Rowand and Littlefield
1998).
48. Barnett, The Meaning (note 1); Dalby, Environmental Security (note 1).
49. See, for example, T. Homer-Dixon, ‘Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict’,
International Security 19/1 (1994) pp. 5–40; T. Homer-Dixon, ‘On the Threshold: Environmental Changes
as Causes of Acute Conflict’, International Security 16/2 (1991) pp.76–116. This can be seen as an exten-
sion of the “new wars” arguments of security studies in the 1990s, which suggested that following the
Cold War, internal conflict in the developing world had replaced inter-state conflict in the developed
world as the major threat to world order. According to this research, aid and development programmes
strengthen the ability of developing states to provide for their populations and maintain order, thus reduc-
ing the possibility of internal civil war. For a critical summary of these arguments, see M. Duffield, ‘Social
Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance’,
Development and Change 33/5 (2002) pp. 1049–1071.
50. See, for example, P. Meier, D. Bord, and J. Bond, ‘Environmental Influences on Pastoral Conflict
in the Horn of Africa’, Political Geography 26/6 (2007) pp. 716–735; C. Raleigh and H. Urdal, ‘Climate
Change, Environmental Degradation, and Armed Conflict’, Political Geography 26/6 (2007) pp. 674–694.
However, Floyd argues that the debates over environmental security in the 1990s are important for
climate change because they not only help think through the linkages between environmental change
and conflict, but also demonstrate potential pitfalls for approaching climate change as a security issue,
specifically that it could lead to policies that increase vulnerabilities of the poor and lead to further
environmental degradation. See R. Floyd, ‘The Environmental Security Debate and its Significance for
Climate Change’, The International Spectator 43/3 (2008) pp. 51–65.
51. S. Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War (New York: Guilford 1990); S. Dalby, ‘Critical
Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference, and Dissent’, Environment and Planning D-Society & Space 9/3 (1991)
pp. 261–283; G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: UMP 1996).
52. Dalby, Environmental Security (note 1).
53. Ibid.; see also G. Bankoff, ‘The Historical Geography of Disaster: ‘Vulnerability’ and
‘Local Knowledge’ in Western Discourse’, in G. Bankoff, G. Frerks, and D. Hilhorst (eds.), Mapping
Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People (London: Earthscan 2004).
54. Barnett, The Meaning (note 1); see also N. L. Peluso and M. Watts (eds.), Violent Environments
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2001).
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 561

55. M. Power, Rethinking Development Geographies (London: Routledge 2003); see also D. Slater,
‘The Geopolitical Imagination and the Enframing of Development Theory’, Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers NS18 (2003) pp. 419–437; Escobar (note 16).
56. Ó Tuathail (note 51).
57. See Power’s discussion of “developmentalism” in M. Power, ‘The Dissemination of
Development’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998) pp. 577–598; also D. Massey,
For Space (London: Sage 2005).
58. M. Watts, ‘Development and Governmentality’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24/1
(2003) pp. 6–34; also Power, ‘The Dissemination’ (note 57).
59. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (note 15); see also Campbell (note 9) and Dalby, Creating (note 51).
60. UNDP, Reducing (note 6) p. 39; see also UNFCCC (note 6) p. 12.
61. For examples, see C. Holling, ‘Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological and
Social Systems’, Ecosystems 4 (2001) pp. 390–405; C. Folke, S. Carpenter, T. Elmqvist, L. Gunderson, C.
Holling, and B. Walker, ‘Resilience and Sustainable Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a World
of Transformations’, Ambio 31/5 (2002) pp. 437–440.
62. On “ecopolitics,” see S. Dalby, ‘Ecological Metaphors of Security: World Politics in the
Biosphere’, Alternatives 23/3 (1998) pp. 291–319.
63. UNDP, A Climate Risk Management Approach to Disaster Reduction and Adaptation to Climate
Change, UNDP Expert Group Meeting: Integrating Disaster Reduction with Adaptation to Climate Change,
Havana, 19–21 June 2002, p. 11.
64. UNFCCC (note 6) p. 24.
65. UNDP, A Climate Risk (note 63) p. 1.
66. Dillon, ‘Underwriting Security’ (note 14).
67. M. Coleman and K. Grove, ‘Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Return of Sovereignty’, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009) pp. 489–507.
68. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (note 15).
69. Foucault, Security (note 14) pp. 55–79.
70. This discussion of life and risk draws heavily on Dillon’s excellent account of emergent life in
Dillon, ‘Underwriting Security’ (note 14).
71. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (note 15); Dillon, ‘Underwriting Security’ (note 14).
72. World Bank, Natural Hazard (note 6) p. 4.
73. Ibid., p. 5.
74. UNDP, A Climate Risk (note 63) pp. 8–10.
75. Foucault, Security (note 14).
76. Dilley et al., Natural Disaster (note 7) p. 111.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., p. 20.
79. UN, ‘Report of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction’ (Kobe, Hyogo, Japan), Jan.
2005, p. 10.
80. M. Dilley, R. Chen, U. Deichmann, A. Lerner-Lam, and M. Arnold, with J. Agwe, P. Buys, et
al. Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis. Synthesis Report (Washington, DC: The World Bank
2005) p. 15.
81. UNDP, Reducing (note 6) p. 2.
82. Ibid., p. 19.
83. These arguments are summarised in J. Sidaway, ‘Spaces of Post-Development’, Progress in
Human Geography 31/2 (2007) pp. 345–361; see also A. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in
Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press 2006).
84. Duffield, ‘Global Civil War’ (note 18); see also M. Duffield, ‘Development, Territories, and
People: Consolidating the External Sovereign Frontier’, Alternatives 32 (2007) pp. 225–246.
85. M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976 (New
York: Picador 2003); see also A. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality
and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press 1995); Coleman and Grove (note 67).
86. Luke, for example, argues that sustainable development reproduces the desire to consume
and thus extends the attachment to capitalist order. See T. Luke, ‘Neither Sustainable nor Development:
Reconsidering Sustainability in Development’, Sustainable Development 13 (2005) pp. 228–238. On sus-
tainable development and culture, see also Escobar (note 16). On the multiple registers of migration
and movement, see the discussions on “exodus” in C. Sandoval, The Methodology of the Oppressed
562 Kevin J. Grove

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000); and M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude (New York:
Penguin 2004).
87. World Bank, Poverty and Climate Change: Reducing the Vulnerability of the Poor through
Adaptation (Washington, DC: World Bank Group 2002) p. 1.
88. Escobar (note 16). On “apparatus”, see M. Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in C. Gordon
(ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon 1980).
89. Ferguson (note 16); Power, ‘The Dissemination’ (note 57).
90. For example, see Mitchell (note 16); Scott (note 16).
91. D. Slater, Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial (London: Routledge 2004); M. Coleman, ‘Thinking
about the World Bank’s ‘Accordion’ Geography of Financial Globalization’, Political Geography 21 (2002)
pp. 495–524; Duffield, ‘Global Civil War’ (note 18).
92. World Bank, Managing Climate Risk (note 7) p. 28.
93. See, for example, Ferguson (note 16); Mitchell (note 16).
94. World Bank, Poverty (note 87) p. v.
95. P. Freeman, L. Martin, R. Mechler, and K. Warner, with P. Hausmann, Catastrophes and
Development: Integrating Natural Catastrophes into Development Planning (Washington, DC: The World
Bank 2002), p. 43.
96. UNDP, Reducing (note 6) p. 24.
97. W. N. Adger, N. Arnell, and E. Tompkins. ‘Adapting to Climate Change: Perspectives Across
Scales’, Global Environmental Change 15 (2005) pp. 75–76.
98. W. N. Adger, ‘Social Capital, Collective Action, and Adaptation to Climate Change’, Economic
Geography 79/4 (2003) pp. 387–404; D. Hilhorst and G. Bankoff, ‘Introduction: Mapping Vulnerability’, In
G. Bankoff, G. Frerks, and D. Hilhorst (eds.), Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People
(London: Earthscan 2004).
99. This is a similar process to that which Escobar argues is at play in discourses on sustainable
development. For Escobar, sustainable development expands the development apparatus to include
environmentalists, for example through framing “green” consumption as the solution to environmental
degradation. Such strategies defuse one of the most potent challenges to development. See Escobar
(note 16).
100. UNDP, A Climate Risk (note 63) p. 6.
101. Freeman et al. (note 95) p. 35.
102. UNFCCC (note 6) p. 24.
103. Ibid., p. 12.
104. World Bank, Natural Hazard (note 6) p. 12.
105. E. Tompkins, A. Nicholson-Cole, L. Hurlston, E. Boyd, G. Brooks Hodge, J. Clarke, G. Gray,
et al., Surviving Climate Change in Small Islands: A Guidebook (Oxford: Tyndall Center for Climate
Change Research 2005) p. 31.
106. World Bank, Natural Hazard (note 6) p. 14.
107. Dilley et al., Natural Disaster Synthesis Report (note 80) p. 26.
108. Ibid., p. 38.
109. UNFCCC (note 6) p. 28.
110. UNMP, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millenium Development
Goals (New York: UNMP 2005) p. 49.
111. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this connection.
112. World Bank, Natural Hazard (note 6) p. 4.
113. L. Schipper and M. Pelling, ‘Disaster Risk, Climate Change and International Development:
Scope for, and Challenges to, Integration’, Disasters 30/1 (2006) pp. 19–38; E. L. Schipper, ‘Climate Change
Adaptation and Development: Exploring the Linkages’, Tyndall Center Working Paper 107 (2007).
114. UNFCCC (note 6) p. 5.
115. Mills (note 30) pp. 18–19.
116. UNFCCC (note 6) p. 27.
117. World Bank, Natural Hazard (note 6) p. 7.
118. World Bank, ‘Project Appraisal’ (note 25) p. 32.
119. Mills (note 30).
120. E. Guerenko, ‘Introduction and Executive Summary’, in E. Guerenko (ed.), Climate Change
and Insurance: Disaster Risk Financing in Developing Countries (London: Earthscan 2006); Linnerooth-
Bayer and Mechler (note 24).
 Insuring “Our Common Future?” 563

121. UN, ‘Report’ (note 79) p. 14.

122. World Bank, Poverty (note 87) p. 29.
123. Tompkins et al. (note 105) p. 76.
124. R. Vakis, ‘Complementing Natural Disasters Management: The Role of Social Protection’, World
Bank Discussion Paper no. 0543 (2006) p. 5.
125. Tompkins et al. (note 105) p. 93.
126. UNFCCC (note 6) p. 24.
127. J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997); J. Butler, Giving
an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press 2006); M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of
the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Picador 2005).
128. J. Hyndman, ‘Towards a Feminist Geopolitics’, The Canadian Geographer 45 (2001)
pp. 210–222; J. Hyndman, ‘Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through
Geopolitics’, Political Geography 23/3 (2004) pp. 307–322. This type of research is exemplified by A.
Mountz, ‘Human Smuggling, the Transnational Imaginary, and Everyday Geographies of the Nation-State’,
Antipode 35/3 (2003) pp. 622–644.