Abstract

How is knowledge about future climate change operationalized in governance of the present? This paper addresses this question by examining efforts to repurpose the US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for climate change adaptation. Policymakers and officials initially imagined the challenge to be principally a technical one of accounting for uncertainty in risk assessments and insurance tools. But the conduct and outcome of their efforts reflected instead politically charged normative tensions related to the temporality of climate ethics. NFIP policyholders, constituted as a ‘risk public’ by the instruments of flood insurance, exposed these tensions in mobilizations targeting practices of risk governance. The case shows that practices of ‘accounting for’ climate change and governing it through insurance work out—in however tentative or provisional a fashion—larger moralized disputes over the distribution of burdens, benefits and responsibilities over time.

摘要

在当前的治理中如何运用有关未来气候变化的知识？本文通过研究将美国国家洪水保险计划（NFIP）重新适应气候变化的努力来解决这个问题。决策者和官员最初认为，挑战主要是解决风险评估和保险工具中的不确定性的技术性挑战。但是他们的努力的行为和结果反而反映了与气候伦理的时间性有关的政治上的规范张力。由洪水保险工具构成“风险公众”的NFIP保单持有人在针对风险治理实践的动员中暴露了这些压力。