Insurance, and the prospects of insurability

Insurance is commonly assumed to be a benign financial tool in the distribution and management of risk, premised on a singular and universal logic. Geographers, amongst others, have been instrumental in unpacking the insurantial ‘black-box’ created by such assumptions, providing differentiated explanations for the form and function of insurance and exploring associated temporal and spatial variegations of affect, morality and politics. In this chapter, I review three broad categories of insurance research – self, property and climate – and cover themes of insurer sustainability, the uneven distribution of power between insurers and publics, and the fallacy of insurance-enabled equity, freedom and security. A focus on insurability draws attention to its excesses – both how insurability necessitates and is necessitated by non-insurability and how insurability is manifest through distributed agencies and not simply through insurer ontologies and epistemologies. I propose a Rancièrian imaginary for understanding associated schisms, limitations and contradictions in insurance logics; that these signify the possibility of ‘politics proper’ in financializing societies where insurance can appear so normalized as to be a natural given. Climate discourses and practices are constituting novel insurantial orderings and emerging spatial variegations draw attention to the prospects of insurability – that these lie with ‘places within climates’ and not, per se, with how insurers respond and adapt to climate uncertainty.