Insuring “Our Common Future?” Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of Environmental Security

Abstract

Dire warnings on the “dangers” of climate change are reinvigorating 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 volumes 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 adaptation 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 argument here is twofold. First, I suggest that risk management and catastrophe insurance have political effects: these biopolitical technologies 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 environmental change. In securing “sustainable development,” discourses on 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.