Underinsurance as adaptation: Household agency in places of marketisation and financialisation

Abstract

The underinsurance of property is pervasively and persuasively promoted as an indicator of risk and riskiness and, in Western nations, is assumed to be aligned with socio-economic disadvantage. Yet, the solution – in its most simple form, buying more insurance – lacks critical interrogation of what the problem actually is. To understand underinsurance better, we map house and contents underinsurance across two municipalities in Australia’s island state of Tasmania, and observe that the existing delineation of disadvantage and advantage between these two places is muted in relation to insurance – underinsurance does not straightforwardly map onto disadvantage. We provide an alternative explanation: that underinsurance is not a risk for households per se and does not represent riskiness on behalf of these households. Rather, it is indicative of household agency that produces place-specified responses within the processes of financialisation and marketisation. We observe that the growth in renting, driven in part by housing financialisation, is associated with property underinsurance. The history of renting as temporary and marginal informs renter decision making not to insure, and thus current financialised changes in housing co-produce rather than ameliorate underinsurance. We also conclude that in negating or resisting insurance marketisation, households garner everyday financial and material adaptative capacity by underinsuring.

Critical insurance studies: Some geographic directions

“…Depending on where, when and what type of insurance, these may be government-owned insurance schemes that enact insurantial logics (see for example McAneney et al, 2016), public-private partnerships that constitute particular insurance technologies (see for example Christophers, 2019;Langley, 2006;Nance, 2015) or government regulation of insurers and insurance operations within a nation state (see for example ACCC, 2019). Governments may also promote private insurance as part of individualised risk and responsibilisation agendas, mobilising insurance rationale and logics in the process (Booth and Kendal, 2020).…”

“…In critical insurance studies, insurance is broadly recognised as spatially and temporally variegated (Booth and Harwood, 2016;Booth and Kendal, 2020), and as a spatially and temporally diverse agent in the co-constitution of everyday life (Ossandón, 2014). There is research grounded in different types of places: homes and households (e.g.…”

Firescapes of disruption: An absence of insurance in landscapes of fire

“…Rather, it is to acknowledge and work with both the critiques of romanticised accounts of landscape and, as canvassed below, the complex histories and politics that bring insurance into being and constitute the practice of insuring (e.g. Booth and Kendal, 2019;Ewald, 1991;French and Kneale, 2009;McFall, 2011;Zelizer, 2017). As Wylie (2009) observes, there is value in 'an account of landscape, matter and perception couched more explicitly in terms of absence, distance, displacement and the non-coincidence of self and world' (279).…”

“…Second, as Booth and Kendal (2019) observe, households play an important role in the process of marketisation, as well as financialisation. In exerting agency in the co-production of markets, households can choose to recognise a 'good' as valuable and meaningful in its pacified form (C¸alis¸kan and Callon, 2010), or resist or negate its pacification.…”

“…Insurance remains a key safety net in modern western life, and with governments in countries like Australia pursuing agendas of self-responsibilisation, its prominence appears to be growing (Booth and Kendal, 2019). In this context, it could be expected that insurance is more present than ever before -as up-to-date policies and/or in the hearts and minds of consumers.…”