Disaster financialisation: the production of financialised space and everyday life in post-earthquake Nepal

Philippe Le Billon, Dinesh Paudel and Katharine Rankin

Chapter 20 in Handbook on Financialisation and Space, 2026, pp 354-372 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter develops the concept of disaster financialisation to explore the expansion of financial logics, processes, and infrastructure into post-disaster spaces, particularly in subsistence economies. Building on scholarship in geography, we define disaster financialisation as the increasing role of financial actors, markets, and logics in disaster prevention, relief, reconstruction, and recovery. We highlight how the global financial infrastructure of capital markets and circuits of finance penetrate disaster-affected regions, integrating households into cash-based economies and institutionalised debt relations. Using a conjunctural approach, we examine the relational and multi-scalar dynamics that shape these processes, and in so doing emphasise the contingent convergence of actors, materialities, and socio-temporal forces. Empirically we focus on the 2015 Nepal earthquakes to illustrate how disaster financialisation operates as a site of contradiction and conjunctural instability, and thus offers insights into the broader planetary expansion of financial capital amid intensifying socio-environmental disasters.

Keywords: Disaster Financialisation; Earthquake; Nepal; Reconstruction; Subjectivities; Geoeconomics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035328628
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035328635.00032 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:23133_20

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().