Inscriptions of resilience: Bond ratings and the government of climate risk in Greater Miami, Florida

Savannah Cox

Environment and Planning A, 2022, vol. 54, issue 2, 295-310

Abstract: In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What “counts†as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them.

Keywords: Resilience; bond ratings; climate governance; environmental fixes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X211054162 (text/html)

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:sae:envira:v:54:y:2022:i:2:p:295-310

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X211054162

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().