Who Pays for the Next Wave? The American Welfare State and Responsibility for Flood Risk

Rebecca Elliott

Politics & Society, 2017, vol. 45, issue 3, 415-440

Abstract: In preparing for and responding to natural hazards and disasters, the welfare state establishes a social contract, distributing responsibilities for what will be collectively managed and what will be individually borne. Drawing on archival, interview, and ethnographic data, this article examines the renegotiation of that social contract through the lens of contested efforts to reform the massively indebted US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) from 2011 to 2014. In the face of a morally charged debate about deservingness and individual choice, Congress passed legislation that committed to incorporating need-based considerations to the NFIP for the first time. The result defined “deservingness†in terms of ability to pay for risk exposure, qualifying an individualization of responsibility for addressing the problem of flood loss—a problem that might instead demand broader risk sharing, particularly as climate change worsens the threat of flooding.

Keywords: welfare state; flood insurance; risk; moral economy; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329217714785 (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:polsoc:v:45:y:2017:i:3:p:415-440

DOI: 10.1177/0032329217714785

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().