Leigh Johnson | University of Oregon (original) (raw)

Papers by Leigh Johnson

Environment and Planning A, 2002

The editors of Environment and Planning A would like to announce that the Ashby Prizes for the mo... more The editors of Environment and Planning A would like to announce that the Ashby Prizes for the most innovative papers published in the journal in the year 2013 have been awarded to Leigh Johnson for her paper "Index insurance and the articulation of risk-bearing subjects" and to Mark Graham and Matthew Zook for their paper "Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the web". Both papers have been made open access. Leigh Johnson: Though it may remain invisible to most readers, an orange dust has accumulated in the folds of this paper. This is the fine dust that swirls off the ground in the drylands of Northern Kenya and somehow makes its way into everything taken there. It takes up residence in creases and crannies and follows one around months or years later. But, you say, this paper is not expressly about Kenya, and there is only glancing reference to pastoralists! Admittedly, there is no dust of this color on the streets of Zurich or in the halls of the international meeting venues where most of the research for this piece was conducted. Yet still, I see it here. This paper was written in an attempt to understand how the logic of climate risk management is transposed from centers of calculation, such as Zurich and Washington, DC, to rural farmers and pastoralists in dispersed index insurance pilot project sites around the globe. In index insurance programs, a payout is based on a proxy environmental variable such as rainfall, soil moisture, or pasture greenness rather than the actual losses experienced by the farmer or pastoralist. Index-based coverage ostensibly promises a clever technological fix to the problems of costly claims adjudication and thin insurance penetration in agricultural markets in the Global South, and is increasingly invoked as a tool to help small producers cope with climate change. In this piece I argue that many index insurance pilots targeting the intensification and scaling-up of smallholder cultivation should be understood as attempts to expand risk-bearing capital and assimilate semisubsistence modes of production within global agricultural commodity circuits through the creation of 'risk-bearing subjects'. Such financial subjects bear, above all, the risk that the loss they experience may not correlate with the index on which the insurance contract is settled. This risk is justified by a neo-Malthusian appeal to the limits to growth and the need to rationalize and intensify agricultural production, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet, as a colleague familiar with my earlier work pointed out, when it comes to the question of social protection-oriented index insurance schemes, I hedge. I leave open the ambivalences of the form, suggesting both the peril and distant possibilities entailed by instruments that are, in essence, weather derivatives. And hence, that dust.

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2018

This editorial provides an analytical intervention to accompany the theme issue’s empirical paper... more This editorial provides an analytical intervention to accompany the theme issue’s empirical papers on “Rethinking the Financialization of Nature.” The papers turn our attention towards three often neglected themes in prior research on finance and nature: (1) the frictional processes through which money leverages nature and resource-based ventures to produce more money (“Getting between M-C-M’”); (2) the role played by moralities, values, and affect in the financialization of nature and resistance levelled against it; and (3) the multiple roles of the state in mediating the circulation of finance in and through nature. We also engage with the politics of information and legitimation accompanying the financialization of nature to tease out levers for political critique. Finally, we map out a forward-looking agenda calling for research to engage more substantially with both the methodological questions accompanying the study of the financialization of nature, and the class dimensions o...

The Journal of Development Studies, 2018

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2015

The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 2013

Despite donor enthusiasm for index-based microinsurance, globally, pilots have struggled to reali... more Despite donor enthusiasm for index-based microinsurance, globally, pilots have struggled to realise its promises. This paper considers the Kenyan Index-Based Livestock Insurance pilot, investigating the competing expectations held by actors including (re)insurers, researchers, donors, NGOs, and pastoralists. We explore expectations' impacts on partner involvement, project outcomes, sales, and the future outlook for Kenyan livestock insurance. Quantitative analysis suggests early demand and subsequent backlash were not results of systematic mis-selling, but rather stemmed from clients' unfulfilled expectations of patron-like relationships with insurance partners. We caution against exaggerated expectations of profitability and call for reflection and transparency amidst the embrace of insurance tools.

This paper chronicles 15 years of experimentation with index insurance as a technology of weather... more This paper chronicles 15 years of experimentation with index insurance as a technology of weather risk governance, particularly as applied to vulnerable agricultural populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Index insurancein which payouts are determined by environmental variables rather than direct loss inspectionhas become a preeminent method with which development actors propose to manage climate vulnerability, despite problems of low demand and inaccurate loss indemnification. These challenges have prompted expert revisioning of the appropriate agents, risks and pools for index-based cover. Contrary to neoliberal individualization, indices have recently been used to constitute broader scales for welfare and humanitarian interventions. Yet, difficulties at even the largest-scaled pool suggest the impossibility of democratizing risk without transforming the terms on which the global adversely selected are offered coverage.

The Politics of Uncertainty (eds Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling), Routledge, 2020

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The heterodox literature on financial risk has in recent years focused predominantly on how risk ... more The heterodox literature on financial risk has in recent years focused predominantly on how risk is distributed, and on the market instabilities and social inequalities that different risk distributions seed. Typically much less discussed is the constitution of financial risk, which is this article’s concern. Drawing empirical examples from two climate financial instruments, its particular interest is in the changing scale – social, spatial and temporal – of the “risk pools” associated with different financial products: the populations across which the products in question serve to aggregate underlying risk. The article explores how, against a historical backdrop of four decades of scale compression in the shape of risk individualization under neoliberalism, certain novel climate financial products seemingly indicate a contrary stretching of the risk pool. The article critically examines sovereign catastrophe insurance pools and green (climate) bonds, highlighting both the significa...

Environment and Planning A (Online First), 2015

This paper investigates the scales and temporalities through which climate change impacts may be ... more This paper investigates the scales and temporalities through which climate change impacts may be rendered into socio-ecological fixes for crises of overaccumulation within the (re)insurance industry. The property insurance and catastrophe reinsurance sectors are notorious for their cyclicity, with prices and returns oscillating dramatically between ‘‘soft’’ and ‘‘hard’’ markets. The problem of overaccummulation in soft market periods is often resolved by the destruction of reinsurers’ capital reserves through huge catastrophic losses. This is typically followed by the revision of catastrophe models and reestimation of exposed values, processes which absorb additional (re)insurance capital and provide technoscientific legitimacy for raising rates. Reframing climate change risk in terms of ecologically-sourced devaluation suggests that, rather than posing an immediate existential threat, in the short to medium term the uncertain impacts of global climate change might constitute a recurrent ‘‘catastrophic fix’’ for particular segments of financial capital. This highlights both the productivity of uncertainty about climate change impacts and the limits of presuming that the operations of the private insurance market can produce a built environment more adapted to climate change. Rather, the more likely outcome is splintering protectionism: a patchwork of high risk, high reward areas where insurance is available only to those with the ability to pay rising premiums, leaving the state to manage the retreat and relocation of less remunerative properties and populations.

This article analyzes the drivers and implications of catastrophe bonds’ growing popularity as an... more This article analyzes the drivers and implications of catastrophe bonds’ growing popularity as an alternative asset class. As investor demand for bonds outpaces their supply from reinsurers, the study asks how the place-based physical vulnerabilities of fixed capital have been rendered into assets deemed increasingly desirable by growing blocks of financial capital. Combining data from extended interviews with industry datasets and market reports, I demonstrate how this securitization pathway allows mobile capital on a search for yield to reframe spatial liabilities as tradable assets, thus accessing new “returns on place”. By aggregating and analyzing data on approximately $37 billion in catastrophe bond transactions since 1997, the study reveals both the ongoing concentration of capital in so-called “peak perils” such as U.S. hurricane and earthquake risks, and the fragmentation and recombination of peak perils to create new risk/return profiles. These purposive, scalable, and selective financial engagements with catastrophic risks depend upon the avoidance of the fixed costs and relational entanglements borne by (re)insurers. This ambivalent relationship with geographical liabilities is reaching its logical apogee in recent proposals to expand the catastrophe bond market to capitalize on growing climate change risks. This movement to “underwrite to securitize” intentionally emulates the “originate to securitize” model pioneered in mortgage-backed securities. I argue that such developments could ultimately yield a built environment that is both more dependent on the state as an insurer of last resort and less adapted to climate extremes.

Subterranean Estates: Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas

perfect hedge A hedge where the change in the price or rate of the hedging device is exactly cont... more perfect hedge A hedge where the change in the price or rate of the hedging device is exactly contrary to the change in the price of the underlying. Every hedger's dream. -Oxford Handbook of International Financial Terms, 1997

Environment and Planning A 45 (11): 2663 – 2681, Nov 2013

In the last decade a growing number of efforts have been made to insure the weather-related produ... more In the last decade a growing number of efforts have been made to insure the weather-related production risks of rural agricultural households in the Global South via microinsurance contracts linked to environmental indices. Such index insurance products are increasingly championed for their ostensible capacity to decrease vulnerability, ‘crowd in’ rural credit, and increase productive risk taking. This paper presents an empirical and theoretical framework for understanding the explosion of these projects, demonstrating that the formation of financial consumer subjects who are themselves agricultural producers is an emerging and consequential process within the dynamics of (dis)articulation. Rather than being hindered by the absence of the real subsumption of land or labor to capital, the derivative nature of the index insurance form—offering only the possibility of remuneration instead of indemnification of loss—makes it especially well suited to operating in precisely such conditions on the edges of (non)market relations.

Antipode Intervention Symposium: Explosive Geographies, May 20, 2013

Schadenspiegel is the title of an extraordinary biannual meditation on damage and loss published ... more Schadenspiegel is the title of an extraordinary biannual meditation on damage and loss published by the German reinsurance giant Munich Re. The magazine, intended for an audience of insurance claims managers, painstakingly chronicles underestimated or unexpected sources of losses emerging in the industry and suggests how to stem the tide. Its topics are remarkable precisely because they are often not particularly spectacular; recent issues have detailed

Geoforum (45): 30-40, Jan 1, 2013

a b s t r a c t This paper uses the example of catastrophe bonds to investigate how exposures to ... more a b s t r a c t This paper uses the example of catastrophe bonds to investigate how exposures to geophysical, biological, and meteorological catastrophic events are constituted as securitizable and exchangeable financial risks in the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market. It discusses the techniques of catastrophe modeling as a pivotal mobile methodology for the calculation and creation of contingent assets out of the fabric of insured environmental and financial vulnerabilities. Catastrophe models are shown to enable economic exchange of contingent futures belonging to ontologically and geographically disparate orders. Pension funds are then introduced to illustrate how biological lives and retirement savings have become deeply entangled in the creation and extension of the ILS market. Pension funds are both major institutional investors in catastrophe bonds and also the principal sellers of ''longevity risk'' posed by pensioners. The extent to which labor both profits from and embodies securitized insurance risks illustrates the growing importance and ambivalence of contingency as a modality of accumulation and rule.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Jan 1, 2010