Confronting uncertainties: the politics of anticipation

The emergence of insurance has a long history co-constructed with a changing politics of markets, states, and communities (Ewald 1991, 2020, Scoones 2024). As a commercial, market-based instrument based on an assessment of defined risks affecting individuals or specified groups into the future, insurance approaches – whether actuarial indemnity-based or parametric index-based1 Classic indemnity-based insurance pays out according to actual losses, with premiums calculated through actuarial assessments of the probabilities of such losses occurring. Index-based, parametric insurance pays out when an index, which is judged to correlate with expected losses, passes a certain threshold, irrespective of what actual losses are. – appear to offer a neat solution for risk governance at a distance, with limited direct state involvement (Greatrex et al. 2015, Mobarak and Rosenzweig 2013). The technical design features, such as actuarial population statistics or index-assessment using satellite imagery (of crop failure or rangeland condition, for example), and the associated predictive models offer a sense of technocratic rigour, allowing prediction and managerial control.

In the context of neoliberal development policies, marketized, individualised practices are encouraged over state-led policies; here the accountabilities lie in the contract relationship and the insurance market, and trust is engendered through the technocratic design of the system. New relationships are generated between particular subjects (the insured) and defined objects (hazards), creating identities around those who are insured and those who are not (O’Malley 1996, Johnson 2013, Elliot 2021). With insurance, the politics of anticipation is therefore centred on calculable risk and an individualised marketized system, generating an imaginary of a controlled, managed, modern, and open-ended future, where catastrophes are insured against and modernising progress ensues, while the insurer can generate a profit from the process. Governmentalities are exerted through the actuarial logics of liabilities, risk indices, and indemnities (O’Malley 1996, cf. Foucault 2008), while anticipation allows for intervention to prevent disasters through pre-emptive anticipatory action, precautionary policy, and preparedness and contingency planning (Anderson 2010, Lakoff 2010), sometimes in the context of an ‘emergency’ (Collier & Lakoff 2015).

Of course, embedded in the neat designs and technocratic practices are multiple assumptions, generating huge uncertainties. Despite improved models of climate dynamics at the broadest scale, downscaled estimates are always uncertain (Ericksen et al. 2013). And the mismatch between assessment of an index and the actual experienced conditions on the ground may be large depending on the quality of the insurance contract design (Johnson 2013, Johnson et al. 2023, Reeves 2017). In the commercial design of insurance systems, risks and costs are taken on by the insured populations, creating skewed accountabilities and responsibilities in an uneven power dynamic governed by a profit-making imperative. Contests over contract terms, disputes about model outcomes and different opinions about appropriate premiums invariably emerge. Struggles over negotiated futures are inevitable, given the uncertainties emerging: not only from the nature of the insurance mechanism but also from intersecting uncertainties – even complete surprises – that people regularly face.

Insurance approaches, defined by a liberal, long-term view of anticipated futures and a framing around risk (where probabilities of future events are known or can be predicted), can however hide alternative, less visible perspectives, more accepting of uncertainty (where futures cannot be predicted) or ignorance (where we don’t know what we don’t know) (Stirling 2010, Scoones and Stirling 2020, Scoones 2024). In confronting uncertainty and ignorance, practised adaptive responses are required, linked to a networked sharing of knowledge and learning from experience; processes that are more grounded in incremental, locally driven, and collective approaches. No single plan is possible, but multiple options must be explored. Failure is expected and redundancy in design is often required, in case one part of the system fails. Reliability in the face of uncertain events therefore must emerge from tracking between the scanning of wider horizons and real-time responses on the ground (cf. Roe and Schulman 2008).

Local, culturally-embedded forms of moral economy – where uncertainties are addressed collectively, allowing the redistribution of risks and benefits – are informed by a different set of logics to insurance. Logics of subsistence, care, mutuality, and solidarity are observed, for example, and these in turn are co-constructed with a particular politics (Scott 1977, Edelman 2012). In more collective responses to risk and uncertainty, accountabilities are more horizontal and trust is built through social relationships. Such local redistributive moral economy responses are inevitably influenced by class, gender, age, ethnicity, and other forms of social difference, even as they deploy narratives of inclusion and equity. Understandings of possible futures and their anticipation, in turn, may be influenced by local standing, types of education, religious and cultural beliefs, and the influence of social networks beyond the locality.

In sum, the politics of anticipation depends on the framing of the challenge (between defined risks or broader, intersecting uncertainties, even ignorance); the techniques and practices involved (between actuarial statistics, index assessment and models, and more contingent social knowledges and learning); the accountability relationships that exist (between being reliant on an insurance contract and on horizontal social relationships) and the imaginaries of the future that are so co-constructed (between a singular, individual, marketized, controlled vision of ‘modernizing’ progress and a more collective, mutualist, caring vision of multiple alternatives).

In the next two sections we explore the experiences of responding to risk and uncertainty among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia (Borana) and northern Kenya (Isiolo), contrasting approaches to index-based livestock insurance and wider collective responses rooted in local moral economies, with the aim of drawing out the contrasting politics of anticipation in each case and their implications.