Conclusion
There is an easy appeal to the managerial logics of index-based insurance as a route to dealing with defined, calculable risk. Commercialisation of the product means that protections can be offered through the market at a distance. The state equally can streamline its operations, reducing costs and increasing efficiencies, by offering generalised social protection through such market mechanisms, even if not on a commercial basis. The idea of an open-ended future that can be anticipated, prepared for, and responded to with a clear mechanism of course neatly fits the progressive, modernist narrative of development, hence the wide appeal of index-based livestock insurance among states and development agencies.
Yet such an approach is clearly limiting, as some promoters of insurance products admit (Clarke and Dercon 2009). Much relies on the ability to reduce uncertainties to risks and to calculate these, apportioning impacts spatially through remotely-sensed images to gear pay-outs to individuals. The assumptions in the models guiding index-based systems are legion, and sometimes come unstuck, with political adjustments being required (Johnson et al. 2019, 2023). In practice, despite the promotional rhetoric, commercial systems of index-based insurance do not provide uniform coverage, and there are inevitable lacunae with some unable to or unwilling to make use of the product.
Insurance, like any other financialised, marketized product, is therefore inevitably political, with winners and losers. In the case of index-based livestock insurance in Ethiopia and Kenya, it is asset rich, better connected, and more diversified (male) herd owners who are the major beneficiaries. An insurance product creates an imaginary of an anticipated, manageable future, but it is only those who have the luxury to control it who ultimately benefit.
While insurance constructs a particular type of future, through the interventions of the state, the market and financial capital, others must confront the future and its attendant uncertainties in other ways. Those constrained by the violence of structural vulnerabilities – the poor and marginalised, very often women or young people without assets – must respond in a more mundane, regularised everyday way to the intersecting uncertainties of, for example, climate, conflict, disease, and market variability. Here, as we have shown for our two sites, social relationships, networks, and mutual solidarities become essential and temporal horizons are narrowed in a more adaptive, flexible approach rooted in diverse and differentiated moral economies and contrasting knowledges and practices (see also Johnson et al. 2023).
This is not an argument to glorify and unthinkingly celebrate the local and the indigenous, but to recognise that there are different frames through which risk and uncertainty are understood and different conditions of relative privilege and vulnerability that allow responses to emerge. None are right or wrong, but some have more power and influence, and associated resources, and others are less visible, more intangible, and less influential.
Accepting and appreciating the differences, as outlined in very schematic form in Table 11.1, allows us to avoid the attempt to assert a singular future, rooted in ‘colonizing’ assumptions of modernity, progress, and managerial control, and usually favouring the already rich and powerful (usually men). Instead, in thinking about ‘future-making’ in the drylands – and in rural settings in Africa more generally – it is important to accept more humility (Jasanoff 2007, 2010) and explore other imaginaries of the future (see Scoones 2024), which are rooted in more diverse framings, contrasting temporalities, and socially contingent moral economies, where uncertainty and ignorance are embraced and not reduced to calculable risk.