Risky Ventures: Financial Inclusion, Risk Management and the Uncertain Rise of Index-Based Insurance

Abstract

Conceptualizing development in terms of risk management has become a prominent feature of mainstream development discourse. This has led to a convergence between the rubrics of financial inclusion and risk management whereby improved access for poor households to private sector credit, insurance and savings products is represented as a necessary step toward building “resilience.” This convergence, however, is notable for a shallow understanding of the production and distribution of risks. By naturalizing risk as an inevitable product of complex systems, the approach fails to interrogate how risk is produced and displaced unevenly between social groups. Ignoring the structural and relational dimensions of risk production leads to an overly technical approach to risk management that is willfully blind to the intersection of risk and social power. A case study of the promotion of index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia – held as a model for innovative risk management via financial inclusion – is used to indicate the tensions and contradictions of this projected synthesis of development and risk management.

Citation

Taylor, M. (2016), "Risky Ventures: Financial Inclusion, Risk Management and the Uncertain Rise of Index-Based Insurance", Risking Capitalism (Research in Political Economy, Vol. 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 237-266. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0161-723020160000031013