| Summary: | Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017. === Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. === Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-309). === Climate change, technological innovation, and financialization are three of the most transformative processes shaping spatial planning and policymaking. Yet, each of these macro-structural processes and their consequences are experienced in the short-term and at geographically-specific scales. In the context of planning, financialization needs to be better understood to evaluate its actual processes and consequences through in-depth analyses of specific cases. Since 2007, India's weather insurance programs have become the largest in the world offering farmers access to new financial instruments and automated technologies to manage the increasing risks of agricultural cultivation. Insurance has come to be seen as a systematic response to the increasing impacts of drought and flooding since the green revolution and an agrarian crisis that has witnessed over 300,000 farmers commit suicide between 1995-2015. In this dissertation, I ask how and why insurance, which never played a significant role several decades ago, has come to be a central planning strategy for agricultural policymakers, outpacing all other government expenditure in the form of premium subsidies. I study the development of weather insurance programs in India and examine implementation across four major agricultural states-Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Punjab-to show how risk transfer in the agricultural sector has been increasingly financialized, with a growing dependence on new derivative instruments and the rising penetration of international reinsurance capital. The overarching research questions motivating my dissertation include: how does the introduction of new insurance policies, financial instruments, and weather technologies impact the agrarian landscape? how do these insurance programs define and measure risk? what are the spatial dimensions of insurance, its variation and its coverage? what is the importance of these developments in terms of how agricultural risk gets financialized for long-term planning as well as political contestation? and what it means to plan for weather risk and climate change in a context of the rapid churning of technologies and the financialization of risk? In my research methodology, I employ granular analysis of actors, agents, and actions, while paying attention to structural positions, systemic rationalities, and recurrent patterns. I conducted interviews with over 40 insurance professionals, underwriters and government experts as well as with 60 farmers and local officials in four states - West Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. I used archival and document analyses as well as spatial analysis of insurance business data to understand and explain spatial variation in policy implementation and outcomes. Amidst the numerous scholarly debates about the role of finance and meaning of financialization, the spatial dimensions of risk and financialization are not well understood. Through my research, I explain financialization of weather risk through an analysis of underwriting methodologies for actuarial models, financial instruments, and automated weather technologies. I show how complexities and shifts in seasonal geographies and temporalities further complicate the extent to which harm, loss, risk can be correlated with financial precision and pricing. I argue that the speed of convergence towards automated and index-based systems has been followed by the disempowerment of farmers who have trouble disputing the terms and eligibility of coverage especially in the case of index insurance contracts, where disputes related to measurement errors and manipulation have had a significant negative effect on adoption, with many states and insurers reducing their offering of such policies. I further argue that the rise of the financialization of risk in the agricultural sector in particular is concurrent with the ascent of a global fast policy environment since the 1970s that facilitates iterative and experimental development of actuarial systems along transnational policy circuits. I contribute archival and empirical findings to show that Indian agricultural policy has witnessed a shift in focus away from the distribution of land, infrastructure, and productivity that were important in post-independence India and the Green Revolution, towards new forms of "riskholding" in the post-Green Revolution period, in which the government focuses on the ways in which the financial risks of agricultural producers are managed and transferred. In my comparative examination of the four states, I show that while insurance mitigates some forms of inequality through subsidies, structural inequalities as a function of inherited landholding disparities and landlessness are reinforced. My overall contention is that agricultural planning and policymaking, specifically through insurance, shifts resources away from longer-term considerations of addressing inequalities of assets such as land and capital, towards the problems of "riskholding," which constitutes a new dimension of differentiation that, in effect, magnifies the salience of short-term financial risk and risk hedging strategies instead of agricultural investment and infrastructure development. Finally, I find that financial risk in its various forms is becoming politicized in ways that are not accounted for in the current literature. I use my case studies to contribute to the literature on the financialization of agriculture (via an intervention in the ongoing debate on the "agrarian question") with a focus on the ways in which insurance subsidies, electoral politics and debt-based mobilization are a manifestation of a more broad-based politics of financialization. The politicization of financial risk ultimately upends the actuarial approach through state-specific variations in implementation through insurance subsidies and loan waivers as electoral strategies. These newly emergent systems are hierarchical and unevenly empower risk capital and new forms of actuarial automation, while risk capital markets and technologies are reshaping the context of planning and the ways weather indicators and indexes are defined and calculated. Furthermore, the uncertainty and severity of climate variability through unseasonal rainfall, drought, flooding, and disease present complex challenges for the very viability of agricultural production that are not adequately addressed through the insurance program, but may in fact, temporarily mask these processes through continued and pervasive ecological extraction and indebtedness. Ultimately, insurance is an incomplete mathematical (actuarial) technology for planning because it assumes fixed aggregate risks and non-correlation of risks. More than the mathematical possibilities and constraints of insurance, new models may show the potential for anti-neoliberal forms of decentralization in insurance and financialization through blockchain and other distributed technology for mutual, peer-to-peer risk management. === by Alpen Suresh Sheth. === Ph. D.
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