Who Pays for the Next Wave? The American Welfare State and Responsibility for Flood Risk

• Date: 01 September 2017
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329217714785
• Author: Rebecca Elliott
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329217714785

Politics & Society

2017, Vol. 45(3) 415 –440

© 2017 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329217714785

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Article

Who Pays for the Next

Wave? The American Welfare

State and Responsibility

for Flood Risk

Rebecca Elliott

London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract

In preparing for and responding to natural hazards and disasters, the welfare state

establishes a social contract, distributing responsibilities for what will be collectively

managed and what will be individually borne. Drawing on archival, interview, and

ethnographic data, this article examines the renegotiation of that social contract

through the lens of contested efforts to reform the massively indebted US National

Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) from 2011 to 2014. In the face of a morally charged

debate about deservingness and individual choice, Congress passed legislation that

committed to incorporating need-based considerations to the NFIP for the first

time. The result defined “deservingness” in terms of ability to pay for risk exposure,

qualifying an individualization of responsibility for addressing the problem of flood

loss—a problem that might instead demand broader risk sharing, particularly as

climate change worsens the threat of flooding.

Keywords

welfare state, flood insurance, risk, moral economy, climate change

Corresponding Author:

Rebecca Elliott, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton

Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.

Email: r.elliott1@lse.ac.uk

714785PASXXX10.1177/0032329217714785Politics & SocietyElliott

research-article2017

416 Politics & Society 45(3)

Through governance of natural hazards and disasters, states play a central role in keep-

ing people safe and in helping them recover economically in the event of catastrophe.

In doing so, they establish a kind of social contract, determining what will be collec-

tively managed and what will be individually borne. How that balance is struck

depends, in part, on the relative strength of moral claims for solidarity from fellow citi-

zens and taxpayers. In this article, I examine the renegotiation of that social contract

through the lens of contested efforts to reform the US National Flood Insurance

Program (NFIP) from 2011 to 2014. In the face of massive debt the program incurred

after Hurricane Katrina, reformers easily won a technocratic fix that would enhance

individual responsibility, premised on moral claims about deservingness and individ-

ual choice. However, less than two years later, following Hurricane Sandy and back-

lash from affected policyholders, Congress abandoned some of the changes with new

legislation that committed to incorporating need-based considerations to the NFIP for

the first time. Drawing on archival, interview, and ethnographic data, I trace the mor-

ally charged debate. I argue that the result defined “deservingness” around ability to

pay for risk exposure, qualifying an individualization of responsibility for addressing

the problem of flood loss—a problem that might instead demand broader risk sharing,

particularly as climate change worsens the threat of flooding.

In the sections that follow, I begin by situating the case in a theoretical tradition in

welfare state scholarship that typically excludes this policy domain—natural hazards

and disasters—from its view. As in social policy debates more generally, NFIP stake-

holders articulated and disputed claims about deservingness and choice to justify rival

visions of the fair terms of social interdependence in flood insurance. After describing

the methodology and evidence, I turn to the history of the NFIP. I show how its design

and implementation created space for these rival visions through the incorporation of

individualistic and solidaristic elements in the program. I then tell the story of NFIP

reform in three acts, following the advocacy that led to reform, the backlash to reform,

and the “reform of the reform” that was ultimately passed. In the discussion, I analyze

how the emergent definition of deservingness reorganized the arrangement of federal

assistance and individual responsibility, forging a tentative resolution to the competing

demands made on the NFIP. I conclude with the implications of these changes, and the

arguments that produced them, for the question of how states and citizens adapt to a

future defined by climate change.

The Moral Economy of American Natural Hazards and

Disaster Policy

Political sociologists and political scientists have connected the scope and generosity

of social policy to the articulation and mobilization of “categories of worth,” particu-

larly whether policymakers and the public perceive recipients as “deserving” or “unde-

serving.” Such distinctions serve discursively to justify the balance of individual and

collective obligations and to institutionalize programmatic boundaries between cate-

gories of beneficiaries.1 In the United States, this normative distinction has been espe-

cially powerful.2 The deserving are generally believed not to be to blame for the