Parametric insurance instruments (‘climate insurances’) have gained increasing importance as means to cope with the adverse economic consequences of natural hazards. Yet, despite the growing prominence of these adaptive policy tools in climate-related policy making there has been only little critical research on the emergence of these instruments. How have these instruments come to shape the interests of state actors? The few existing accounts largely lock-in a rather structuralist view. Yet this renders the emergence of these instruments somehow a-political. This paper seeks to address the shortcomings originating from these perspectives and develops a framework that is able to account for agency. Thus, it seeks to bring local, regional and international (non-)state actors back into the analysis and looks at their interrelations. Such a move points not only to the political dynamics at play when it comes to the creation of insurance instruments but also emphasizes how contextual changes, for example, material, ideational and institutional changes, have fueled conventions and expectations of different actors involved about what is desirable and feasible.
Keywords: Climate Change; Insurance; Risk Management
