ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ex-ante risk management (EARM), a relatively novel form of insurance that has become increasingly influential in development and disaster management fields. While EARM directly refers to a suite of risk management and budgeting tools and techniques, it also indexes a distinct governmental rationality, a way of understanding disaster events as contingent financial liabilities, that seeks to transform how developing states plan for unpredictable financial impacts of catastrophes. EARM attempts to enable states to adopt the anticipatory and calculatory practices of insurance companies, and approach disasters as events that generate contingent financial liabilities that require financial capacity to manage independently without foreign aid. However, as I demonstrate here through an example of Dominican disaster budgeting, the rationalities of EARM instead transform the relation between insurance, the developing state, donors, the public, and a volatile earth in the Anthropocene, further hollow out developing states’ sovereignty.
