The Battle over Socialization: Climate Change, Rising Uncertainty, and the French “Cat Nat” Reinsurance Scheme

Climate change raises the question of who will manage increasing risks: states, markets, or a combination of the two. One way to frame this issue is via the concept of socialization. My aim is to show its usefulness by investigating a public-private natural disaster reinsurance scheme created in France in the 1980s: namely, the “cat nat” regime. I will first define socialization. I will then identify three socialization mechanisms present in the cat nat regime. Often, risks do not preexist socialization: in this regime, socialization “produces” risks through scientific instruments and administrative decisions. Thirdly, I will show that climate change leads to two tendencies in socialization processes: on the one hand, efforts are made to tame the uncertainty it generates through scientific knowledge; on the other, since uncertainty is nonetheless on the rise, it leads to tensions between interest groups about what kind of socialization to pursue. The analysis of these tensions will show that climate change accentuates the political element of socialization. The resulting dynamic is one I will call “stability in crisis.”