Assets at risk: The political technology of actuarialism

Climate change is increasingly translated into financial risk through actuarial practices such as risk-based pricing, reinforcing market-based climate governance. This paper reconceptualizes actuarialism as a political technology, extending Ewald’s specification of insurance through economic, moral, and juridical dimensions. Drawing on documents and semi-structured interviews, the paper examines “insurance retreat” in New Zealand (2020–2025). The analysis identifies three registers—Assetization, Responsibilization, and Authorization—through which climate adaptation was progressively reorganized around asset protection. Rather than co-existing, these registers were sequentially triggered as each encountered political limits: economic calculation rendered climate change a problem of insurable assets; contestation over its effects triggered narratives of responsibility and prudence; and unresolved questions over costs and intervention triggered institutional arrangements of entitlement. The paper contributes to critical climate risk research by showing how actuarial technologies constitute climate change as a market-governable object, advances governmentality scholarship by demonstrating how political technologies adapt to contestation and extends Ewald’s typology by showing how its dimensions become dynamically and cumulatively activated.