UC Berkeley

As climate-related disasters magnify in frequency and severity around the world, global Southern governments are increasingly working with disaster risk and development finance institutions to implement climate finance instruments like catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities (ILS) in their states and regions. These instruments are attractive because they are designed to transfer the burden of risk from governments to global private capital markets, but they have drawbacks: they require debt-driven repayment on premiums; they cannot be implemented without the appropriate political, economic, and legal frameworks in place ‘on the ground’; and they are less appropriate at the scale of the city, where disaster risk is often concentrated. This research investigates emerging pathways for these instruments as they are promoted in Mexico, and the cascading effects of their use under a new political regime in the wake of sovereign disaster governance restructuring—namely the dismantling of the Fondo de Desastres Naturales (the Fund for Natural Disasters, or Fonden). This dissertation takes the form of three research articles organized into chapters. The first chapter is a case study in Xochimilco that brings the established urban theoretical concept of peripheral urbanization together with more recent work on disaster urbanization to advance the twin theories of “everyday disaster” and “autorecovery” as processes that self-organize and improvise in response to the uneven distribution of state resources. This framing offers a more expansive conceptualization of disaster governance, risk, and recovery that both contributes and responds to calls to challenge the pervasive ideological focus on “resilience” in contemporary development, disaster finance, and critical urban studies scholarship while thinking from the South. The second chapter investigates the publics and counterpublics of “resilience” discourses and their significance for development-driven disaster governance and organizational activism. By looking at sites of organizational activism and at the World Bank’s persistent attempts to “innovate” a municipal contingency fund in Mexico City, this study shows how subjective political economic conditions and ideologies dictate the kinds of interventions deemed investable, complicating radical activism efforts “on the ground” and claims from critical climate finance scholarship that development finance-driven insurance instruments can seamlessly “fix” overaccumulated capital in global Southern cities. The third chapter draws on political economy and economic geography to demonstrate how Mexico’s relationship with development-driven disaster governance is taking new forms since the dismantling of Fonden, and appears to be reproducing and even intensifying “neoliberal” modes through austerity and a financialization of risk that generates new markets for preferred forms of governance. Where these market forces converge under AMLO’s campaign to transform the state through Morena, Mexico represents a critical political moment—and a political party emerging in the service of these new market forms—I call the “populist resilience regime.”