The state and the state-of-the-art: prefiguring private insurance for US flood risk

Abstract States not only govern markets, but they also create them, often with the intention of expanding or improving the delivery of specific policy objectives. This article outlines one way they do this: prefiguration. States prefigure markets, and private market actors, when they imagine and instantiate new market products, logics, and practices. I illustrate prefiguration through an analysis of the history of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the federal program that underwrites flood insurance in the United States. From the time of the NFIP’s establishment, policymakers and officials have fashioned and continuously reformed a public program, and an insurance product, in ways that emulate an imagined primary private flood insurer. In doing so, though, they have gradually established the conditions under which private flood insurers can do business. This article contributes to scholarship on state ‘marketcraft’. Whereas many scholars have addressed why governments turn to markets in the first place, and the consequences of doing so, this article offers a closer examination of what takes place in between: the specific activities that governments undertake as they pursue market creation.