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This book offers insight into a relatively new type of insurance increasingly deployed in rural areas of developing countries. As an initially World Bank-driven concept of hedging the poor against aggravating weather-related risks, Weather Index Insurance is characterized by specific features that are supposed to facilitate smallholders´ integration in financial markets. Farmers have to undergo severe changes with respect to their selfawareness and their behavior in the course of the implementation procedure. Bucher provides a comprehensive account of the product Weather Index Insurance in order to identify the governmental strategies employed to enforce those changes. Applying Michel Foucault´s governmentality reveals that Weather Index Insurance serves as a technique of government to proliferate neoliberal rationality on a global scale. Careful examination of the discourse of index-based insurance discloses the specific tactics that underlie implementations of Weather Index Insurance, including discourse itself. It is shown how those tactics are directed towards financial inclusion and ultimately turn its targets into governable subjects.

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Matthias Bucher is a geographer, who specialized in socio-economic interrelations on a global scale. The present book was written in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in human geography.

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