Mutuality at a Distance? Risk and Regulation in Marine Insurance Clubs

In this paper I investigate an institution which combines two forms of risk regulation commonly regarded as antithetical. In the governmental mode, associated with the rise of capitalism, the welfare state, and commercial insurance, regulation is centralised and spatially removed from the risk itself, and involves the surveillance, prediction, and control of risks posed by large-scale populations of atomised individuals or companies. This is in contrast to the older mutual form, in which social relations within communities allocate and minimise risks, evident in the moral economy of the peasantry, friendly societies, and the resurgence of discourses of community responsibility in the 1990s. Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs are mutual associations of the world's shipowners, which insure marine liabilities (including environmental risks). Their communal structure and self-interest in minimising risks means that they could, and to an extent do, play an important role in regulating marine safety and environmental performance. However, their global scale means that social relations between shipowners are not simply analogous to those within a local community. The P&I Clubs do, in practice, employ centralised managers responsible for determining entry standards, setting premiums, handling claims, and engaging in loss prevention. These activities rest upon the ‘scientific’ calculation, allocation, and management of risks. At the same time the aim is to ‘maintain mutuality’ amongst members, and tacit knowledge and actively produced trust are essential to this end. I argue that the combination of a mutual structure and a global scale produces a hybrid style of regulation, and the successful application of rules, incentives, sanctions, and surveillance depends as much on the construction of specific sociospatial relations as on organisational form, with implications for new regulatory designs.