Earthquakes, Exceptional Government and Extraordinary Accounting

This study examines how a particular set of calculative practices and classification systems helped to guide the emergency responses to the 2009 earthquake in Abruzzo, Italy. Accounting classifications worked in tandem with scientific classifications to define the seismic event as a site for exceptional governance, to demarcate the temporal and spatial boundaries, and to guide the immediate and subsequent healthcare-related humanitarian responses. Accounting classification schemes were borrowed and built by the local health authorities as the federal government made the provision of disaster relief funding contingent on the identification of additional and traceable earthquake-related expenditures. The analysis also shows the maneuvers that occurred around the accounting classifications as public healthcare providers attempted to use the classifications to solve day-to-day health treatment funding problems and the federal government tried to exert control at a distance. The analysis provided both contributes to our understanding of the governance of these exceptional events and brings to the fore the challenges associated with such humanitarian responses.