Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how different levels of government and communities collaborate to reduce wildfire risks in high-latitude areas. It uses a social contract lens and a case study from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

Presentation long abstract

The increasing wildfire risk in high-latitude areas has its own complexities due to fuel conditions, low humidity, remoteness and limited resources. With increasing wildfire impacts on communities, people expect governments to recognise community needs and provide assistance for wildfire risk reduction. Communities are also encouraged to become involved in wildfire risk reduction and to take individual responsibility for wildfire preparation. However, disparities may arise between governments and communities regarding their roles, responsibilities and expectations for wildfire risk reduction.

This paper uses social contract theory and argues that wildfire creates a political opportunity to challenge existing power distributions between levels of government and communities. We explored how communities have been involved in developing wildfire strategies. We used Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, as a case study, based on the experience of the 2023 wildfire evacuation. We conducted 23 semi-structured interviews across levels of government, NGO representatives and other key community informants to understand how they work together to prepare for future wildfire risks. Drawing on social contract theory, we uncovered ongoing development and tensions between governments and communities in wildfire risk management. Finally, we summarised findings into four themes specific to the high-latitude context: governance structures, resource allocation, community-based support and long-term risk planning.

Presentation short abstract

This research developed a decision-support tool with two Eeyou communities to challenge colonial fire management. By braiding Indigenous knowledge with spatial risk modeling, it empowers communities to reclaim fire sovereignty through collaborative and culturally relevant risk mitigation.

Presentation long abstract

In Canada’s boreal forests, state-sponsored fire management operates through intensive suppression near critical assets and a passive “let-it-burn” policy in remote areas. This approach, rooted in colonial dispossession, removes Indigenous knowledge and stewardship from the land, framing fire solely as a hazard. For the Eeyouch of Nemaska and Wemindji (northwestern Quebec, Canada), fire is intertwined with multigenerational experience, knowledge, forest management and biodiversity. Risk management policies, crafted through federal-provincial-local interactions and enacted by Quebec’s Forest Fire Protection Agency (SOPFEU), overexpose Eeyou landscape values to increasing risks, while traditional fire sovereignty is suppressed. This presentation draws from the colonial politics of fire management in Eeyou Istchee to propose culturally relevant decision-support guidelines for fire risk mitigation. Developed through collaborative research with Nemaska and Wemindji land users and practitioners, this tool integrates Eeyou knowledge and landscape values with spatial risk modeling. It empowers communities to evaluate mitigation strategies such as cultural burning, firebreaks, and forest thinning based on their efficiency in protecting culturally important areas, cost, and alignment with the Mino Pimatiseewin, the Cree way of life. We argue that such a tool challenges the colonial logic of state-controlled risk management by recentering Indigenous knowledge and land-based authority. By enabling Eeyou practitioners to prioritize interventions on their cultural and ecological priorities, the framework acts as a medium for collaborative forest management with non-Indigenous practitioners. This case offers a critical pathway for reclaiming fire sovereignty, positioning Indigenous fire stewardship as essential for resilience in an era of polycrises.

Presentation short abstract

The study examined fire governance in Northern Ghana using the ‘Livelihood as Intimate Government’ framework. The findings revealed that fire use is a negotiated practice, shaped by land tenure, property rights, gender, social hierarchies and overlapping, often competing authority structures

Presentation long abstract

In Africa, landscape burning by local communities is vital for rural livelihoods and wildfire risk management. While fire is widely recognised as a cultural practice and environmental management tool in rural communities, less attention has been given to the socio-political dynamics and everyday governance shaping its use. Drawing on livelihoods as an intimate government theory, this study uses focus group discussions, key informants and semi-structured interviews to examine how fire use in Northern Ghana is negotiated through self-governance and broader power structures.

The findings revealed that land tenure emerged as a key factor restricting fire use and decision-making, particularly among women and settled migrants. These restrictions formed part of the broader mechanisms for maintaining social hierarchies and territorial control in these communities. Moreover, women’s overwhelmingly domestic and reproductive responsibilities further limited their ability to participate fully in fire volunteering. At the community level, traditional authorities, particularly the Earth priest, shaped fire use in communal areas using spiritual and moral narratives to determine when to burn. Additionally, decentralised governance and participatory approaches in communities by state institutions and NGOs have produced competing and multiple forms of control. Both models compete to exert authority and determine who has the legitimacy to set fires and who is framed as a threat. While these competing power structures have contributed to changing fire regimes, they have reinforced marginalisation and deepened the politics of environmental stewardship in these communities. We argue that achieving inclusive fire governance requires confronting the embedded power dynamics within everyday livelihood practices.

Presentation short abstract

Community-Based Fire Management (CBFM) has emerged as a viable alternative approach to wildfire management, however they are seldomly used in Kenya due to persistent fire suppression policies which have excluded IPLC. Legal frameworks should be inclusive and co-developed.

Presentation long abstract

The frequency and severity of wildfires are increasing globally, highlighting the limitations of conventional fire suppression policies in managing fire-prone landscapes. Despite the resumption of Community-Based Fire Management (CBFM) as in as a viable alternative in developed countries, it is seldomly used in Kenya due to enforcement of fire suppression policies and lack of clear fire management frameworks. We aimed to identify impediments of effective fire use, identify barriers to effective inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) and their traditional knowledge in fire management frameworks, and assesses potential pathways for enhancing inclusivity in fire-suppressed landscapes. Data was collected through online questionnaires and a participatory workshop format involving a total of 140 respondents. Of these, 20 IPLCs and 20 fire managers participated in one-day, and two-day workshops respectively. The impediments of fire use differed significantly between the tribes (p< 0.001) with fear of fire getting of control, lack of awareness, lack of legal frameworks and emerging carbon restrictions hindering effective fire use. Over 80% of fire managers and 60% of IPLC agreed that cultural practices and knowledge are largely excluded in the current fire frameworks due to lack of awareness, deliberate exclusion by authorities and lack of funding to facilitate inclusion. Clear legal frameworks and co-develop plans coupled with education and training, provision of fire equipment could revamp traditional fire use and increase IPLC inclusion in the fire frameworks unlike current where participation in fire suppression does not necessarily translate into the meaningful integration of Indigenous and local knowledge

Presentation short abstract

As repetitive wildfires question the efficiency of fire exclusion, community-based fire management is gaining prominence. Drawing on four Central and South American case studies, we show how land tenure and community agency shape power relations, project design and the long-term governance of fire.

Presentation long abstract

Many countries around the world are moving from fire exclusion policies towards more participatory approaches to fire management. The term ‘community-based fire management’ (CBFiM) is quickly gaining traction at an international level, but there is no clear definition of the term, and examples are diverse. Donor-funded CBFiM projects involve varying degrees of participation by local communities at different stages, ultimately impacting fire management outcomes. Moreover, the legacy effects of fire criminalisation policies and persisting epistemological inequalities can impede the effective participation of local communities in project design and the alignment of initiatives with local social-ecological realities. We examined how community agency influences the design and implementation of fire-management projects across four case studies in Belize, Brazil, Guyana, and Peru. Land tenure arrangements, pre-existing local fire uses and governance and the degree of agency afforded to local communities in project design have significant effects on immediate and longer-term project outcomes. Funding models also affect project outcomes: external funding can provide a significant opportunity to cover the cost of fire management and provide local employment opportunities but is often accompanied by requirements affecting project design and alignment with local priorities. Where project funding significantly alters local fire governance and management but funding then ceases, communities do not always maintain new forms of fire management or revert to arrangements that pre-dated the project. Effective local community participation in community-based fire management initiatives is pivotal both in their long-term persistence, but also to maximise social and environmental benefits of such initiatives.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the shifting role of fire insurance given the increasing intensity of wildfires due to our current climate crisis. Looking to fire insurance, we argue, presents a unique opportunity to understand value, governance, and perceptions of risk as socially and legally constructed.

Presentation long abstract

Record wildfire seasons have captured international headlines from Canada to Australia, and Spain to Turkey. While the localized impacts of wildfires are unique geographically, wildfire’s intensifying impacts are global. Alterations in weather patterns and ecosystems due to climate change combined with a century of fire suppression tactics that were normalized during settler colonial and urbanizing processes have been attributed as key drivers to the increasing intensity and severity of wildfires. Within this context, Global North countries have naturalized property and fire insurance as the financial mechanism to hedge risk in locations where fire and property meet (i.e. at the wildland-urban interface), presenting unique opportunities to consider value, governance, and risk as socially and legally constructed. As such, who can (and cannot) stay and/or rebuild post-fire is increasingly determined by insurance coverage – or a lack thereof. Insurance itself, however, is deeply entangled with socio-legal and political geographies including access to property that have long operated along power geometries engrained within social contexts. In this paper, I will consider what the shifting role of fire insurance suggests given our current climate crisis, including the increased intensity of wildfires. By weaving together theoretical texts and recent studies on the state of insurance due to increasing impacts of wildfire, I will begin to lay the foundation for further research into political ecology, wildfires, and insurance that will ask: What can (climate) justice perspectives applied to fire insurance reveal about the colonial legacies of insurance?

Presentation short abstract

Diferenciar usos del fuego entre aquel funcional al desarrollo, de prácticas tradicionales de manejo del territorio, resulta clave para construir estrategias colectivas en defensa de lo común, invita a pensar el fuego como parte de las tramas de interdependencia y de relaciones sociometabolicas.

Presentation long abstract

Frente a los grandes y extremos incendios forestales que se vienen presentando en los últimos años en el mundo entero, podemos afirmar que el fuego ha sido y sigue siendo un factor socioecológico crucial en la transformación de los territorios. Esto convoca a seguir pensando más allá de la emergencia de extinción de incendios, invita a pensar sobre las relaciones y rupturas atravesadas por y desde el elemento vital fuego y las formas que adquiere en tanto flujo de energía-materia. Una ecología política del fuego permite poner en discusión dichas fracturas y repensar el trasfondo la gran contradicción de la crisis civilizatoria actual: rentabilidad versus habitabilidad. En la misma sintonía estrategias de territorialización también toma fuerza en pos de la (co)habitabilidad. La lectura desde el metabolismo social aporta

disparadores para re pensarnos, abre un abanico de preguntas y alternativas a reconciliar y reconstruir nuevas vincularidades con la tierra, y la especie humana como parte de ella y no sobre ella. Es también un desafío ético-político y epistemológico. Si consideramos un contexto más estructural, los usos y manejos del fuego a nivel normativo y de política pública se concentran en una posición de supresión y prohibición del fuego. Pretender suprimir el fuego de la vida humana es eliminar de la ecuación un elemento constitutivo de la vida como flujo y entramado energético, pero homogeneizar sus usos también puede resultar en una forma de invisibilizar los entramados de poder, lógicas de dominación y explotación de los territorios.

Presentation short abstract

This paper advances fire (im)mobilities to analyse Brazil's uneven fire governance. It shows how suppression regimes targeting local burning coexist with agribusiness appropriation of fire, revealing colonial power structures alongside practices of resistance and territorial care.

Presentation long abstract

Wildfire governance has long been shaped by Eurocentric paradigms that frame fire primarily as a disaster. While influential, this is not the only narrative. In Brazil, fire circulates through multiple, geographically differentiated yet contemporaneous regimes. In some regions, agribusiness actors selectively appropriate fire as a destructive technology for land clearing, pasture renewal and territorial expansion. Elsewhere, particularly in agribusiness-dominated areas of the Cerrado, fire is governed through suppression regimes that criminalise Indigenous, quilombola and rural burning practices, portraying local communities as irresponsible burners and threats to monoculture economies.

Although these narratives materialise unevenly across regions, they coexist and shape a fragmented but interconnected system of fire governance, where different uses of fire are alternately legitimised, prohibited or weaponised. These competing regimes obscure how fire becomes a contested medium of land governance.

This paper introduces the framework of fire (im)mobilities to offer a more complex understanding of the socio-ecological role of fire. The framework conceptualises fire as an agent that produces -and is produced by- multiple forms of (im)mobility involving humans and non-humans. It highlights how fire regimes intersect with land conflicts, agribusiness expansion, conservation agendas, but also with everyday practices and socio-ecological rhythms.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Cerrado-Amazon transition zone, the paper shows how colonial hierarchies unevenly structure fire governance, restricting some burning practices while enabling others. At the same time, fire sustains resistance, livelihoods and alternative forms of territorial stewardship. Fire (im)mobilities thus provide a new lens to analyse fire’s entanglements with land politics and epistemic resistance.

Presentation short abstract

We analyze the particular way in which fire, in Argentina, becomes a political problem from the role that collective actions have had, which establish debates about the neo-extractivist production model, the role of the State, the meanings of “nature”, and the definitions of fire.

Presentation long abstract

The use of fire as a tool for land management in Argentina dates back to the colonial era, linked to productive activities and rural ways of life. However, in the 21st century, fires have come to be considered a "problem" on the public agenda. This shift is due to both climatic factors and the advance of a neo-extractivist model based on the intensive exploitation of natural resources, as well as to social struggles that challenge this model.

In Patagonia and the central part of the country, fires are linked to territorial conflicts and real estate speculation; in the northern region, to the expansion of the agricultural frontier; while in the Paraná Delta, more than 200,000 hectares burned due to the expansion of livestock farming.

Fire is no longer perceived solely as a natural threat, but as a political phenomenon that calls into question the productive model, the role of the State, and the very concept of "nature." These disputes highlight tensions between neo-extractivism and socio-environmental movements that denounce environmental degradation. Thus, the fires in Argentina are symptomatic of a broader territorial conflict, where economic interests, state policies, and citizen resistance converge. Therefore, fire as a political phenomenon allows us to understand the new forms of social conflict emerging in southern South America.

Presentation short abstract

Focusing on the frictions that shape the political ecology of fire in Argentine Patagonia, this research explores wildfire as a catalyst of ruination and examines its intersections with political processes of Indigenous marginalization, territorial control, and land dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates the intersections between wildfires, territorial politics, and power structures in the Comarca Andina, a region in north-west Argentine Patagonia that has been repeatedly affected by severe forest fires over the past decades. The analysis draws on ethnographic research conducted between December 2024 and March 2025, during two major wildfires that destroyed parts of the villages of Epuyén and Mallín Ahogado. Building on local interpretations of wildfire as a catalyst of ruination (Stoler 2013) - and thus as an accelerant of long-standing colonial dynamics embedded in the territory - the study examines how wildfires become instruments of state power, tied to broader processes of marginalisation, deterritorialisation and land dispossession affecting Mapuche people and local residents. In this context, the political use of fire operates alongside national ‘nature conservation’ policies rooted in a logic of accumulation by dispossession. These policies advance capitalistic territorial control, displace native communities, and impose boundaries that inhabitants sometimes attempt to erase or reclaim through fire.

Moreover, by analysing the sociopolitical conflicts that followed the 2024 Los Alerces National Park wildfire, and by considering the role of non-native pine plantations as technologies of governmentality (Foucault 2004), the paper shows how green-neoliberal institutional policies in Argentine Patagonia have contributed to the sociocultural construction of risk. It argues for rethinking fire governance by grounding it in the social meaning of the forest as an arena of friction (Tsing 2005) between different social actors and, therefore, between competing ontologies of nature.

Presentation short abstract

This study shows how hotspot surveillance is reshaping fire governance in northern Thailand, placing highland communities between legal recognition and moral blame. It argues that the strategic evasion of satellite detection exposes the epistemic limits of visibility-driven haze policy.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in fire-dependent rural communities in northern Thailand, this paper examines how satellite-based hotspot surveillance has reconfigured the moral and political terrain of fire governance. Although controlled burning is formally recognized through regulatory mechanisms, traditional fire practices in the highlands face intense social scrutiny, particularly in urban discourse, where hotspot maps circulate as evidence of rural irresponsibility amid the country’s recurrent haze crisis. This contradiction creates a fraught ethical landscape: despite legal recognition, villagers synchronize burns to evade satellite detection while asserting collective visibility to defend their standing as legitimate forest custodians. Such performative compliance reveals a desire to shield customary fire use from reputational harm and to preserve the moral economies through which ecological care is enacted. By tracing how these overlapping regimes of legality and morality are negotiated, the study highlights the ambivalent position of highland residents, who are simultaneously permitted, blamed, and surveilled. The limitations of hotspot detection further exacerbate the divide between technocratic representations and lived experiences. These dynamics are conceptualized as a politics of visibility, in which rural actors navigate the dissonance between legal permission, urban stigma, and the moral optics of haze governance. The study calls for governance approaches that acknowledge epistemic plurality and move beyond hotspot reduction as the dominant policy horizon.

Presentation short abstract

The study shows how conservation and tourism shape fire governance in the Okavango. Using satellite data, literature, and interviews, it finds that concession rules shape fire use and reinforce power dynamics that can marginalise livelihoods.

Presentation long abstract

Fire has long shaped the ecology of the Okavango landscape, yet conservation and tourism narratives frame fire as a threat to wildlife, infrastructure, and the region’s tourism economy.These narratives have influenced the development of fire governance across protected areas and private concessions, promoting restrictive fire policies that limit where and how burning can occur. Such approaches obscure fire’s ecological role and the political and economic processes through which land and resource access are regulated.This work examines how conservation and tourism influence fire management and the spatial patterns of burning across the Okavango landscape. Drawing on MODIS fire data, conservation policies, historical literature, and interviews with tourism operators, conservation organisations, and key informants, the study traces how concession boundaries and access rules shape fire practices. Preliminary results reveal a differentiation between the interior Delta, dominated by tourism concessions with strict fire suppression, and the Panhandle, where most livelihood-related burning occurs, including agriculture, fishing, and grass and reed collection. Tourism actors often emphasise the dangers of uncontrolled fire, while conservation organisations highlight concerns about fire near wildlife and protected areas. Differing interpretations of fire use influence management decisions and shape how fire events are attributed to particular groups. By analysing fire as both an ecological process and a political instrument, this study shows how fire governance reinforces existing power relations in the Okavango landscape. The study argues that more inclusive and contextually grounded fire management is essential for addressing emerging fire-related tensions and supporting sustainable coexistence among conservation, tourism, and local livelihoods.