Presentation short abstract

This article examines how disaster management of forest fires is entangled with state-making practices. In the Indian Himalaya, disaster management is not simply a response to environmental crisis, but a political project that governs through crisis, produces risk, and deepens state’s authority.

Presentation long abstract

Recurrent disasters such as wildfires are increasingly attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but this broad explanation often obscures the political choices that shape how disasters are recognised, governed, and instrumentalised. Focusing on the Uttarakhand Himalaya in India, where forest fires have become a near-annual phenomenon, this article examines how disaster management is deeply entangled with state-making practices in political forests. Drawing on interviews, policy documents, and media articles, it highlights how the 2016 Uttarakhand fires marked a turning point in the formal inclusion of forest fires within India’s disaster policy. Since then, the spectacle of fire, amplified through media coverage, remote sensing technologies, and smoke spreading to distant urban centres, has helped normalise the framing of fire as a disaster. This spectacle is often disconnected from the social and ecological realities of fire in the region. It also enables the Forest Department to access emergency resources, distribute blame and responsibility, and consolidate territorial control. Yet rather than reducing fire risk, disaster management interventions reinforce a suppression-oriented approach and lock the region into a firefighting trap. The study argues that disaster management in Uttarakhand is not simply a response to environmental crisis, but a political project that governs through crisis, produces risk, and deepens the state’s authority over forests. It suggests that managing wildfires as disasters can, in certain contexts, serve as a renewed site of state-making in political forests, complicating accounts of state retreat advanced in scholarship on green neoliberalism and disaster capitalism.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how interactions between social, economic and political forces are shaping wildfire risks in Galicia. Grounded in political ecology and using interdisciplinary methods, the paper shows how power dynamics and diverse actors contribute to a firescape of increasing vulnerability.

Presentation long abstract

The landscape of Galicia, the Northwestern region of Spain, continues to fall victim to an increasing incidence of wildfires. For centuries the region has faced recurring wildfires with cultural, industrial and political factors playing a central role in shaping Galicia’s vulnerabilities. While the existing literature provides substantial historical and institutional grounding for the causes of the wildfires, this paper examines the contemporary network of actors involved in perpetuating wildfire risk. The paper is situated within political ecology and contributes a holistic analysis of intersecting power dynamics, presenting questions related to land ownership, historical burning practices, renewable energy production, rural depopulation, reforestation policy and natural resource management. Adopting the “firesapes” analytical framework the Galician socioecological system is defined in relation to the drivers and effects of the wildfires. Methodologically the paper presents an interdisciplinary perspective, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. An anthropological investigation will follow a period of fieldwork carried out in the region, rooted in a series of interviews and focus groups with rural citizens, members of emergency services, local experts and larger corporate/political actors. The quantitative side will include geographical mapping to identify correlations between wildfire incidence and structural change. The paper argues that the wildfire crisis in Galicia in recent years is the result of diverse social, economic and political factors creating a firescape in which risks are continually increased rather than mitigated. In highlighting these issues, the paper contributes to broader debates about global sustainable development, particularly related to biodiversity and the promotion of responsible production policies.

Presentation short abstract

Research in Catalonia examines how social learning and collective action shape resistance to large wildfires, linking ecological risk with governance, inequality, and adaptation in Mediterranean socio-ecological systems under climate change.

Presentation long abstract

Large wildfires (GIFs) in Mediterranean regions are intensifying under climate change, reshaping ecosystems, livelihoods, and governance structures. This proposal, based on research by the GRAM group at the University of Barcelona, situates wildfire not only as an ecological disturbance but as a political and social force that exposes inequalities in risk, recovery, and land relations.

Drawing on case studies in Catalonia, the research examines how communities, administrations, and forest owners negotiate wildfire risk through collective organization, territorial planning, and adaptive governance. Using participatory methods—interviews, focus groups, and multi-actor dialogues—the research explores how social learning processes enable communities to identify structural drivers of fire regimes (intensity, recurrence, and de-seasonalization), confront the psychosocial dimensions of loss and displacement, and co-produce strategies for resistance.

By foregrounding wildfire as both catastrophe and cultural element, the paper engages political ecology debates on disaster, extractivism, and socio-environmental transformation. It highlights how rural depopulation, landscape homogenization, and climate-driven drought intersect with governance gaps to exacerbate vulnerability, while collective responses can reconfigure relations between humans, non-humans, and fire.

Ultimately, the paper argues that resistance to wildfire is inseparable from questions of environmental justice, social organization, and the politics of land. It contributes to the panel’s aim of critically situating wildfire within broader frameworks of disaster and inequality, offering insights into how Mediterranean communities transform risk into learning and adaptation in an era of fire.

Presentation short abstract

In this paper I frame the Bolivian Chiquitanian forest fires being fuelled by extractivist development. I discuss how the repeating disasters fosters emotional -, onto-epistemological -, economical - and political colonizing among the Indigenous Chiquitano communities.

Presentation long abstract

In Chiquitania, in the South-East of Bolivia, the aggravated forest fires have been connected with the regional agroindustry and climate change. The temperatures are raising rapidly due the deforestation at the expanding agricultural frontier. The intensified forest fires around the highway carretera bioceanico in the South Chiquitania, demonstrates the predicted socio-ecological harms of the infrastructure project. In addition, the state tolerates the fire-use with the “leyes incendiarias”; contested by Bolivian civic actors.

In this paper I frame the forest fires being fuelled by extractivist development and I discuss on colonizing impact of the forest fire disasters among the Chiquitano communities, finding emotional, onto-epistemological, economical and political colonizing impacts touching the Chiquitano communities. This paper grounds on the authors PhD project in environmental policy. The primary data for the multi-sited ethnography was collected during eight months of fieldwork between 2022 and 2024 in Bolivia.

Among the Chiquitano communities the forest fires have appeared as disasters producing mental crisis. The following droughts have endangered the traditional subsistence agriculture, rising waves of emigration from the villages to labour work; weakening the traditional structures and value systems in the villages. The fire management capacitation provided by NGO`s have been vital for the communities, yet increased the communities responsibilities and provoked conflicts, while the dependence on the states support in the emergency has limited the possibilities of autonomous Indigenous politics. Thus, I claim that the forests fires nourish emotional colonization, political colonization, economical colonization and onto-epistemological colonization.

Presentation short abstract

Un imaginario del desierto moviliza las pasiones, identidades y proclamas ambientalistas ante los incendios en las islas del río Paraná, Argentina. El Estado y ganaderos como “ecocidas”, territorios de Vida como “humedales” y “bienes comunes”: una controversia ambiental por el fuego en las islas.

Presentation long abstract

A partir de los incendios ocurridos en las islas del río Paraná en la región central de Argentina, se desplegaron movimientos sociales con repertorios particulares de valoración del territorio. Ellos hablan de “ecocidio/ecocidas”, de “humedales” y “monte nativo”, de “bienes comunes” y “usurpadores de tierras”. En los discursos de los movimientos sociales se denuncian prácticas productivas locales como la ganadería, la caza o el turismo en las islas en las cuales perciben una desigual apropiación del territorio y a una falta de conservación ambiental que van en detrimento de la Vida. En la descalificación de actores locales, impugnación de sus actividades y del Estado -en sus múltiples escalas- como un garante fallido e incluso un adversario en la gestión territorial, los movimientos ambientales producen una reapropiación de la red de producción discursiva de la biodiversidad (Escobar, 1999) cuya grafía principal se da a través de la instalación en la esfera pública de la noción de “humedales” como identidad nominal del territorio insular. A partir de una identidad ensamblada emergente: “Somos Humedales”, el movimiento ambientalista de la Ciudad de Rosario -uno de los epicentros de la controversia por el fuego en las islas del rio Paraná- genera una disputa geontológica por el territorio. La percepción de una pérdida de biodiversidad ocasionada por factores como el desarrollo productivo, la falla estatal en la conservación de la naturaleza y la producción de nuevas identidades, es impulsada por estos movimientos a partir de una tensión entre la Vida y la No Vida (Povinelli, 2022).

Presentation short abstract

The presentation discusses what ethnography can add to wildfire vulnerability assessments in Barcelona’s WUI, highlighting everyday infrastructures, care relations and governance dynamics often absent from social indicators, reframing wildfire risk as an urban political-ecology issue.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, wildfire risk assessments in Mediterranean Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas have increasingly incorporated social vulnerability indicators. These efforts rely largely on census-based models that aggregate variables such as age, income or household composition to map and compare vulnerability at scale. While useful for policy prioritisation, such models often fail to capture how vulnerability is lived, negotiated and mitigated in everyday life, and how infrastructural, relational and political factors shape residents’ capacity to act.

This presentation examines what ethnographic research can reveal about social vulnerability that standard indexes routinely overlook. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork in two mountain neighbourhoods of Barcelona, we identify several critical yet underrepresented dimensions: mobility constraints linked to single-access roads, ageing and care dependencies, weak institutional trust, long-standing infrastructural neglect, and uneven forms of social cohesion, among others. Above all, our findings show how everyday practices, social and material infrastructures and relations of trust shape both vulnerability and adaptive capacity.

In this regard, a situated ethnographic perspective highlights how wildfire risk is produced through specific histories of urbanisation, governance arrangements and socioecological relations characteristic of Mediterranean WUI contexts. This reframes wildfires in Barcelona as an urban political ecology issue in which risks are unevenly distributed, responsibilities are negotiated, and important local capacities remain poorly recognised within institutional models.

By foregrounding these dynamics, the presentation contributes to broader debates on how social sciences can illuminate the limits of institutional risk governance and foster more just, relational and sustainable forms of preparedness and adaptation.

Presentation short abstract

Fire reveals a planet in crisis, but also the suppressed possibilities of alternative modernities. Beyond destruction, it carries traditions of care, resistance, and renewal that challenge capitalist dispossesion and exploitation and open paths toward relational, equitable, eco-social futures.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines fire not only as a material force reshaping a planet in flames, but also as a symbolic threshold between competing visions of modernity. In dominant global narratives—those forged through dispossession, exploitation, and the colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal management of people and territory—fire appears as the emblem of devastation: a destructive agent unleashed by an eco-social order that renders landscapes flammable, labor disposable, and futures precarious. Yet beyond this paradigm of planetary burning lies another lineage. Across Indigenous, racialized, and socialist practices in the Global South, fire can be understood as a medium of care, renewal, and collective transformation: a tool for relational ecologies, historical memory, and emancipatory horizons.

Reading contemporary fires alongside these histories of resistance, the presentation builds on the arguments of Incendios: una crítica ecosocial del capitalismo inflamable [Infernos] to frame current eco-social crises as a crisis of imagination. As forests, factories, and tower blocks ignite worldwide, what burns is also an exhausted model that encloses universality by excluding most of the world. Against this failing worldview, the presentation sketches an alternative approach to an unfinished project of modernity—grounded in reciprocity over exploitation, communal stewardship over commodification, and the incomplete promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, continually reoriented by Indigenous cosmologies, Black radical traditions, and socialist experiments in the Global South. Fire, in this sense, emerges both as a warning and an inspiration that, while exposing systemic catastrophe, also sparks the untapped potential for revolutionary eco-social transformation on a planetary scale.

Presentation short abstract

The 2024 wildfires that razed the Indigenous territory of MonteVerde were the result of enduring conditions of climate coloniality and ongoing processes of colonization via incendiary extractivism. Grassroots initiatives forged amid these firescapes show that other worlds persist amid the flames.

Presentation long abstract

In 2024, wildfires burned over 80% of the Monkoxi’ Indigenous territory of Monte Verde. Wildfires in Monte Verde mostly originated outside of the territory and demonstrate the uneven distribution of cultural and material harms driven by climate coloniality, whereby those who contribute the least to carbon emissions disproportionately experience the impacts of climate change (Sultana 2022).

This study draws from the fields of Indigenous political ecology, critical climate justice and critical disaster studies to assess the structural drivers of wildfires in the Bolivian lowlands, with emphasis on the relationship between wildfires, territorial reconfiguration, extractivism, and commodity frontier expansion (Remes & Horowitz 2021, Devisscher et al., 2019). The results document and unveil the power dynamics underlying the uneven distribution of wildfire impacts and responses, as told through a mixture of interviews, surveys, and body-territory mapping. The findings contribute towards denaturalizing state wildfire management practices by highlighting how prevailing political regimes are served by the militarization of wildfire response and the uneven application and impact of wildfire management policies.

Land scorched by the fires is left bereft of biodiversity that favors traditional modes of subsistence, exacerbating precarity and creating incentives for community members to rent the land to extractive industries. Thus, catastrophic wildfires prompt long-term cultural and territorial reconfiguration that transform Indigenous territories into zones of sacrifice in the name of commodities (Juskus, 2023). Nonetheless, despite and because of these catastrophic firescapes created by colonial capitalism, the territory continues to resist, providing another example among countless that other worlds are possible