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.