Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
Non UBC
Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)
DSpace
Asiyanbi, A., & Davidsen, C. (2023). Governing wildfire risk in Canada: The rise of an apparatus of security. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(5), 1207-1223.
Asiyanbi, Adeniyi
Davidsen, Conny
This article argues that the governance of wildfire risk in Canada is increasingly oriented towards governance through a security apparatus. As climate change complicates wildfire “problems” in fast-expanding wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas, fire managers and other actors increasingly seek a shift towards a fire-permitting, risk-based fire management style, even as the balance between private and public responsibility for wildfire protection gets renegotiated. This approach, typified by FireSmart, is characterised by a gradual, geographically uneven shift from state-centred, fire suppression towards a multiplicity assembled around an expectation of security and the promise of economic freedom. These multiple shifts, we argue, reflect a characteristic approach to governing through the Foucauldian “apparatus of security”, a mechanism of power which seeks security through economic freedom and indirect governmental intervention. Central to the emerging apparatus of wildfire security are three core rationalizing discourses focused on the valorization of the individual’s capacity for wildfire management and protection, the negotiation of limits of state and public institutions in wildfire management, and the invitation to live resiliently with wildfires by embracing biophysical contingency. At stake is the complex politics through which the very ideas of wildfire risk, responsibility, and security are being, and can be, reconstituted. Our analysis furthers the poststructural geographies of wildfires and climate risk governance in Canada and beyond.
Accepted Version 1 Adeniyi Asiyanbi (Corresponding Author) Department of Community Culture and Global Studies, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada a.asiyanbi@ubc.ca Conny Davidsen Department of Geography University of Calgary, Canada Asiyanbi, A., & Davidsen, C. (2023). Governing wildfire risk in Canada: The rise of an apparatus of security. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(5), 1207-1223. Governing wildfire risk in Canada: the rise of an apparatus of security. This article argues that the governance of wildfire risk in Canada is increasingly oriented towards governance through a security apparatus. As climate change complicates wildfire “problems” in fast-expanding wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas, fire managers and other actors increasingly seek a shift towards a fire-permitting, risk-based fire management style, even as the balance between private and public responsibility for wildfire protection gets renegotiated. This approach, typified by FireSmart, is characterised by a gradual, geographically uneven shift from state-centred, fire suppression towards a multiplicity assembled around an expectation of security and the promise of economic freedom. These multiple shifts, we argue, reflect a characteristic approach to governing through the Foucauldian “apparatus of security”, a mechanism of power which seeks security through economic freedom and indirect governmental intervention. Central to the emerging apparatus of wildfire security are three core rationalizing discourses focused on the valorization of the individual’s capacity for wildfire management and protection, the negotiation of limits of state and public institutions in wildfire management, and the invitation to live resiliently with wildfires by embracing biophysical contingency. At stake is the complex politics through which the very ideas of wildfire risk, responsibility, and security are being, and can be, reconstituted. Our analysis furthers the poststructural geographies of wildfires and climate risk governance in Canada and beyond. Accepted Version 2 Keywords: Governance, Wildfires, Climate change; Security; Neoliberalism 1.0 Introduction If the growing frequency and severity of large fires are already posing an increasing challenge to public safety in Canada and across North America, climate change projections suggest that this trajectory will become even more significant (IPCC 2022; Coogan et al. 2021; Price et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2017; Hanes et al. 2019). Simultaneously, there is growing exposure of human settlements and activities to wildfires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas (Erni et al. 2021). WUIs are physical and conceptual spaces of complex interactions of “wildlands” and “human landscapes”, producing distinct fire socio-ecologies. These spaces are laden with politically-charged concerns about public safety and security. While fire-exposed WUI areas grow through urban sprawl, recreational development, and growing populations of forest-adjacent communities, the proximity of human activities to forested lands also means greater chances of human-caused ignition (CIFFC 2019). Although annual fire protection costs in Canada have nearly tripled between 1970 and 2017, now standing at about one billion Canadian dollars annually, the Blueprint for Wildland Fire Science in Canada assessed the general capacity for wildfire management in the country as “not keeping pace with the growing complexity of wildland fire” (Sankey 2018, iii). Indeed, Tymstra et al. (2020, 1) warn that current challenges and trends might be pushing wildfire management institutions towards “a tipping point”. A distinct approach to wildfire governance is thus taking hold in Canada. To understand this emergent approach is to appreciate the two major tensions around which the approach evolves. The first relates to the growing, if uneven, recognition of the limits of fire suppression policy and the attempt to balance a “fire-permitting” attitude with expanding areas of human, non-human and infrastructural concentration around WUI landscapes. Accepted Version 3 Some of these landscapes have also been inadvertently rendered more flammable through historical fire suppression (Parisien et al., 2020). The second tension relates to the continued renegotiation of the bounds of public and private responsibilities for wildfire protection and environmental disasters more generally, especially at a time of accelerating climate change. These tensions within the Canadian context resonate to varying extents with wildfire governance dynamics elsewhere – particularly in the US (Moritz and Knowles 2016; Eriksen & Simon 2017), and Australia (see Booth and Harwood, 2016; Lucas and Booth, 2020). These tensions offer important entry points for understanding how public wildfire risk is being governed differently and what this might mean. We argue that the dominant approach to wildfire governance in Canada is increasingly oriented towards governance through a security apparatus. This approach is partly typified by FireSmart, the country’s single most important initiative that connects many wildfire policies and plans with actions at the wildland-urban interfaces. This emergent approach entails governing through a dynamic multiplicity of actors, practices, techniques, tools, and fire types. This multiplicity coheres around an expectation of security and the promise of economic freedom. This mode of governing aptly reflects what Michel Foucault described as an apparatus of security, a liberal mechanism for operationalizing the art of governing and securing populations through indirect means (e.g. the market) and less through direct governmental intervention. As decades of state-centred, near-total fire suppression unevenly shift towards risk-based management of fires for multiple objectives, it is the rights and capacity of individuals, understood primarily as homeowners and consumers, that increasingly serve to rationalize a new way of apprehending wildfires particularly, at the WUI. At the same time, state capacity for wildfire protection continues to be the subject of debates around limits. We suggest that these seemingly unconnected shifts are integral parts of the rise of a distinct approach, understood in terms of governing through an apparatus of security. Accepted Version 4 Critical geographers and other social scientists are already generating compelling insights into how wildfires and efforts to manage them in the Canadian context get experienced in ways that foreground questions about differing experiences, competing values, unequal power relations, unevenness of outcomes, and inequity (Walker et al. 2020; Zahara 2020; Sutherland 2019; Pacholok 2013; Goemans and Ballamingie 2013). Elsewhere, scholars are bringing significant insights into the nuanced intersections of wildfire vulnerability and affluence (Eriksen & Simon 2017); wildfire and gender (Eriksen, 2013); the will to know and control in wildfire science and anticipatory policy (Neale 2016; Neale et al. 2016); and the contentious, everyday politics of wildfire insurance (Booth & Harwood 2016; Booth & Kendal 2020). Yet, the challenge by fire historian, Stephen Pyne (2006) that geographers have paid too little attention to fires is still relevant. There is therefore significant scope for geographers and particularly critical geographers to further contribute to pyrogeographies. Building on existing body of work, our paper makes a modest contribution in this direction. We advance a poststructural understanding of contemporary efforts to govern wildfire risk in Canada by unveiling some of their key rationalizations, and by locating them within the broader contexts in which their assembled multiplicity becomes intelligible as a fairly coherent way of doing things. This is important at a time when climate change, escalating wildfire challenges, expanding WUI, and wider social and political dynamics all converge with the growing invocation of institutional “tipping point” and state “limits”. At such uncertain moments, how emergent approaches to wildfire governance are rationalized and with what effects take on renewed significance, analytically and politically. We build on the current geographical application of Foucault’s apparatus of security across a range of domains relating to nature-society entanglements, including boreal forest management (Baldwin 2013), agricultural drought (Clarke-Sather 2019), and smart cities (Klauser et al. 2014). We bring this geographical literature into dialogue with critical literature on risk, Accepted Version 5 disasters and political technologies (Ewald 2019; Lobo- Guerrero 2010, 2016; Collier 2014; Mansfield, 2012; Miller & Rose 2008; O’Malley 2011, 2013). In doing this, we show how contemporary efforts to govern increasingly challenging wildfire “problems” in the wildland-urban interfaces call for constant reflection on the ways that often taken-for-granted categories of risk, responsibility and security are not fixed but are actively and contingently constituted. While the deployment of Foucault’s apparatus of security in geographical literature has often emphasized the “elements of the apparatus” (Clarke-Sather 2019; Eden, 2007), we extend this current deployment by drawing attention to rationalizing discourses as central to legitimating and rendering the apparatus intelligible. Such rationalizing discourses are often left implicit in the deployment of apparatuses of security or are generally taken up as a separate form of analysis typically under such Foucauldian analytics as “power/knowledge”. Yet, to fully understand how and with what effects specific apparatuses of security get constituted and sustained, and how each element and the whole come to make sense and become legitimated, a fuller development of co-constitutive, rationalizing discourses is indispensable, as Foucault suggests in his later reflections on apparatuses (Foucault, 2010, 18-19). Our poststructural geographical analysis of wildfire governance in Canada attends to the making of the apparatus and the equally central discourses that co-constitute and sustain it. In developing our arguments, we draw on interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021 with 25 participants across the wildfire and forest sectors, including participants from the federal government and provincial governments, an arms-length association, a non-governmental organisation, the academic community and two local communities. These interviews which were both formal and informal were combined with detailed analysis of program documents, national and provincial policy documents, other grey literature and Accepted Version 6 academic literature. At the provincial level, we emphasize the Alberta province. Alberta is the cradle of FireSmart and a major player in the Canadian wildfire management landscape. The province has experienced two of Canada’s costliest wildfire disasters in Canadian insurance history based on insured losses – the 2016 Horse River wildfire in Fort McMurray and the 2011 Flat Top Complex wildfires in Slave Lake. The rest of the paper develops our arguments through a theoretical background that provides the basis for understanding the evidence of the rise of a distinct approach to wildfire risk governance, one typified by FireSmart and rationalized through discourses of individual capacity, limits of the state, and security through the contingent. 2.0 Apparatuses of security: governing risks through “freedom” Close to a century of fire suppression policy in Canada had heavily centred state rule and disciplinary routines of firefighting. Over the last three decades, a gradual shift in rhetoric and practice has been underway towards a more calculative, fire-permitting approach that has co-emerged with FireSmart. In this shift that reflects governing through a security apparatus, a growing array of actors, tools, practices, activities and objectives are being assembled around proactive management, acceptance, and circulation of fires. Here, older objectives of the state combine with a new (and growing) range of objectives that seek articulation with the interests of various segments of the population – objectives which include ecosystem-based management of landscapes, the “resilience” of WUI communities, “economic freedom” of citizens as homeowners and consumers, the “return” of cultural burning and Indigenous land stewardship, the biopolitical ordering of “species at risk”, the management of carbon sinks and so on. So, how to understand this gradual but remarkable shift towards an apparatus of security?1 Foucault introduced “apparatuses of security” in his lecture series at College de France between 1975 and 1979. These were more recently published in the English Language in Accepted Version 7 three volumes: Society must be Defended; Security, Territory and Population; and The Birth of Biopolitics. In these lectures, Foucault charted the genealogies of the modes of governing which culminated in the varieties of neoliberalism that took hold in the West during the period in which he was giving his lectures, in the 1970s. Early in Security, Territory and Population, he articulates what he calls apparatuses of security which are technical mechanisms of power that characterized the rise, since the eighteenth century, of the liberal mode of governing with its characteristic rationality of freedom. This liberal mode of governing entails the deployment of multiform tactics to govern indirectly while keeping direct governmental intervention to a minimum (Foucault 2009). This, Foucault notes, aims to “secure the natural phenomena or economic processes or processes intrinsic to [the] population” (2009, 353). And to intervene in and secure these “natural” (and naturalized) phenomena is portrayed as a way to assure freedom. But, since these natural(ized) or taken-for-granted phenomena delimit the boundaries within which the imperative of freedom operates, freedom in this sense is more about “the management and organization of the conditions in which one can be free” (Foucault 2009, 61-62). It is freedom in this sense that characterises apparatuses of security. Governing through apparatuses of security differs from modes of governing in the earlier centuries centred mainly on the use of law, punishment and the fear of the Sovereign – what Foucault calls the juridico-legal mode. Apparatuses of security also differ from disciplinary mode of governing, which situated the individual within the penal order as a subject of normalization. Both the juridico-legal and the disciplinary modes tend, fundamentally, to constrain and contain. An apparatus of security is different in that it seeks to open up possibilities for the movement and circulation of a multiplicity of elements (Baldwin 2013; Clarke-Sather 2019; Elden 2007). Beyond a binary of dos and don’ts, a security apparatus works towards an end that seeks to satisfy a wider range of objectives precisely through a more dispersed and indirect style of intervention. It is concerned about finding “support in Accepted Version 8 the reality of the phenomenon… making other elements of reality function in relation to it, in such a way that the phenomenon is cancelled out” (Foucault 2009, 59). Using the examples of grain scarcity, a pandemic and the management of cities, Foucault shows how security apparatuses address these risks by working with a range of givens (so-called natural) elements, and by fostering freedom understood as “the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things” (Foucault 2009, 48-49). As such, elements of the apparatus of security include circulation of people and things; treatment of certain aspects as given or natural; calculations of cost, risk and damage; embedding of the event within a multiplicity of factors which are never an end in themselves; and predictions and estimations based on information about the population (Clarke-Sather 2019; Elden 2007; Klauser et al., 2014). Studies deploying the notion of apparatus of security have tended to focus on one or more of these “elements of the apparatus” elaborated by Foucault midway through his lecture series, in Security, Territory and Population. However, in the early part of the third volume, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault would further specify the nature of his work on security, which much like most of his other work on madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, entails “the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth” (Foucault, 2010, 19). If the “elements of the apparatus” relate to the practices that “mark out in reality” a specific apparatus, the regime of truth relates to the broader discourses within which the apparatus and its elements gain intelligibility and become legitimately assessable as true or false (Foucault, 2010, 18-19). We emphasize the centrality of core rationalizing discourses as essential for better understanding apparatuses of security. In our case, we show that not only do the ongoing shifts in the governance of wildfire risk in Canada reflect several elements of a security Accepted Version 9 apparatus, the apparatus itself gains intelligibility and legitimacy in relation to a set of core discourses. The history of wildfire management in Canada over the last one-and-half centuries must be understood as part of the broader territorialization of the Canadian settler state (Tymstra 2015; Pyne 2011). This territorialization process has left about 90 percent of all lands under the control of the Crown. Different jurisdictions of the Canadian state began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to systematically control landscape fires to facilitate capitalist resource economies, enable settler lives, and re-order landscapes according to the states’s socio-ecological visions (Pyne 2011). Following early periods of toleration of Indigenous fire cultures, the settler state would later pursue more drastic control of all landscape fires, including Indigenous fire practices (Griffin & Hammond 2014; Hoffman et al. 2022; Tymstra 2015). Limited perhaps only by its own capacity, “uncooperative” landscapes natures, and contending human agency, the state historically sough to suppress virtually all landscape fires, which were routinely framed as destructive (Sutherland 2019, Tymstra 2015; Zahara 2020).2 This suppression approach was further etched in public consciousness through heroic image of the fully kitted firefighter, trained and disciplined in a military-like command chain, although Pacholok (2013), writing in the context of the Okanagan Valley, differentiates between the “strong” heroic image of structural firefighters relative to wildland firefighters. Aided by the public-facing Smokey Bear and other public outreach tools, the orientation was to stop virtually all fires.3 Forest fire offences were severely prosecuted by the state, and public campaigns on wildfire prevention often included dramatic imageries meant in part to drive compliance by instilling fear of stiff punishment. In short, the control of wildfires had historically taken its rationality from the Accepted Version 10 territorialization of state power, manifest in the state’s demonstration of strong and direct control over landscapes and diverse populations, mainly through the tools of law, command, discipline and punishment. Over the last decades wildfire suppression has begun to open towards a more diversified, risk-based, fire-permitting approach – in recognition of the adverse impacts of fire suppression and in pursuit of a wider range of objectives (Copes-Gerbitz et al. 2022; McGee et al. 2014; Tymstra et al. 2020). As we later show, FireSmart, which began in the early 1990s, reflects this gradual shift. With more fire managers across Canada and North America increasingly seeking to “manage” rather than wholly suppress wildfires (Schoennagel et al. 2017), the public is invited to “accept more managed fire on the landscape”, including prescribed burns and Indigenous fire practices, if in a more restrictive form under the state’s careful gaze (Tymstra 2015, xxviii). But “managing’ wildfires has also entailed increasingly complex systems of calculations, modelling and predictions – systems which are no less political (Beverly 2019; cf. Neale 2016). This emergent approach intervenes in a milieu made up of at least two main aspects that are considered “natural” with respect to physical nature and human nature. First is the idea of the “natural” occurrence of fires across the Canadian ecozones, an idea that is confronted with the recent human-altered fire-deficit landscapes, anthropogenic climate change and the millennia-long history of Indigenous fire practices (cf. Zahara 2020). But this naturalization of wildfires also points to the embrace of biophysical contingency to which we later return. The second is the naturalness of economic processes and individual’s economic freedom, manifest in the defence of private property in land, and the supposed inevitability of continued expansion of wildland-urban interfaces through private property. Taken for granted are the historical geographies of forest lands, current modes of urban Accepted Version 11 and rural planning, and the current land ownership patterns which are in many jurisdictions subject to Indigenous claims. Moreover, the economic freedom of citizens summoned narrowly as consumers and homeowners is taken as given in a way that obscures citizens as socially-differentiated, political subjects. Wildfire security, hitherto concerned about stopping all fires, would now be concerned with working with and securing these given aspects, as multiple objectives, interests, actors, tools and practices are made to converge. When taken together these elements become recognizable as a distinct approach: governance through an apparatus of security. As Foucault (2009) shows, if governing through an apparatus is about orchestrating the conditions within which individuals can be free, this orchestration is part of the perennial struggle to establish security in the balance between the interests of the individual operating in the market domain, and the collective interest for which the state must intervene to produce social good. This struggle has been the subject of intense debates in disaster security. It is to these debates on risk, disaster security and responsibility that we now turn. 3.0 Disaster risk, responsibility and security in liberal societies Since Ulrich Beck (1992) famously observed the rise of the risk society marked by hazards that emanate from modernity itself, scholars have continued to debate the social construction of risk and the political work that the notion of risk is made to do (Ewald 2019; Lobo-Guerrero 2010, 2016; Mansfield 2012). Risk, understood as the chance of a hazard materializing, also represents a political technology for rendering uncertainty governable. For instance, as Lobo-Guerrero (2016, 5) observes about the insurantial logic, “uncertainty becomes risk” through the orchestration of a linear temporality that attempts to make the future actionable in the present through calculative practices based on the past. This orchestration entails series of calculative, discursive and material interventions to render Accepted Version 12 hazards visible within a broader schema through which it becomes possible to formulate a pre-determined moment of potential risk materialization, known as the event. This is a knowledge-based process in which calculations, assumptions and speculations by experts derive legitimacy from bodies of knowledge that society already accepts as true. As such, any effort to govern uncertain events – including wildfires – necessarily entails corresponding ways of constructing risk through expert labour. Linked to the production of risk is the question of responsibility for dealing with risk. The debate over the role of the individual and the collective in providing security against extremely uncertain or catastrophic hazards has a long history in Western societies (Ewald 2019). Individual responsibility has long been portrayed as the moral apogee of individual foresight, rationality, self-dependence and self-regulation, in contrast to the supposed immorality of creating a burden on others in a system of solidarity. But as François Ewald (2019) shows in his genealogy of insurance values in France, not only have both responsibility and solidarity been historically considered complementary virtues, but they have also been equally appropriated in legitimizing the institution of private insurance. As Deborah Stone (1999) insists in her reflections on the morality of contemporary insurance, private insurance is as much a “mutual aid” (form of solidarity) arrangement as social insurance administered through public institutions and other solidarity-based collective arrangements. It thus appears that in some sense the struggle between individual responsibility and collective solidarity has to do as much with the power to define and mobilize each or both to particular ends as with any essential incompatibility between them. In Western Europe, for instance, responsibility for disaster security continued to be debated through the major periods of the post-war planning, the rise of the welfare state and the ascendancy of neoliberalism. For instance, by the time that Friedrich Hayek penned his famous 1944 work, Road to Serfdom, it was still taken for granted that natural disasters Accepted Version 13 against which individuals cannot adequately protect themselves belonged in the sphere of public-assured security. A defender of individual freedom against collectivism and especially central planning, Hayek notes an important concession to collectivism: “… there is no reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision…. To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such “acts of God” as earthquakes and floods” (Hayek 2014/1944, 148). As neoliberalism began to emerge from the shadows of post-war planning in Western Europe, policies emerged which transferred to individuals more responsibility for protection against risks, even if the government provided a minimum level of security required for the functioning of neoliberal competition and enterprise (Foucault, 2010). Within this context, proponents often called for a clear separation between the domains of markets and economic expansion on the one hand, and that of social justice. In contemporary liberal societies, however, even the latter is becoming a domain where the individualizing and enterprising tendencies of neoliberalism are fostered. Pat O’Malley (2011) argues that such contemporary risk techniques go beyond traditional norms of precaution and prevention moving towards self-enterprise in the face of extreme uncertainty as part of a growing attempt to realize “the neoliberal dream of a society of extreme entrepreneurs” (O’Malley 2011, 5; cf. Mansfield 2012; Lobo-Guerrero 2016). Security is here to be found not in the absence of hazards, but in the “freedom” to embrace uncertainty. This more recent mode of thinking about security is as much about mobilizing multiplicities and biophysical contingency (Baldwin 2013), as it is about normalizing the proliferating hazards of modernity (Mansfield 2012), and fostering the perpetual re-invention of the resilient, enterprising subject (Lobo- Guerrero 2016; O’Malley 2011). Accepted Version 14 While some scholars call for an understanding of climate change risks as belonging to the domain of social justice and solidarity (Lucas and Booth, 2020; Felli and Castree, 2012), the continued promotion of market-based solutions to climate-linked disasters reflects the long-standing struggle between private and public responsibility. At the points where these climate-linked disasters touch the ground (e.g. in WUI fire spaces) proponents of private protection point to the dominant system of private property rights as dictating the necessity of private responsibility for disaster security. Lucas and Booth (2020, e676), in their work in the Australian context, pointed to the “mismatch between social understandings of responsibility for climate risks, and the technocratic, market-based home insurance products offered by private insurance markets”. Yet such a mismatch in the context of climate-linked wildfire risk relates not only to the scales of “global” climate change and “local” disaster, but also to the nature of WUI as an emergent frontier between public and private lands, and the boundary-crossing nature of wildfires and their products (e.g. smoke, carbon emission). This tension reflects the broader political challenge of balancing rights and responsibility in disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation broadly (cf. Blackburn and Pelling, 2018). Moreover, it reflects deeper struggles about how to organize collective life. These tensions are playing out in the emergent shifts in wildfire governance in Canada towards governing through a security apparatus, and the instantiation of these shifts in FireSmart. 4.0 Assembling an Apparatus of Wildfire Security in Canada 4.1 The Rise of FireSmart FireSmart began as an initiative of the non-profit association, Partners in Protection (PiP). PiP was formed in 1993 from a task force constituted by the then Alberta Forest Service to address wildfire problems. The inaugural members of PiP included six provincial and Accepted Version 15 municipal government entities (Alberta Forest Service, Alberta Public Safety Services, Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties, Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, Alberta Planners Association and Alberta Fire Chiefs Association) and two federal government entities (Canada Parks Service, Canadian Forest Service). In 1999, PiP formally created the FireSmart® brand and published its pioneer technical manual titled FireSmart: Protecting your Community from Wildfire (1999, revised in 2003). As such, from its early days, FireSmart had reflected the three major jurisdictions of the Canadian state namely, municipal, provincial/territorial, and federal. In the context of wildfire governance generally, the federal level provides national coordination, research, wildfire emergency funds, and direct fire management on federal lands (e. g. National Parks). Regulations, programs and resourcing on wildfire management and fire protection are developed and channeled mainly at the provincial and municipal levels. By 2011, PiP had established a national reach for the firesmart initiative, having been formally incorporated at the federal level. At present firesmart continues to expand its networks, with membership currently including over 100 organizations spread across ten Canadian provinces and territories. FireSmart also has a growing partnership with the United States, New Zealand and Australia. In 2021, Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) formally took over the national initiative and the brand from PiP.4 FireSmart activities continue to be funded by the local, provincial, and federal governments through various funding channels and programs. FireSmart aims “to encourage shared responsibility for fire protection and to empower individuals, communities, and industry to directly reduce the risk from wildfires in or near populated areas” (FireSmart Canada Website 2020). This is pursued through seven highlighted foci: Education, Emergency Planning, Vegetation Management, Legislation, Accepted Version 16 Development, Interagency Cooperation, and Cross Training. National FireSmart officials are also involved in advocacy and in the lobbying of governments for more fire-resilient building regulations. If these formal aims of FireSmart appear circumscribed, the social life of the initiative in practice is far more elaborate. The initiative has become a significant assemblage of actors and activities that shapes how wildfire risk is framed and engaged across the Canadian society. Notably, the term itself has evolved to encompass a range of everyday uses. It is a noun referring to the national initiative. It is also an adjective (e.g. a firesmart property) and a verb (e.g. to firesmart a property). Although the Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy (CWFS, 2016, 12) calls it “a concept”, aptly reflecting the ambition of the initiative is the assertation of a key official that FireSmart is “not a project [but]…a movement and … a way of life!” (Int. 10, 24/2/2020). FireSmart incorporates common-sense fire protection efforts, yet lays claim to specialized domains of knowledge, expert certification and complex scientific wildfire debates. An important report on the 2016 Horse River Wildfire notes that “many of the conditions leading to home vulnerability are well-known, manageable, and can be readily addressed by residents working on their properties with guidance by knowledgeable local fire and public safety authorities (ICLR & Westhaver, 2017, 9).5 A FireSmart official also pointed out that “there’s a lot of education that needs to take place and a lot of collaboration, cooperation as I don’t think it [FireSmart] is inherent for most communities.” (Int. 10, 24/2/2020). As such, FireSmart is simultaneously a domain of “well-known” actions and a sphere of expert orchestration and public education. FireSmart also opens up to an array of tools, practices and knowledges across public and private spheres, including governments, Indigenous communities, businesses and voluntary organisations across levels from the Accepted Version 17 local to the international. An even more expansive vision of FireSmart among its proponents summons a wider range of actors from the insurance industry to the manufacturers and distributors of fire-resistive products; from national and provincial lawmakers to the news media. In short, from the early days of its founding with only eight government agencies, FireSmart is now active through an array of actors with various interests. The initiative, for instance, draws on broad areas of knowledge and expertise: forestry, fire management, insurance and actuary, public communication, climate and weather science, urban planning, landscape management, emergency planning and response etc. Some of its aims are even more far-reaching. One example is captured in the observation of a key FireSmart official that: “every social science research project that we’ve ever done … is pointing to providing incentives for individuals to take [mitigative] actions” (Int. 10, 24/2/2020). Incentives, then, are an element of what is envisioned as a broad market-driven mitigative campaign in which proponents envisage ultimately a fully commercialized FireSmart branding of everyday products and a fully engaged insurance sector shaping public consumption towards wildfire protection. Such is the emergent approach to governing public wildfire risk, as typified by FireSmart. Its primary concern is not the boundaries of dos and don’ts per se, nor is it about law and punishment primarily. Rather this emergent approach seeks to indirectly steer the wildfire “problem” by deploying a multiplicity that seeks to cancel out, nullify or limit the reality of the “problem”. Wildfire protection at the WUIs increasingly gets channelled through a diverse set of objectives, actors, tools, and practices, including but clearly beyond those associated with the state. Rather, the state increasingly becomes one actor among a growing array of actors and interests that converge around WUI fire protection. This Accepted Version 18 approach becomes even more recognizable as a distinct way of doing things when considered in the light of three core discourses, to which we turn below. Meanwhile, it is crucial to note that while Firesmart – by itself and as part of a larger approach – operates like an apparatus of wildfire security, its efficacy is not our focus in this paper. That would be the subject of a different investigation. Rather we focus on the constitution of this apparatus and the three core discourses surrounding its emergence and sustenance. 4.2 Valorising individual capacity Fire management is increasingly rationalized based on multiple objectives. In relation to WUIs in particular, one rationality appears to be increasingly drawn upon like never before: the interest of the “individual homeowner”. It is the individual homeowner, above all else, whose rights, capacity, and responsibility for wildfire protection are elevated anew. Canada’s WUIs, which cover an estimated 116.5 million hectares or 13.8 percent of Canada’s total land (Johnston and Flannigan, 2018) have been growing. In the US, one in every three new residential buildings has been built in WUIs since 1990 (Radeloff et al. 2018). Tymstra (2015, 146) also identified 1995 as the period when “fire management agencies in North America shifted their focus to become structure-protection agencies” due to the expansion of the WUI. But WUI expansion alone can hardly explain how the individual homeowner became imagined as the prime subject of fire risk, and the individual home as the locus of fire security. To be sure, in Canada, efforts to cultivate some level of individual responsibility for fire protection, particularly urban structural and industrial fires, date back to a few centuries (O’Malley & Hutchinson 2009). Indeed, some of the emerging views around responsibility Accepted Version 19 for WUI fires more or less extend thinking from structural fires as a matter of personal responsibility, as an official of an arms-length forestry association in Alberta reasoned: “So it’s no different than your own home. Right, who’s responsible for protecting your apartment or your house from fire? Well, it’s yourself right you know, you should be putting in the fire detectors and you should be making sure the furnace is in good working order … you should have your escape routes and little family fire drill and all that kind of thing.” Yet the historical enrolment of the public through wildfire education campaigns and volunteering in support of a century of fire suppression appears partly different from public mobilization within the emerging apparatus. If historically the public was mobilized ultimately in the name of the state and a narrowly defined public interest, contemporary mobilization of the public in wildfire protection entails a multiplicity that gets rationalized in the interest of the individual. To be sure, there are existing individualizing logics that already shape the Canadian society. For instance, as John Saul (2008) observes, there is the ethos of Western individualism and independent spirit of European pioneers who yet forged relations of dependence, reciprocity, and trade with the Indigenous peoples in Canada, partly producing what he calls “a Métis civilization”.6 This was enabled by a vital, if less-recognized, underpinning of collective life in Canada: the Indigenous peoples” idea of an ever-expanding circle of equality in which individual and group interests are made to co-exist towards an egalitarian end (Saul, 2008). There is, however, the more globally widespread individualizing force of neoliberal capitalism, which is particularly crucial for understanding the emerging shifts in wildfire governance and broader disaster and climate adaption governance not only in Canada but also in the US (Collier, 2014), Australia (Lucas and Booth, 2020), and the UK (Felli and Castree, 2012). Yet there is also an important sense Accepted Version 20 in which wildfire risk is being made visible anew through the more recent problematization of WUIs by wildfire experts and managers. If the emerging wildfire security apparatus typified by FireSmart foregrounds an atomized vision of wildfire, focusing on embers and individual property ignition, it also visibilizes the individual homeowner as the prime subject of wildfire risk and the locus of wildfire security, as evidenced in interviews and major reports (Int. 2, 31/10/2019; FireSmart Manual 2013). For instance, an important report on the 2016 Horse River fire in Fort McMurray prepared on behalf of ICLR by leading Canadian wildfire managers is worth quoting here: “The present Canadian approach to the wildland/urban interface fire problem requires a radical and sweeping strategic shift that brings primary focus onto the root of the problem. That is, resolving this problem definitively and responsibly will require reducing the vulnerability of homes that are easily ignited by the inevitable showers of wind-driven embers from wildland fires…. [That is] the only place where the sequence of wildfire disasters can be broken... Agencies and organizations with mandates or responsibility for public safety and/or fire protection need to shift their primary emphasis onto proactive initiatives that target the root cause of the wildland/urban interface problem – homes that are vulnerable to ignition by embers” (ICLR & Westhaver 2017, 2). Individual homes become the measure of vulnerability, and the ignition potential of each becomes not only the “root of the problem” but also the key to addressing this “problem”. Residing in WUI areas is seen as a matter of individual choice. This points to the well-documented pattern of affluent populations choosing to settle in and sometimes fostering practices (e. g. resistance to proactive fire protection measures such as prescribed burning) that amplify wildfire vulnerability in WUI zones (Int. 1, 28/10/2019; cf. Eriksen and Simon Accepted Version 21 2017). Yet, location of communities and individual homes are also shaped by powerful historical, social, economic and cultural factors. Moreover, the fact that 90 percent of lands in Canada is under Crown Ownership means that WUI communities are also often flanked by Crown lands, the fire management systems of which adjoining communities have no control over. The individual homeowner at the centre of this WUI wildfire discourse is assumed to be capable of, and willing to take actions to address fire hazards at the WUI.5 Insofar as this discourse emphasizes the application of “tax and insurance incentives and disincentives” (FireSmart Manual 2003) and envisions a fully commercialised FireSmart brand that guides individual consumption choice with respect to a wide range of fire-rated brands, products and services, then individuals are assumed to readily respond to monetary (dis)incentives and education by experts. Significant FireSmart efforts are, indeed, pursued through communities and municipalities. Yet, much of these efforts tend to be oriented ultimately towards private action. For instance, a community FireSmart leader notes how the landscape level is something “that’s very difficult to move the needle on anyway. And so we just … put our efforts on really working with individuals on their own properties and bringing them information and programs that work at that level” (Int. 9, 20/02/2020). A recent comprehensive survey of all (59 percent response rate) municipalities in Alberta regarding municipal fire protection work found that this is a more widespread pattern: “the most commonly reported planning and development measures adopted by municipalities addressed flammable materials on private property and roadway standards” (Gatti and McGee, 2021, iv). The study found that the least adopted measures were those that seek to control pattern of development in relation of known hazards, e.g. land-use planning and zoning. Accepted Version 22 This discourse also reflects in the expansion of the remit of private insurance to regulate individual homeowner’s behavior. In this expanded scope for private insurance, the risk of WUI fire damage – with all its complex interacting factors such as location, landscape type, weather and climate, spatial distribution of structures and infrastructures, fire-fighting response, and a host of other human factors – is directly tied to individual homeowner’s firesmart behaviour, which is then incentivized accordingly. It is this chain of individualization of wildfire risk that underpins growing attempts to personalize wildfire risk underwriting on the basis of Firesmart. For instance, the insurance-led institute ICLR notes in its 2017-2021 Strategic Plan that it is committed to developing wildland fire risk ratings for communities in Canada which will both serve as a basis for “improved home insurance underwriting practices related to wildfire” (ICLR 2016, 30). As such, the valorisation of individual capacity renders the wildfire “problem” visible and actionable in specific ways as outlined above. This discourse has co-evolved with a growing discourse on state limits, to which we now turn. 4.3 Framing the limits of state capacity Central to the on-ongoing shift in the governance of wildfire risk in Canada is the growing discourse around the capacity and responsibility of the state for wildfire protection. This discourse apprehends the state through its historical and ongoing role in fire protection while appearing to project various normative stances on the role of the state in the future of wildfire protection in Canada. With diverse proponents and different emphases, various strands of this discourse tend to converge around the idea of “limits” to state capacity as contested and subject to negotiation. Three strands of this discourse can be identified as follows. The first centres the economy of state-led fire management. As Figure 1 shows, the cost of wildfire protection in Canada is escalating, with total costs almost tripling over the last Accepted Version 23 forty years. The fixed and the variable trend lines depicted in the graph each represent the two major aspects of wildfire protection in Canada: while fixed cost relates to proactive and preventive efforts, including long-term institutional planning and programs, and variable cost relates to cost of additional firefighting efforts. Whereas the former continues to rise, the latter which rose rather slowly over the decades peaked in 2006 and has continued to decline. The escalating variable cost of fire suppression (see Figure 1), which is often the focus of this strand, has also been noted to produce declining marginal returns on investment (Tymstra 2015, 146). It is partly on this basis that proponents of this discourse are critical of the growing cost to the public of wildfires protection, espousing the need to admit, if not prescribe, a limit to state responsibility partly by shifting more responsibility for wildfire protection towards individuals and communities. For instance, an official of an arms-length association notes that the key aim here is to find “the sweet spot” where to optimize government spending on wildfire suppression (Int. 11, 25/2/2020). Indeed, as observed by a fire scientist, it appears that virtually any level of spending can be justified to the public in wildfire response efforts to maintain public safety (Int. 13, 1/11/2019). This, with the insistence on individual responsibility for fire protection in the WUI, underpins the drive to accept, if not prescribe some limits to the channelling of the economic burden of wildfires through public institutions. Reinforcing the sentiment about scaling back state responsibility are the challenges faced by public fire managers who sometimes get pushed back by individual homeowners claiming private property rights, communities defending the aesthetic value of landscapes, or insurance companies suing governments for wildfire damage attributed to lack of proactive government action (Int. 1, 28/10/2019; Int. 19, 10/05/2021). But this sentiment should also be understood in relation to the emerging general orientation of disaster governance in Canada, where analysts of flood risk governance, for instance, note how “governments have been changing their policies to reduce their financial exposure by shifting Accepted Version 24 responsibility to homeowners” (Henstra & Thistlethwaite 2017, 1). As such, this strand seeks or at least envisages a certain form of limit to state role in the future of wildfire protection at the WUI (cf. Schoennagel et al. 2017). The second strand of the discourse on state limits begins with the recognition of the current weakness of the state, which is considered symptomatic of a longer-term decline in state capacity for forest and wildfire management. In contrast to the first, proponents here call for the shoring up of state capacity for fire protection, asserting the need for a stronger public responsibility in the future of wildfire protection. This discourse, which emphasizes the low and declining fixed fire expenditure in Figure 1, often takes cognizance not only of the economy of wildfire protection but also the longer historical and wider political-economic context of wildfire and forest governance. For instance, multiple interviews referred to the long and uneven history of decline in the capacity of the federal and provincial governments for forest and wildfire management (Int. 1, 28/10/2019; Int. 2, 31/10/2019).7 An Alberta government official recounts the experience at the provincial level: “The way our work is done has certainly changed. We used to spend a lot of time in the bush. We used to have a lot more staff.… So, yeah, it’s probably in the early “90s when we had a lot of cutbacks when we dropped a lot of that work. The government was trying to balance budgets… government was downsized quite a bit…. So, we’re leaner these days and have to change the way we do things. I think it’s probably the same [across other Canadian provinces]” (Int. 1, 28/10/2019). Similarly, there have been waves of decline and contraction at the federal level, in the Canadian Forest Service (CFS), where two instances have had perhaps the most enduring impacts on its current capacity. The first is the period beginning from 1971, regarded as the beginning of “CFS’s lowest ebb” (Drushka & Burt 2001 25). This was during a period of Accepted Version 25 reorganisation, downsizing and privatisation within the institution. The second wave is the more recent wave of contractions beginning in 1993 when a series of restructuring led to CFS losing its department status and many research programs were closed. Drushka and Burt (2001, 27) observed that during this period, the CFS budget was cut by 60 percent and its workforce was reduced by one-third. This was also at a time when private and arms-length organisations blossomed. FireSmart’s PiP itself started in Alberta around this period, during the Ralph Klein (Alberta’s Conservative Premier between 1992-2006) years when neoliberalism rose to the fore with its commitment to individual (economic) freedom, privatization, deregulation and austerity (Harrison, 2015). Consequently, scientists voice alarm over “decades of under-funding of fire science” critical for proactive fire management (Flannigan & Wotton 2017; Struzik 2018). They point to the shrinking pool of wildfire experts exacerbated by the retirement of a large cohort of senior experts whose replacement remains uncertain (CWFS 2016; Sankey 2018). Edward Struzik, pointed to the ironic situation of staff strength at the CFS when he called on the federal government to “restore funding for the Canadian Forest Service to at least 1990s levels when it employed 2,200 people. CFS employs 700 people now and only about a dozen of those are wildfire scientists” (Struzik 2018). The Blueprint for Wildland Fire Science in Canada observes that this gap in expertise at a time of growing wildfire challenges “puts future public safety and security at risk” (Sankey 2018, iii; cf. Tymstra et al. 2020). Not only do proponents call for a reinforcement of public capacity for long-term wildfire management, others highlight the need to more strongly wield otherwise underutilized state-led fire mitigation measures including land-use planning and zoning (Mbajiorgu 2018; cf. Gatti and Tara, 2021). Still, others call for the development of a national database of wildfire structural damage and a national risk framework as present in the US, Australia and parts of Europe. Accepted Version 26 The third strand of the discourse on state limits approaches the history of state involvement in wildfire protection from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples. This strand takes the culture of state wildfire management as part of the broader settler-colonial relations between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada. It envisages certain limits to the role of the state to the extent that current state-led fire management cultures partly hinder Indigenous capacity for effective fire protection – which is tightly linked to Indigenous fire cultures, land stewardship and self-determination. This discourse emphasizes the need to rethink the broader enterprise of wildfire protection in Canada as institutionalized in and through state and non-state structures (Int. 20, 22/06/2021). As one respondent observes, the “dominant fire culture [is one] where we want everything to fit into the one box about fire” (Int. 20, 22/06/2021). Since this dominant fire culture evolved through the historical disvaluing, suppression and sometimes criminalization of Indigenous fire cultures, what counts as “legitimate expertise” in fire protection continues to be limited to those based narrowly on formal certification. To some extent, recognition still continues to be denied to members of Indigenous communities who embody long-held local fire knowledge and experiences of fire management and firefighting (Int. 20, 22/06/2021). Indigenous agency in fire management continues to be stifled by cross-jurisdictional complexities across levels of government. Moreover, attempts to engage communities sometimes also perpetuate long-standing paternalistic relationships where fire protection is “done for” communities as opposed to enhancing communities’ capacities to effectively manage the landscape in culturally appropriate ways. One of our respondents' notes: There's quite a paternalistic relationship with many of the fire management agencies, or it's like, you know, oh, we'll do this for you, we'll take care of this for Accepted Version 27 you. And I think many Indigenous nations now are saying, no, we want to do our own work. We have sovereignty over our own land and our own inherent rights. And, we want basically to steward this land based on our values (Int. 20, 22/06/2021). Meanwhile, with the high risk of fires around many Indigenous communities, this discourse also shows some scepticism towards recent attempts by the state to foster greater circulation of landscape fires. For instance, while debates continue over whether there exists a “let-it-burn policy” in northern Saskatchewan, Zahara (2020) analysis of Indigenous communities’ views raise questions about the possible obfuscation of state responsibility. Indeed, proponents of Indigenous fire cultures also seek active, enabling state commitment to fire protection in ways that foster Indigenous fire practices, well-being and self-determination (Christianson 2014; Hoffman et al. 2022). As such, this strand appears to accept both a certain kind of limit and a certain kind of reinforcement of state capacity for wildfire management into the future – insofar as both are necessary to enable more an equitable and sustainable fire management environment required for the thriving of Indigenous use of fire as a versatile tool for landscape management (Hoffman et al. 2022; Christianson 2014). As such, the discourse on the limit of the state’s capacity and responsibility for wildfire management is varied. While the various strands differ in their normative prescriptions, they more or less converge around the idea of “limits” to state capacity as contested and subject to negotiation. And this is crucial not only because these different articulations of limits co-exist with the valorisation of individual capacity for fire protection, but also because both of these discourses are linked to how the general idea of wildfire security would be understood. Accepted Version 28 4.4 Security through the contingent As one FireSmart official declares, not only is it impossible to fully reduce the risk of wildfire in communities, but people must also now learn to “live resiliently with wildfire” (Int. 10, 24/02/2020). This reflects a broader shift in the ways that governmental actors now think of fires and how to secure the Canadian society in the face of escalating wildfire challenges and growing uncertainty linked in part to climate change. It reflects a shift towards a new understanding of security that rests not so much on direct control and suppression per see, but on the indirect deployment of a multiplicity, greater circulation (of fires, actors, objectives, tools etc) and the embrace of contingency. Cordy Tymstra (2015, xxviii, also146-157) describes this as a “… paradigm shift from reactively fighting fire to proactively managing fire and the fire environment… [noting that] this shift means accepting more managed fire on the landscape and strengthening defensive positions by making communities and other values-at-risk FireSmart” This “paradigm shift” would seek not only to manage fires, but to do so by managing the “fire environment”. With the “naturalness” of fires now increasingly emphasized and taken as a given within the emerging apparatus of wildfire security, security appears to take on a new meaning. It would no longer be about the long-held view of security as “freedom from” threat, but about the “freedom to” act in the face of extreme uncertainty and risk (O’Malley 2013). It is security based on circulation and movement, and not based on restriction. Since wildfire security concerns itself with risk to the life and vitality of human populations, non-human species, and ecosystems, security in this case also takes on a biopolitical dimension. A hallmark of biopolitical security is its embrace of biophysical contingency. Within this logic, biophysical uncertainty and complexity would no longer function as barriers but as actively constituting the possibility of actions (Baldwin 2013). This emergent form of security privileges process over outcomes. Not only does governing through a multiplicity Accepted Version 29 also activate multiple notions of outcomes and multiple claimants of outcomes, but also the language of resilience, that is “freedom to”, is one of constant action oriented towards the seemingly infinite reinvention of the “resilient self”. This emergent understanding of security appears, at first, to be a natural response to what some have called the “age of catastrophes.” For instance, many of our respondents alluded to the ways that climate change would further complicate wildfire challenges, in line with many scientific studies (Coogan et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2017; Sankey 2018, Wotton et al. 2017). In concluding their detailed review of climate impacts on the boreal forest ecosystem, Price et al. (2013, 351) suggest that “the facts [about the impacts of climate change on Canada’s boreal ecosystem] are alarming”. Yet, the recent shifts in the governance of wildfires in Canada (and elsewhere) can hardly be said to be just a pragmatic response to these conditions. Rather, these shifts are also historically and geographically contingent, and political, since public understandings of wildfire risk, responsibility for wildfire protection, and the nature of security are at stake within these shifts. And these are issues of public deliberation and negotiation. 5.0 Conclusion Contemporary public wildfire governance in Canada confronts actors with growing, intersecting challenges: Climate change increases and complicates wildfire events, fire management increasingly calls for more fire-permitting, risk-based approaches, and all while the Canadian wildland-urban interface continues to expand. In an effort to mobilize all hands on deck, a different approach has since been emerging. At the centre of this emergent approach is a more indirect style of governing, one which espouses the individualization of risk, at time when state capacity for wildfire protect is the subject of debates about limits. Understood in terms of what Michel Foucault calls an apparatus of Accepted Version 30 security, the rise of this approach within Canada’s wildfire governance landscape points to the continued reinvention of the promise of individual “freedom” in the ways that liberal democracies approach the question of security against risks generally (Mansfield 2012; Miller & Rose 2008) and extreme uncertainty (Collier 2014; Lobo-Guerrero 2010; O’Malley 2013). Our aim in this paper has been to characterize this emerging approach to wildfire risk governance, and some of the conditions of its emergence and sustenance. The apparatus of wildfire security is open, enrolling an ever-increasing array of elements. Yet, the marginal inclusion of state practices such as land use planning and zoning or proper Indigenous fire stewardship is but one indication that the apparatus does not exhaust the range of possible fire protection practices in Canada. Yet, with the growing seriousness of wildfire risk and damage across Canada, there is an urgent need for critical analyses that unpack the material ramifications of this emergent approach to wildfire protection and climate adaptation more broadly through a focus on unevenness, equity, and justice – including the representational, distributive and recognition aspects. Still underexplored are the ways that these governance shifts shape and are shaped by structural forces that constitute dimensions of class, race (including indigeneity) and gender. In this paper we have focused on some of the powerful discursive and conceptual underpinnings upon which this emerging approach is currently rationalized and established. Our analysis contributes to contemporary poststructural geographies of wildfire risk governance in Canada and beyond. Wildfire governance is a uniquely generative empirical domain for the studies of risk and disaster security, given its deep layers of uncertainty related to wildfires themselves in which expectation of “surprise” is acknowledged (Hulse et al. 2016). Climate change introduces its own layer of uncertainty. And yet another later of uncertainty relates to WUI areas themselves – liminal socio-ecological and conceptual Accepted Version 31 spaces that escape simple determinations. WUIs offer a generative arena for the geographical investigation of risk in relation to the entanglements of nature and society; discourse and practice; political economy and everyday politics. This paper has pursued some of these possibilities, highlighting how the often taken-for-granted categories of risk, responsibility and security are not fixed but are negotiated – in this case, through the rise of an apparatus of security. Reference Baldwin, A. (2013). 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Her research interest addresses local to global interests at the policy nexus between forests, climate, Accepted Version 38 energy, and carbon, including sustainable resource management, local extraction conflicts, indigenous land and resource rights. 1 This shift is not necessarily peculiar to Canada. Indeed, the Canadian FireSmart was modelled after the US program, Firewise. As such, a detailed comparative analysis with other contexts, notably US, Australia and the Mediterranean regions of Europe is highly desirable but is beyond the scope of the current paper. 2 Tymstra (2015) showed how the so-called ‘ghost fires’ raged unhindered across much of the north of the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia at least until policy changes in the 1950s authorized and enabled full suppression in Alberta. 3 While the Smokey Bear was an adored icon of fire suppression in Canada and the US, it was nevertheless revulsed as a symbol of land appropriation and racial discrimination in areas such as northern New Mexico (Kosek, 2006). 4 CIFFC is a not-for-profit corporation formed by the federal, provincial, and territorial wildland fire management agencies in 1982 to share firefighting resources and information during the fire season. If CIFFC emerged with a focus on fire suppression, PiP emerged to focus on public engagement and preparedness. 5 ICLR describes itself as a leading centre for multi-disciplinary disaster prevention research and communication. It was established by the property and casualty insurance industry, and led by coalitions of insurance practitioners who work with researchers and other practitioners 6 Thanks to Colin Sutherland for stimulating some of the ideas that we develop here. 7 To be sure, this trajectory differed across jurisdictions and is historically uneven and non-linear, sometimes with significant wildfire events followed by a period of investment in public wildfire protection.
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Governing wildfire risk in Canada : The rise of an apparatus of security
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