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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.

Article; Postprint

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0444804

Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan); Non UBC; Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)

10.1080/24694452.2023.2175638

Faculty

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