Wildfires are worldwide phenomena that have been shaping the environment and life on Earth for millions of years. The global increase in the magnitude and spread of wildfires has inaugurated what experts call a ‘new era of fire.’ In this framework, fires have been couched almost exclusively as ‘natural disasters’ to be mitigated or suppressed. Yet wildfires are much more than that.
The ERC-funded FIREPOL project will study fire as a political phenomenon: it will conduct a comprehensive cross-continental investigation into the political triggers of wildfires with a focus on the Global South. FIREPOL will integrate fire policy data, remote sensing, qualitative case studies, and ethnographic research. The aim is to explore the complex interplay of political factors, institutions, power dynamics, and social struggles influencing wildfire distribution, societal impacts, and public narratives.
FIREPOL is an ambitious, high-risk/high-gain project that will deliver a new framework to understand and explain the connections between politics and wildfires, at a timely moment when wildfires have been identified as crucial socio-ecological challenges within the global climate change agenda. It will develop a new theoretical framework around the concept of ‘wildfire commons’ as a way of engaging the academic community, policy stakeholders and the general public in the co-production of alternative pathways for the sustainable, equitable and politically engaged management of wildfires.
FIREPOL is motivated by the reality that studying wildfires as political phenomena requires a broad understanding of politics. It will start by considering the state and policy apparatus (supra-politics) (RQ1). How wildfires are managed through specific laws, policies and institutions has been a key research question; however, how these are combined within complex policy and institutional arrangements remains unclear. Their interaction with other characteristics of state governance are also poorly understood. FIREPOL will take a new approach to fire-relevant norms and institutions through the identification of a typology of fire policy regimes. These are defined as ensembles of policies and institutional arrangements in policy areas with direct/indirect impact on wildfires, characterized by specific attitudes towards fires (e.g. suppression, mitigation). It will then consider how these interact with other factors to shape wildfire patterns, including: decentralization, deregulation, institutional effectiveness and colonial legacy.
To study supra-political dynamics, the methodological design involves compiling a new fire policy database and conducting a large-N statistical analysis of the relationship between different fire policy regimes and wildfire patterns in 78 countries across South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
In countries characterized by relatively weak governance, what happens outside the formal political arena is often as or more important than what happens within it. This ‘politics beyond the state’ – or ‘para-politics’ – is the focus of RQ2. Taking inspiration from the literature on the South Asia haze crisis in the 1990s and its transnational political economy implications, and from pioneering literature on how elites determine wildfire practices, FIREPOL will consider cross-national effects of para-political factors including: the role of clientelist networks, the alignment between political and technocratic visions of fires, and the role of social activism and advocacy networks.
To study para-political dynamics, the methodological design involves a Small-N qualitative comparative study to examine how wildfires are influenced by power dynamics among political actors at the national level. Three country clusters will be analysed: 1) Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay; 2) Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam; 3) Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia.
A focus on the localized dynamics of community interactions (infra-politics) will offer insights into the distributive and identity politics of wildfires (RQ3). Wildfire conflicts can be the expression of conflicts among communities with different livelihood strategies and ethno-cultural ties, or they can be acts of protest against state policies and institutions FIREPOL will study key aspects of wildfire contention: conflicting livelihoods and identities, narratives of contention, and repertoires of contention and strategy.
To evaluate the infra-political dynamics, the methodological design involves in-depth ethnographic research on two case studies of wildfire conflicts through participatory and community-based methods. For this we draw inspiration from the collaborative project Playing with Wildfire (UKRI 2020-2023).
Finally we will bring the other themes in close conversation in order to generate a transregional comparison of wildfire politics across the Global South and a new theoretical framework to more accurately and fairly imagine, conceptualise and act upon wildfires in policy and public debate [RQ4]. The three fields/levels of politics (supra-, para-, infra-) are at the core of the project’s analytical framework. They will offer a comprehensive account of the political drivers of wildfires and their effects on: i) wildfire patterns, or the actual occurrence and distribution of fires in physical space; ii) wildfire impacts, or the material implications for communities and the broader society; and iii) wildfire narratives, or how societies conceptualise and discuss wildfires in the public sphere.
FIREPOL will promote a more nuanced understanding of fires: one which acknowledges that negative or positive impacts are contingent on environmental and socio-economic landscapes. In line with this epistemological shift, FIREPOL will craft a new language to discuss wildfires. ‘Politicization’ of wildfires from the perspective of contentious politics and the ‘commons’ literature is a key step towards overcoming hyper-normative narratives grounded on either a view of fire as intrinsically bad or a polarized conception of ‘bad’ vs ‘good’ fires. Avoiding both neo-colonial and primitivist narratives of fire, FIREPOL will also contribute to decolonising public and scientific narratives on wildfires, which is crucial when discussing wildfires in the Global South and in the framework of climate change action. This in turn will feed into the development of a new policy-relevant framework which conceptualises wildfires as common resources (‘commons’).
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