Conference Agenda

Fire-prone areas of the world are experiencing a significant increase in the frequency, intensity, and severity of wildfires. Climate change is a strong driver of worsening fire conditions, even in landscapes where wildfires were previously small or infrequent, and can make mitigation and suppression efforts more difficult. The ecological impacts and an expanding rural-urban interface add urgency to this challenge. Changes to wildfire governance and policy can help manage these risks, but this requires a comprehensive understanding of social, economic, and ecological drivers and the complex dynamics of these linked systems. This research synthesises global research on climate change, wildfire, and governance to identify leverage points for helping society adapt (or transform, where required) to these challenges. It does so through a mixed methods study combining bibliometric analysis of global literature and qualitative comparative analysis of Australian case studies. The bibliometric analysis sought to identify emerging themes in this interdisciplinary field and examined collaboration patterns across fields and geographic areas. This analysis finds that although all three topics receive much attention, particularly in North America and Australia, a relatively small body of literature tackles these interlinked challenges of climate change, wildfires, and governance. The analysis also finds clear emerging themes relating to knowledge, co-production, technology, and psycho-social dimensions of change. However, there are several gaps and areas of weak or nonexistent connections between different bodies of knowledge that limit our understanding of how to leverage change in governance or social systems. The findings from a qualitative comparative analysis of Australian case studies are then discussed to explore key leverage points in greater depth and identify potential pathways to transform governance. How these levers can be pressed, however, is considered within broader challenges for confronting the escalating risks of wildfires. This includes a discussion of how both tacit and explicit conflicts in values shape the politics of wildfire governance and power dynamics between actors, how debates around both causes and solutions shape understanding of wildifre as a policy problem, and shapes beliefs about what (and whose) knowledge is legitmate for informing fire management practices.

Environmental security is a deeply contested concept that has nonetheless become a popular frame of reference for understanding the urgency of contemporary ecological risks. Some scholars who remain skeptical of this trend suggest that environmental security as a political project legitimizes harmful structures of power by expanding the threat/enemy distinction into new realms—such as environmental thought—where instead, change and transformation require reinvigorating notions of collectivity rather than defense, combat, or division. Others, however, locate a sense of hope in environmental security as an emancipatory agenda that draws upon the momentum of crisis to communicate the pressing need for an alternative approach to human-nature relations. In this paper, I expand upon this debate by exploring the tension between security as an inevitably repressive ordering principle of state-centric violence and security as a necessary feature of subversive politics of care, particularly as it relates to both the bodily and abstract impacts of current and future ecological conditions. Specifically, I ask whether and how security as a political concept— if reimagined— can contribute to movements for a safer and more equitable planet. In doing so, I draw from theorists Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Sarah Ahmed, whose works consider the drivers and effects of global conditions of crisis, the fragility that persists in a society that depends upon a dramatically uneven distribution of risk, and the modes of relationality that are required to extend and safeguard livable life. I conclude by arguing that despite debates about its relevance or utility, security is inherently intertwined with the politics of planetary change and with visions for a more just ecological future.

Given the ongoing efforts to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change, the effects of climate change and purported solutions are often widely embedded in modern policy documents. Frequently these stipulations fail to address underlying challenges that threaten the sustainability and adaptability of systems, ignoring complex interactions that span multiple interacting scales and levels – jeopardising long term outcomes.

This presentation focuses on the intersection of climate change and fire and how it is discussed in policies informing fire management in Australia. Fire and climate change is a prime exemplar of this disconnect, demonstrating multiple complex interactions over multiple scales including temporal, spatial, and governance levels. Fires are broadly predicted to become more frequent, larger and of greater intensities globally – although effects and interactions are manifold, and often poorly understood. Climate change has already made its mark on many fire regimes globally, intensifying pressures on governance and management in fire and related fields, which is only expected to intensify in the future. Australia is a relevant case study: with high vulnerability to climate change on an already highly flammable continent resulting in significant threats to society and the environment, potentially providing useful insights for other regions globally. It is therefore imperative to collate and explore the current understandings and knowledge employed by policymakers on the interactions of climate change with fire regimes to better inform future adaptation efforts.

This research investigates the policies that inform fire management practices in Australia at the state and national level and their discourses that construct them, with special reference to their prognostic (what we can do) and the diagnostic (what is the problem) frames. Through employing a novel form of content and framing analysis enriched with discourse analytic techniques we can understand how fire regimes are constructed, what effects on fire regimes are predicted from climate change, what adaptations are offered to manage these changes, and how changes to governance are (or are not) forwarded as potential adaptation solutions. By analysing documents from major bodies that have direct input into fire management practices and adaptations to fire at different levels of governance this research reveals what underlying ideologies and knowledges are engaged with, where transfers of these have occurred – and potentially why they have occurred. This understanding provides insights for assessing the current state of governance and how it might be reconfigured to improve environmental, social, and economic outcomes.

Previous research has not yet explored how humanitarian international non-governmental organizations conceive climate change and its relationship to security. This is remarkable given the significance of international non-governmental organizations in international politics, the fact that humanitarian international non-governmental organizations are critical in early responses to some of the most catastrophic effects of climate change, and that climate change has become one of the most prioritized issues in the humanitarian sector. Security constitutes a critical concept in the context due to its significance in both international discussions on climate change and in humanitarian aid. With regard to the latter, human security is a particularly important concept. The article addresses the outlined research gap, and seek to answer how (do) humanitarian international non-governmental organizations conceptualize climate security (?), through an interpretive content analysis of material produced by six humanitarian international non-governmental organizations—CARE International, the Danish Refugee Council, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the International Rescue Committee, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Mercy Corps. All of these organizations are influential in the humanitarian sector, but they differ in important aspects such as organizational structure, principal area of responsibility and their region(s) of operation. Data for the analysis consist of extensive first-hand material retrieved from the organizations’ websites and information channels, including news, policies, reports, statements and strategies. The empirical analysis is based on a framework for climate security discourses. Even though all the six analyzed humanitarian non-governmental organizations describe climate change as one of the defining crises of our time, they approach the issue and related risks differently. While some see it more instrumentally, as something that increases humanitarian needs and creates challenges, others discuss it more conceptually as an issue that fundamentally changes our circumstances and, by extension, what security, crises and humanitarianism actually mean. This, in turn, has significant implications for humanitarian work as well as climate and security policy more generally.