Firing up: Policy, politics and polemics under new and old burning regimes

Abstract

Changing fire regimes in the context of climate change call for new understandings of their diversity, use, policies, practices and politics. While catastrophic fires are redoubling calls for suppression, new political ecologies debate fire prohibition politics and emphasise understanding and incorporating local knowledge into management decisions. Latin American countries are characterised by strong regional tensions associated with environmental policies, agriculture and infrastructure development that often compete with local livelihoods, traditional management and a range of resource use practices. Landscape knowledge systems that inform customary use, access and resource interventions have become a new node of contestation; these are added to the perennial question of land rights, especially as carbon politics and other environmental services become more important in the structuring of autonomy over land uses. This themed section presents research conducted in different countries and biomes in Latin America and explores the historical and current tensions around the development of the science of burning by local populations. Research outlines the contradictions and tensions between fire control policies and rural livelihoods, and the emergent political factors and ideologies that inherent in fire conflicts and could help shape solutions. Our four case studies in different regions of south America (Amazon, Cerrado, Chiquitana), explore the production, application and circulation of knowledge about fire and its consequences using an array of methods: classical descriptive models, analytics from political ecology, and the complex arena of science and technology studies. The latter help us to understand the conflictual dynamics associated with “new fire management,” which relies on more technological means of fire control as well as legislation, payments, and new governmentalities to transform traditional practices. Overall, the papers place fire management in its new active political and ecological framing, namely at the heart of current development debates in the Latin American tropics.

Recalibrating burdens of blame: Anti-swidden politics and green governance in the Philippine Uplands

“…Anti-swidden narratives and burdens of blame have intensified as of late (Tacconi, 2016;Carmenta et al, 2019). As global climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation measures aim to enhance forest cover (e.g., natural climate solutions, or REDD+) as forest conversion and climate change causes forests to dry out and become more susceptible to fire, the criminal nature of swidden clearing and burning is assumed a priori and considered a direct threat to green governance agendas (Dressler et al, 2018;Fletcher et al, 2018;Eloy et al, 2019). Swidden farmers now bear a mounting burden of 'fire risk' in increasingly flammable forest landscapes (e.g., drying out due to the greater prevalence of drought etc (see Smith 2018;Carmenta et al, in review;Eloy et al, 2019)) and are typically blamed when escape fires occur, irrespective of how close the fire is to where they reside (Carmenta et al, 2019).…”

Modelling Human-Fire Interactions: Combining Alternative Perspectives and Approaches

“…However, the problem of fire can be framed very differently: for example, ecologists may focus on maintaining biodiversity by managing the size and timing of fires in line with the needs of an ecosystem or species of interest, whereas town councils will focus on preventing damage to people and infrastructure. In response to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, managing land use to reduce carbon emissions or increase sequestration has become an increasingly powerful driver for many fire-related policies (Eloy et al, 2019). However, land use management decisions necessarily involve trade-offs between the aspirations of different groups of people (Mace et al, 2018).…”

Prescribed Burning Reduces Large, High-Intensity Wildfires and Emissions in the Brazilian Savanna

“…In these two regions, the IFM program's implementation included the professionalized indigenous brigade's training, vehicles, infrastructure, and safety equipment. The aim is to use local traditional knowledge in defining the fire regimes to be implemented [57,58].…”