Wildfire Risk Governance and Risk Individualization in Canada's FireSmart

Keywords: Wildfire, Biopolitics, Risk, Climate change, Neoliberalism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 45

Abstract

This paper analyzes recent shifts in public wildfire risk governance using the case of the Canadian flagship program FireSmart. FireSmart emphasizes “shared responsibility” and particularly the role of individuals and communities in addressing wildfire risks at the wildland urban interface. We take a biopolitical approach to security in which populations are governed indirectly through a security apparatus that fosters “freedoms” and the circulation of people and things. We suggest that FireSmart works through an approach to security that summons various actors, practices, techniques and discourses, while promoting risk individualization. This approach responsibilizes and mobilizes individuals and local communities as the locus of wildfire security, understood in terms of “living resiliently with” wildfires. Seen through this analytic of biopolitical security, FireSmart has far-reaching effects that go beyond immediate questions of technical efficacy. What is at stake are the more political questions about the redefinition of risk, responsibility and security, with implications for deepening vulnerability and inequality, even more so within the wider neoliberal terrain of public-private shifts in environmental governance in the age of climate change.