Burning anticipation: Wildfire, risk mitigation and simulation modelling in Victoria, Australia
Timothy Neale
Environment and Planning A, 2016, vol. 48, issue 10, 2026-2045
Abstract:
Wildfire is a global environmental ‘problem’ with significant socioeconomic and socionatural impacts that does not lend itself to simple technical fixes (Gill et al., 2013: 439). In Australia, a country with a pronounced history of disastrous landscape fires, these impacts are expected to increase as the peri-urban population continues to grow and the climate continues to change. This paper draws upon the burgeoning literature on anticipatory regimes to analyse an in-depth case study of a government pilot in the highly fire-prone State of Victoria, where practitioners have utilised a simulation model to measure and intervene in the distribution of wildfire risk. The pilot presents the ‘calculative collective device’ (Callon and Muniesa, 2005) of wildfire management at a moment of what I label ‘calculative rearticulation’, wherein figurations of the future are rebooted, reconstructed or recalibrated; such moments, I suggest, can reorient the institutionally conservative spaces – such as environmental or risk management – providing opportunities for practitioners and others to interrogate the existing distribution of hazards and anticipatory interventions. Through such opportunities ‘hazardous’ more-than-human landscapes can be imagined otherwise.
Keywords: Anticipation; Australia; calculation; risk; wildfire (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X16651446 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:48:y:2016:i:10:p:2026-2045
DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16651446
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().