Governing Wildfire Risk in Canada: The Rise of an Apparatus of Security

Abstract

This article argues that the governance of wildfire risk in Canada is increasingly oriented toward governance through a security apparatus. As climate change complicates wildfire “problems” in fast-expanding wildland–urban interface areas, fire managers and other actors increasingly seek a shift toward a fire-permitting, risk-based fire management style, even as the balance between private and public responsibility for wildfire protection gets renegotiated. This approach, typified by FireSmart, is characterized by a gradual, geographically uneven shift from state-centered fire suppression toward a multiplicity assembled around an expectation of security and the promise of economic freedom. These multiple shifts, we argue, reflect a characteristic approach to governing through the Foucauldian “apparatus of security,” a mechanism of power that seeks security through economic freedom and indirect governmental intervention. Central to the emerging apparatus of wildfire security are three core rationalizing discourses focused on the valorization of the individual’s capacity for wildfire management and protection, the negotiation of limits of state and public institutions in wildfire management, and the invitation to live resiliently with wildfires by embracing biophysical contingency. At stake is the complex politics through which the very ideas of wildfire risk, responsibility, and security are being, and can be, reconstituted. Our analysis furthers the poststructural geographies of wildfires and climate risk governance in Canada and beyond.