Knowing wildfire risk: Scientific interactions with risk mitigation policy and practice in Victoria, Australia
Introduction
Over the past decade, major landscape wildfires in the United States, Chile, Canada and Australia have illustrated the seriousness of the global ‘wildfire problem’ (Gill et al., 2013). Such wildfires inflict much of their significant socioeconomic and socionatural costs through immediate fire damage and the dispersion of toxic ash and smoke. These costs are likely to rise as wildfires become both more severe and more frequent in fire-prone regions due to climate change (Handmer et al., 2012). At the same time, wildfires present a complex mesh of dynamic factors for those seeking to reduce or manage them, in that ignitions, wildfire behaviour, and the reactions of different human and nonhuman communities during and after wildfires are all highly uncertain (Neale and Weir, 2015). This complexity is indicated in the official Australian definition of natural hazard risk as ‘the likelihood of harmful consequences arising from the interaction of hazards, communities and the environment’ (COAG, 2011: 22). Such interactional definitions suggest that the pressing task of managing natural hazards, such as wildfire, includes investigating and knowing the interplay of social and scientific dimensions of both hazards and places.
As in natural hazards research more generally, most social research on wildfire has focused upon either the politics of its management or identifying the causes and cures of vulnerabilities in at-risk communities (see Eriksen and Head, 2014, McCaffrey, 2015). Alternately, there has been little research into those professionally engaged in management, a group often called decision-makers and practitioners but that we simply label, following Morss et al. (2005), ‘practitioners’. This deficit in present social research is not something we seek to explain but rather to begin to ameliorate, driven by two contentions. First, it does not stand to reason that the social world of hazard governance, however bureaucratic and professionalised, would not also offer complexities and contradictions that parallel those found in at-risk communities. Without their empirics, we cannot begin to understand how different values and forms of knowledge are routinely ordered and prioritised within such anticipatory regimes (Anderson, 2010). Second, though hazard governance is pervasively political and social, it is also driven in diverse ways by physical scientific research. If we hope to understand how this research interacts with and informs both public policy and practice we must remain attentive to cultural and social specificities, including the institutions, individuals, and discourses involved. In this paper, we address these aspects of wildfire management through an exemplary case study of the Barwon-Otway region of Victoria, Australia (see Neale et al., 2016).
Though the interface between scientific research, policy and practice has been subject to extensive inquiry, their actual relationships are frequently hard to discern. As Jasanoff states (2003: 227–228), the diffusion of scientific research into practical application is typically imagined to be both linear and unproblematic. As such, responses to difficult environmental problems can be shaped by the fallacies that, for example, scientific uncertainty is the cause of political inaction and that scientific research necessarily reduces uncertainty. However, the global history of climate change science shows that any linear formulations between ‘more science,’ ‘less uncertainty’ and ‘political action’ are inherently flawed (Sarewitz, 2004: 392–393). This is not only because scientific research is a potent topic for political dispute (see Collins and Pinch, 1998), but also because cultural, economic and institutional factors also vitiate the integration of scientific research into other domains (Hulme, 2009). In the translations from the hazardous world to ‘the laboratory’ – and back again – the contingent events, agents, other forms of knowledge, and concerns driving research and its application are often omitted (Hacking, 1983, Latour, 1987).1 The many critiques of the linear model of the research-policy nexus suggest that ‘science led’ or ‘science dependent’ policy and practice are not simply scientific or technical matters (Briggle, 2014, Hunt and Shackley, 1999); to pretend as such is to ignore the social causes of our successes and failures in addressing environmental issues such as wildfire. In focusing upon science and its innovations we may elide other significant knowledges, and, more acutely, how what counts as authoritatively ‘scientific’ or ‘unscientific’ is being naturalised or reordered in a given context.
This paper proceeds by first surveying the intersection between scientific research and public policy, before then outlining the governance of wildfire risk in Victoria, presenting the method and results of the empirical study of mitigation practitioners, and discussing the implications of this case study to our understandings of hazard management. Southwest of the metropolis of Melbourne, the Barwon-Otway area is a high wildfire risk site in Victoria, with large stands of contiguous forest and an extensive wildland-urban interface (see Fig. 1). The area’s established but comparatively modest record of fatalities and house losses from wildfires belies its high media and political profile. Since 2009, the area has been used by government agencies as the pilot site for a new approach to the calculation and mitigation of wildfire risk utilising a novel scientific tool: the wildfire simulation model PHOENIX RapidFire (‘PHOENIX’). This pilot has been devised with the explicit aim of replacing the existing policy approach, criticised by many researchers, which was endorsed and expanded by the state government in the aftermath of the disastrous 2009 Black Saturday wildfires. The practitioners engaged in this pilot were therefore uniquely positioned to comment on the values and forms of knowledge prioritised in this transition, and provide insight into the cultural and social specificities of an avowedly science-led policy transition.
Section snippets
Research, policy and practice
The relation between scientific research and public policy is often imagined as a linear ‘pipeline’: research gives answers to practical policy questions. However, as political scientist Brian Head argues (2008: 1), policy decisions ‘emerge from politics, judgment and debate, rather than being deduced from empirical analysis’. Reviewing the movement towards ‘evidence-based’ policy from the 1990s onwards, Head suggests that any successful implementation requires systematic research (‘science’),
Wildfire risk and wildfire risk mitigation in Victoria
Wildfires have been a feature of the Australian continent for over 50 million years, predominantly ignited by lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions, while Aboriginal people have used wildfire over the past 40,000 years or more to reduce fuel and promote the growth of desired flora and fauna (Bird et al., 2008). This fire regime has been dramatically reshaped since the arrival of European settlers in 1788, by both transformations in land use and the brutal suppression and marginalisation of
Methods
To identify the relevant practitioners in the study area we used a non-random or ‘purposeful’ sampling, adopting a snowball recruitment method in which key informants at relevant institutions identified individuals with expertise and experience (Noy, 2008). A majority (n = 22) of possible participants (n = 30) were recruited to be involved in semi-structured interviews and participant observation. A subset of these practitioners (n = 12) subsequently participated in a 1-day workshop (see Table 1).
Scenario exercise: ‘everyone else is thinking “beach”’
In addressing the possible futures of the Barwon-Otway area, the practitioners adopted a set of frames established in the interviews that are important to understanding the role of modelling. In their work, practitioners are tasked with mitigating risk generally, however their overriding focus is to mitigate a specific event: a lowest-probability highest-consequence ‘worst case’ landscape fire event. This imagined event was referred to as ‘The Day,’ meaning ‘a big fire event’ (Doug) or ‘like
Conclusion
The rigor of science, developed through methodologies of replicable testing and the institution of peer review, is an extremely useful authority for practitioners seeking to improve how we predict and mitigate the probabilities and consequences of natural hazards. But, despite its many uses, scientific knowledge is not an objective fix that conveniently delivers a solution. Nor is the path from scientific research to policy and practice either linear or wholly predictable. Instead, as the
Acknowledgement
The support of the Commonwealth of Australia through the Bushfire & Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre program is acknowledged. The research on which this article is based received ethical approval from the Western Sydney University Human Research Ethics Committee (reference: H10856).
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