Burning anticipation: Wildfire, risk mitigation and simulation modelling in Victoria, Australia

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.