It’s not a ‘thing’ but a ‘place’: reconceptualising ‘assets’ in the context of fire risk landscapes

Abstract

At a national policy level, Australian governments have embraced the notion of shared responsibility between agencies and communities for disaster resilience, including bushfire. Emergency management agencies take an asset-based approach to management based on an assumption that valued places can be quantified by cataloguing individual ‘things’ in the landscape. Implicit in shared responsibility, however, is incorporation of local knowledge of landscape and risk into planning. This already difficult task can be made more complex as local constructions of risk in the landscape sometimes appear at odds with management agency perspectives. This research examined local constructions of bushfire risk in two contrasting Australian landscapes – one semi-rural, one peri-urban. The results suggest that local ecological knowledge arises from interactions between people, the landscape and objects (e.g. flora and fauna) in the landscape. Place meanings transcend individual ‘things’, emerging instead from experience of the whole landscape, both social and ecological and at multiple scales. We argue therefore, that understanding bushfire cannot be segregated from wider social and ecological processes at a landscape level. Shared responsibility will involve respectful and meaningful engagement between agencies and landholders in collaborative planning to ensure local knowledge informs asset-based management.