Securing the human perimeter: beyond operational approaches to developing community capacity to live with fire. Two examples from Victoria, Australia

—This paper explores the parallels that frequently exist in fire management organizations between operational approaches to fire and engagement approaches in the community. We observe that community issues are often treated in the same way as a fire incident—“controlled” and “contained” through education and “direct attack” messaging. The aim of these approaches is to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity so that people ultimately will better understand fire risk and change their behavior. However, we argue that building community capacity to live in fire-prone landscapes should not be approached or judged in the same fashion as operational or communications activities that take place during actual emergencies. Indeed, taking a command-and-control mindset into non-hierarchical social groupings, e.g., communities when there is no emergency, can reinforce community distrust, antagonism, dependence, and complacency. We also describe two case studies that go beyond relating to communities via command and control and demonstrate effective strategies for dealing with fireprone communities. 1.0 INTRODUCTION: THE PAST In the past decade, the Land and Fire Management division of the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) in Victoria, Australia, has begun to widen its emphasis from pursuing excellence in fire suppression to developing its expertise in longterm strategic planning, ecological understanding, and recovery. It has done so by increasing its capability in fire ecology, fire and fuel behavior analysis, spatial technologies, and rapid recovery responses. In this sense, the organization is broadening its operational toolbox to ensure that it is as competent at Planning, Preparedness, and Recovery as it is at Response. We argue that the operational emphasis on responsiveness in the past has also influenced the way the organization relates to communities. In the attempt to care for and protect people, DSE has attempted to “control” and “contain” engagements with people and remedy flare-ups of misunderstanding through messaging. Although these “responsive” and “reactive” ways of caring for people are still necessary during actual incidents, research suggests that care for people needs to be expressed differently across the Planning, Preparedness, Response, Recovery spectrum (see, for example, Sharp et al. 2009). Hence, just as the organization looks to understand fire more holistically in an operational sense, DSE is beginning to recognize the need to more fully appreciate how people’s responses to fire are not simply about short-term bursts of attention, fear, or anger but are socially, politically, and economically constituted over the long-term. In this paper, we describe how, by broadening its emphasis on the Planning, Preparedness, and Recovery phases of the spectrum, the organization is beginning to re-conceive how it relates to the community and in the process is gaining a level of comfort with the complexity of everyday human relationships. The authors are relatively new to working within DSE (and fire operations for that matter)—making us what you might call “privileged outsiders” (Bahktin 1993). We are privileged to be able to participate in the organization but are still new enough to be