Abstract:

As wildfires worsen globally, Wildfire Risk Communication (WFRC) has become a key tool within the broader field of wildfire governance to foster people’s risk-reduction and preparedness behaviours. However, institutional WFRC approaches often rely on technocratic, top-down approaches that overlook the lived realities, knowledges, and needs of frontline communities.

This thesis critically re-examines and reimagines communicating about wildfires by centring and visibilising the singular perspectives of Pego Viu, a community initiative in the País Valencià (Spain) dedicated to custòdia i defensa del territori—collective, place-based practices of stewardship, resistance, and care. Based on an ethnographic engagement with Pego Viu between 2021–2024 – including interviews, focus groups, informal conversations, and participant observation – this research foregrounds their situated knowledges and lived experiences, whilst also integrating my own positionalities as researcher, inhabitant, and volunteer.

Findings reveal three main insights. First, institutional WFRC is experienced as disempowering and reductionist, entailing manifold negative consequences for local inhabitants. Second, Pego Viu approaches wildfires in holistic, relational, and situated ways that contest technocratic framings, challenge knowledge hierarchies, and assert local agency. Through their custòdia i defensa del territory, they instead foreground resistance, identity, territory, grief, hope, care, and collective action. Third, Pego Viu reveals five ‘beyonds’ to communicating about wildfire, namely beyond communication as an information transmission tool; beyond wildfires as an isolated risk to be solved; beyond communities as passive recipients; beyond technocratic governance of wildfires; and beyond the known future.

Together, these ‘beyonds’ offer a grounded proposition for reimagining other ways to communicate about, relate to, and live alongside wildfires – thus nurturing our collective imagination and reminding us that more hopeful futures in wildfire-prone territories are in the making.