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Abstract

The ongoing global increase in wildfire activity is not unique to Australia, yet Australia's Arnhem Land region is uniquely decreasing in bushfire activity despite being situated within one of the world’s most (increasingly) flammable landscapes. Remote sensing data, among other methods of research utilized in this paper, suggest that this unique phenomenon can be understood through the underlying institutional structures of the region's settler-state and Aboriginal management regimes. A comparison between these two regimes reveals that the more-Aboriginal system of land management evidently surpasses the neighboring settler-state's ability to reduce bushfire activity within equally flammable landscapes because, as I argue, this non-profit system (ALFA) resists adopting the same purely bureaucratic structure that increases landscape flammability. Prior studies on bushfires and/or indigenous land management in Australia typically limit discussions to either empirically understanding the continent's bushfire activity without studying underlying regional management structures or by further articulating local Traditional Ecological Knowledge without enunciating its effect on regional bushfire activity. Following this paper's case study, I argue that further studies on bushfires in Australia (or wildfires in other anglophonic settler colonies) should utilize a methodology of inquiring into the institutional structures of management regimes and their economic mobilization of resources. Doing so could more substantially contribute towards greater understandings of sociocultural political relations under late-capitalist and settler-colonial contexts continuing to unsustainably advance the ongoing processes of climate change, the anthropocene, and these processes’ inherent flammability. PDF available upon request.

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