How global narratives shape local management: A history of fire in the tropical savannas of Belize and Guyana

Abstract

The suppression of anthropogenic fire is an important legacy of European colonisation worldwide. Fire suppression has undermined human livelihoods and fire-dependent ecologies. Belize and Guyana are the only former British colonies on the mainland of Central and South America. Both countries have fire-dependent tropical savanna ecosystems, where fire is used within local livelihoods, for example, for hunting. We compare the creation and implementation of savanna fire suppression and management policies and projects by agencies in twentieth to twenty-first-century Belize and Guyana, and the extent to which global environmental narratives have shaped this process. In both countries, a picture emerges of weak state efforts to control fire, largely driven by economic concerns. In colonial Belize, the state made intermittent attempts to suppress or manage savanna fires in limited areas, owing to interest in pine forestry. In Guyana, the colonial state did not attempt to control fires, given economic interest in cattle ranching, and the remoteness of the savannas. Since 2000, both states have developed new fire policies, and state agencies, conservation non-governmental organisations and Indigenous advocacy groups have won funding for fire-related projects. We show that these contemporary policies and projects, like those of the colonial period, primarily financed by inconsistent international funding, continue to lean heavily on international discourses about fire that make assumptions about fire problems and propose solutions incompatible with local realities. Understanding the local geography, ecology and politics, and recognising the ways colonial fire legacies altered, and continue to impact these places, could inform more just and productive approaches to working with local fire users in Belize, Guyana and beyond.