Resolving the fire governance paradox in an increasingly fire-prone world

Fire is a planetary-scale governance challenge. Across fire-prone landscapes of the Global South, managing fire to support biodiversity, livelihoods and climate resilience requires approaches and policy to move beyond treating fire as a uniform threat, an illegal act or a poverty-driven choice. Fire is embedded in social-ecological systems, and conflict reflects misalignment among policy, ecological dynamics and social realities. In this Perspective, Madagascar provides a diagnostic lens on the challenges associated with fire. Fire-sensitive forests, fire-adapted open ecosystems, rural dependence on burning, colonial fire-control legacies, forest-centred conservation and fragmented mandates co-exist within landscapes, exposing the limits of suppression-first governance across the Global South. We combine our diagnosis with examination of fire governance from fire-prone countries and transdisciplinary practitioner knowledge to propose ten principles for aligning fire policy with social-ecological realities. These principles offer a pathway beyond blanket suppression towards legitimate, adaptive and context-specific fire governance across sectors, institutions and scales.