The Contribution of Environmental History to Understanding Fires in Landscapes: Exploring Analogies between Case Studies in South Africa and Portugal

This article offers comparative environmental histories of wildfires in Portugal and South Africa from c .1860 to the 2010s, using a framework derived from Elinor Ostrom’s work on managing communal environmental systems and an emerging integrated approach to wildfire management. In doing so, it sets out ideas for writing more systematic comparative historical analyses of wildfires while also using the case studies to show how historical analysis enriches case study approaches usually focused on natural and social science data and perspectives. It considers the particular versus the general, investigating whether historical analyses of fire use, management and occurrence can generate more holistic apprehensions of wildfire scenarios.