The Ignite to Unite team is comprised of Texas State University researchers with a keen interest in enhancing wildlife habitat conservation on private lands in the United States.
The Problem: Wildfire mitigation has become more expensive, complex, and conflictual, disproportionately affecting operations and budgets across scales of governance. To stimulate cost-effective use of suppression resources and alleviate conflict, U.S. wildfire governance has incorporated collaborative partnerships to bridge the macro-micro divide. Collaboration is essential for tackling large-scale wildfire problems that cross jurisdictions and involve myriad critical actors such as property owners, who occupy approximately 90% of the growing wildland-urban interface. However, despite the documented necessity of collaborative relationships to stimulate collective action about wildfire management and achieve efficiencies of scale about suppression resource use, social, political and institutional factors, such as institutional entrenchment and politicization of wildfire, have rendered collaboration inconsistent across multi-jurisdictional and multi-ownership landscapes.
Objectives of This Research: The conceptual vision for this research is to leverage the concepts of polycentric governance (cooperation amongst and between jurisdictional decision makers) and collaboration risk (likelihood that collaboration will fail) to a) explain cross-scale blockages that diminish efficiencies of scale and b) identify windows of opportunities to bridge scales of governance in a holistic way. We answer two questions: 1) which socio-political factors enable and constrain cross-jurisdictional collective action about a public good (fire-resilient landscapes, reduced suppression costs)? and 2) how can multi-institutional collaboration expand institutional boundaries to decrease suppression decision making fragmentation, reduce risks, uncertainty, and costs, and capacitate critical actors? We focus on wildlife agencies as collaboration brokers because they have institutionalized engagement with landowners to promote fuels reduction and habitat conservation on private lands, essential pieces of wildfire management.
