Identifying interventions to support collaborative governance for wildfire resilience

• In Event: Adaptation Strategies in Collaborative Environmental Management

Abstract

Collaborative governance is widely used to address wicked problems. While high-quality collaboration can build trust, improve decision-making, and improve policy outcomes, high-quality collaborations are not distributed uniformly. There are many potential reasons why: some places lack collaborations altogether, some collaborations lack important community perspectives or sufficient resources, some have passed peak performance, etc. A collaboration’s local context – the policy problem’s specific nuances, the community’s demographic, economic, and civic capacity profile, and the number of collaborations occurring in a policy space – might also shape propensity to collaborate and how effective the collaboration is.

In order for governments or nonprofit organizations to support more effective and equitable collaboration, two steps are necessary: (1) diagnosing “collaborative deficits” facing a particular location and policy arena, and (2) identifying interventions to enhance the collaboration. This is especially challenging for national-level organizations, who need to balance national-scale perspectives with the specific needs of each local community.

This paper presents a data-driven approach to identifying context-specific interventions to support collaborative governance, using the case of wildfire resilience in the United States. In partnership with the National Forest Foundation, we have spent the last year collecting varied data characterizing wildfire risk, community vulnerability, and collaborative planning activities at the municipal or county scale. These include: network data of individuals involved in wildfire planning, the content of community wildfire protection plans, a national household survey on wildfire capacity, a survey of nonprofits on community engagement priorities, and secondary data measuring wildfire risk, social vulnerability, and civic capacity. Drawing on these data, we explore ways to identify collaborative deficits and develop locally-appropriate interventions, such as creating new collaborations or connections, enhancing or expanding existing collaborations, disrupting entrenched networks, and providing resources or implementation assistance. Our framework will enable nuanced identification of collaborative deficits and a platform for helping communities adapt to be more resilient against wildfire.

Author

• Nicola Ulibarri, University of California, Irvine
  Presenting Author