Analyzing Prescribed Burn Associations: Network Structures, Resource Mobilization, and Policy Outcomes

• In Event: Mitigating Wildfire Risk in the Wildland Urban Interface

Abstract

Prescribed burning restores ecosystems, reduces forest fire severity, and repairs strained cultural connections with fire. However, achieving these benefits at a landscape scale requires collective action among diverse stakeholders across property boundaries. This challenge is particularly acute on private lands, where fragmented ownership patterns create significant barriers to coordinated fire management. Implementing burns on private lands also requires mobilizing human and financial resources like place-based knowledge, technical experience and equipment, and regulatory expertise. Individual landowners generally do not have sufficient resources to act alone – and landscape-level action is necessary for effectiveness. Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) have emerged as a promising solution to this collective action problem, providing a framework for voluntary cooperation among residents, landowners, tribes, fire professionals, and other stakeholders to fill capacity gaps and coordinate burn efforts in fire-prone communities. 

Despite their potential, there is no systematic evidence about the conditions under which PBAs organize themselves, sustain voluntary efforts, and meaningfully impact prescribed burning capacity. We address this gap first by analyzing how PBAs coordinate actions given different community conditions and participant types. Then, we connect these different structural approaches to PBA-level outputs and outcomes, including numbers of burns implemented and changes to learning and community mobilization.

We use data from a survey administered to members of the 24 California PBAs collecting information on participant backgrounds and motivations, social networks, resources, and outputs and outcomes to analyze the structure and function of PBAs. We run Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to examine how PBAs are organized in terms of centralization, bridging versus bonding social capital, and the presence of brokers connecting different subgroups. Then, using results from the survey and network analysis, we conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis to determine how different PBA characteristics and structures support outputs (e.g., numbers of burns) and outcomes (e.g., learning and community mobilization). This approach acknowledges that PBAs vary significantly in their strategic orientations, with some prioritizing treatment activity while others focus on community engagement and social cohesion. Connecting management strategies and operational structures, measured by network statistics, to outputs and outcomes shows the conditions under which PBAs achieve the best results.

Author

• Tyler A Scott, University of California, Davis
  Presenting Author