Autumn Ellison

Re-envisioning community-wildfire relations in the U.S. West as adaptive governance

Prompted by a series of increasingly destructive, expensive, and highly visible wildfire crises in human communities across the globe, a robust body of scholarship has emerged to theorize, conceptualize, and measure community-level resilience to wildfires. To date, however, insufficient consideration has been given to wildfire resilience as a process of adaptive governance mediated by institutions at multiple scales. Here we explore the possibilities for addressing this gap through an analysis of wildfire resilience among wildland-urban interface communities in the western region of the United States. We re-engage important but overlooked components of social-ecological system resilience by situating rural communities within their stateto national-level institutional contexts; we then analyze two communities in Nevada and New Mexico in terms of their institutional settings and responses to recent wildfire events. We frame our analysis around the concepts of scale matching, linking within and across scales, and institutional flexibility.

Developing Fire Adapted Communities: The Importance of Interactions Among Elements of Local Context

ABSTRACT Resident perceptions and actions related to wildfire management are influenced by a complex set of factors that are often tied to a specific local context. We conducted in-depth case studies in two diverse communities to better illustrate how elements of local social context collectively influence wildfire perspectives and behaviors in a given locality. Our results suggest that the influence of commonly cited predictors for wildfire mitigation actions, including homeowners’ associations, vegetation preferences, and previous experience with wildfire, can vary based on their interaction with other elements of local context such as residents’ desire for privacy, preferences for wildland or ornamental vegetation, identification as “suburbanites” or “country residents,” and willingness to collectively organize. We compare our results to existing wildfire social science findings and argue for a more holistic view of local social context as a way to design tailored strategies for increasing resident responsibility for wildfire.