Bruce Evan Goldstein

Resilience To Surprises Through Communicative Planning

Resilience thinkers share an interest in collaborative deliberation with communicative planners, who aim to accommodate different forms of knowledge and styles of reasoning to promote social learning and yield creative and equitable agreements. Members of both fields attended a symposium at Virginia Tech in late 2008, where communicative planners considered how social–ecological resilience informed new possibilities for planning practice beyond disaster mitigation and response. In turn, communicative planners offered resilience scholars ideas about how collaboration could accomplish more than enhance rational decision making of the commons. Through these exchanges, the symposium fostered ideas about collaborative governance and the critical role of expertise in fostering communicative resilience.

Expanding the Scope and Impact of Collaborative Planning

Problem: As planners grow increasingly confident that they have settled on the right concepts and methods to conduct stakeholder-based collaboration, they are not considering what can be achieved through other collaborative approaches. Purpose: We aimed to explore how creating a network of place- and stakeholder-based collaboratives using communities of practice could strengthen individual collaboratives and achieve network synergies. Methods: Using a case study approach, we draw out lessons for collaborative planning from our research on the U.S. Fire Learning Network (FLN), a collaborative initiative to restore ecosystems that depend on fire. We analyzed data from over 140 interviews, hundreds of documents including restoration plans, newsletters, meeting summaries, maps, and various other reports, and observations at more than a dozen regional and national meetings. Results and conclusions: We conclude that the FLN nurtures expertise in ecological fire restoration and collaborative planning by linking multi-stakeholder collaboratives to regional communities of practice. Moreover, this linkage creates and sustains a network of collaboratives that amplify the potential for fundamental change in the culture and practice of fire management. Takeaway for practice: A community of practice is an effective approach to collaboration in situations where the purpose is to expand expertise rather than to resolve conflict and reach consensus. Moreover, a community of practice can link stakeholder-based collaboratives to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Realizing this potential requires questioning the universality of some of the core principles of stakeholder-based collaborative planning and diversifying the collaborative planning toolkit. Research support: This research was supported by the Northern Research Station of the U. S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy.

Narrating Resilience: Transforming Urban Systems Through Collaborative Storytelling

How can communities enhance social-ecological resilience within complex urban systems? Drawing on a new urbanist proposal in Orange County, California, it is suggested that planning that ignores diverse ways of knowing undermines the experience and shared meaning of those living in a city. The paper then describes how narratives lay at the core of efforts to reintegrate the Los Angeles River into the life of the city and the US Fire Learning Network’s efforts to address the nation’s wildfire crisis. In both cases, participants develop partially shared stories about alternative futures that foster critical learning and facilitate co-ordination without imposing one set of interests on everyone. It is suggested that narratives are a way to express the subjective and symbolic meaning of resilience, enhancing our ability to engage multiple voices and enable self-organising processes to decide what should be made resilient and for whose benefit.

The US Fire Learning Network: Springing a Rigidity Trap through Multiscalar Collaborative Networks

Wildland fire management in the United States is caught in a rigidity trap, an inability to apply novelty and innovation in the midst of crisis. Despite wide recognition that public agencies should engage in ecological fire restoration, fire suppression still dominates planning and management, and restoration has failed to gain traction. The U.S. Fire Learning Network (FLN), a multiscalar collaborative endeavor established in 2002 by federal land management agencies and The Nature Conservancy, offers the potential to overcome barriers that inhibit restoration planning and management. By circulating people, planning products, and information among landscape- and regional-scale collaboratives, this network has facilitated the development and dissemination of innovative approaches to ecological fire restoration. Through experimentation and innovation generated in the network, the FLN has fostered change by influencing fire and land management plans as well as federal policy. We suggest that multiscalar collaborative planning networks such as the FLN can facilitate overcoming the rigidity traps that prevent resource management agencies from responding to complex cross-scalar problems.

The network imaginary: coherence and creativity within a multiscalar collaborative effort to reform US fire management

In response to the ongoing crisis in fire management, the US Fire Learning Network (FLN) engages partners in collaborative, landscape-scale ecological fire restoration. The paper contends that the FLN employs technologies, planning guidelines and media to articulate an FLN imaginary that co-ordinates independent efforts to engage in ecological fire restoration work without need of either hierarchal authority or collective social capital. This imaginary may allow the FLN to draw on the creativity and adaptive innovation of collaboration to reform fire management institutions and fire-adapted ecosystems.

The U.S. Fire Learning Network: Providing a Narrative Framework for Restoring Ecosystems, Professions, and Institutions

Through the U.S. Fire Learning Network (FLN), The Nature Conservancy and federal land management agencies are attempting to reorient fire management from fire suppression toward ecological restoration and community protection. In its first 2 years, the FLN linked place-based collaboratives at a national scale. Using structured planning exercises, the FLN mediated between central coordination and collaborative autonomy by guiding partners through construction of place-based and mutually coherent narratives. These narratives situated landscape partners within an arc of conflict, crisis, and resolution, aligning partners with the goals of FLNs sponsoring organizations while enhancing community solidarity and shared purpose. FLNs narrative framework placed fire managers in a heroic role of restorationist, legitimized multiple professional ways of knowing, and built collaborative capacity, thus charting a path from crisis to renewal for ecological and human communities and for fire management itself.

Socially Explicit Fire Regimes

Fire regime classifications are established and proven tools that guide fire policy, management, and science. They summarize and organize complex information into a concise measure of the timing, intensity, and distribution of fire. The idea of fire regime deserves careful examination because it provides the guiding rationale for managing vast acreage. We identify and unpack two fire regimes articulated in the intense public, professional, and scientific debate that following the 2003 “Cedar” fire outside San Diego, one of the largest and fastest moving fires in California history. We contrast these two regimes and describe their implications for science, management, policy, and land use.

The weakness of tight ties: why scientists almost destroyed the Coachella Valley multispecies habitat conservation plan in order to save it.

Two groups of biologists were responsible for an unprecedented delay in completing a endangered species habitat conservation plan in the Coachella Valley of southern California. While antagonism grew as each group relentlessly promoted their perspective on whether to add a few areas to the habitat preserve, their inability to resolve their differences was not simply a matter of mistrust or poor facilitation. I analyze how these biologists practiced science in a way that supported specific institutional and ecological relationships that in turn provided a setting in which each group’s biological expertise was meaningful, credible, and useful. This tight coupling between scientific practice and society meant that something was more important to these scientists than finishing the plan. For both factions of biologists, ensuring the survival of native species in the valley rested on their ability to catalyze institutional relationships that were compatible with their scientific practice. Understanding this co-production of science and the social order is a first step toward effectively incorporating different experts in negotiation and implementation of technically complex collaborative agreements.

The Futility of Reason: Incommensurable Differences Between Sustainability Narratives in the Aftermath of the 2003 San Diego Cedar Fire

After the largest wildfire in California over the past century, natural resource agencies described how they could reduce vulnerability to fire hazard by sustainability managing fuel levels. A community coalition challenged this narrative by placing the fire within evolutionary time and describing how sustainability could be achieved through collective action within a dynamic and vulnerable landscape. The agencies rejected the coalition alternative as a dangerous and scientifically dubious distraction from their security responsibilities. In this clash, differing knowledge practices delimited the possibilities of citizenship and governance in which alternative sustainability narratives had meaning and significance. Ambivalence persisted because sustainability narratives were informed and justified by knowledge practices that were both driver and outcome of efforts to achieve different sustainabilities.After the largest wildfire in California over the past century, natural resource agencies described how they could reduce vulnerability to fire hazard by sustainability managing fuel levels. A community coalition challenged this narrative by placing the fire within evolutionary time and describing how sustainability could be achieved through collective action within a dynamic and vulnerable landscape. The agencies rejected the coalition alternative as a dangerous and scientifically dubious distraction from their security responsibilities. In this clash, differing knowledge practices delimited the possibilities of citizenship and governance in which alternative sustainability narratives had meaning and significance. Ambivalence persisted because sustainability narratives were informed and justified by knowledge practices that were both driver and outcome of efforts to achieve different sustainabilities.

Moving forward with effective goals and methods for conservation: a reply to Marvier and Kareiva

We welcome the added nuance that Marvier and Kareiva have included in their response [1] to our analysis [2] of New Conservation Science (NCS). However, we take issue with multiple points that they raise. In particular, we do not believe that our arguments in any way ‘pit good values against each other’ or that we have painted conservation to date as a string of unqualified success stories. Nonetheless, we are glad that they now appear to embrace many of the same fundamental goals, strategies, and motivations that have long characterized conservation.