The Fire Learning Network Goes Under the Microscope (original) (raw)
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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 FLN’s sponsoring organizations while enhancing community solidarity and shared purpose. FLN’s 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.
The Fire Learning Network: A Promising Conservation Strategy for Forestry
Conservation Learning Networks (CLN) are an emerging conservation strategy for addressing complex resource management challenges that face the forestry profession. The US Fire Learning Network (FLN) is a successful example of a CLN that operates on a national scale. Developed in 2001 as a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, the US Forest Service, and land-management agencies of the US Department of the Interior, the FLN has solicited the participation of fire professionals from more than 600 partner organizations to collaboratively design and implement ecological fire restoration strategies. Our review of the FLN provides evidence of the network’s ability to improve conservation practices, points to its potential to transform and empower fire management practices and institutions on a national scale, and illustrates the utility of CLNs for other natural resource management challenges.
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.
How Can We Span the Boundaries between Wildland Fire Science and Management in the United States?
Journal of Forestry, 2012
In 2009, the federal Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) initiated a national network of boundary organizations, known as regional fire science consortia, to accelerate the awareness, understanding, and use of wildland fire science. Needs assessments conducted by consortia in eight regions of the United States are synthesized here using a case survey approach. Although regions used different methods based on their different ecosystems, geography, and demography, results showed striking similarities in how fire science is accessed and used, barriers to its use, and research information needed. Use of Internet-based information is universally high; however, in-person knowledge exchange is preferred. Obstacles to fire science application include lack of time, resources, and access to the most relevant information as well as communication barriers between scientists and managers. Findings show a clear need for boundary organizations to span fire science and management to (a) organize and consolidate fire science information through easily accessible websites and (b) strengthen relationships between scientists and managers to facilitate production and communication of science relevant to managers' concerns. This article contributes to boundary spanning theory by underscoring and documenting the advantages of regionally focused boundary organizations in meeting user needs and building bridges between fire scientists and managers.
Wildland fire mitigation networks in the western United States
Disasters, 2009
Multiorganisational networks have become the primary vehicle through which disaster policy is designed and administered. Numerous case studies reveal their importance and the role they play in all phases of disaster management. This research emphasis on the description of coordination and collaboration lacks a descriptive framework, however, for examining the capabilities and potentialities of networks. This paper provides an overview of the network and disaster management literature and suggests six basic components of a network structural framework that can be used by researchers and practitioners. The framework is then applied to six wildland fire mitigation networks in the United States as a means of illustrating how such networks are actually configured. The results of the empirical research show that the capacity of the networks is mixed, with most lacking the ability to assess risk and evaluate their activities.
2011
The Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture (ATCOFA) at Stephen F. Austin State University is taking a proactive stance toward preparing forestry students to work closely with the public on fire planning in wildland-urban interface areas. ATCOFA's incorporation of the "Changing Roles" curriculum provides lessons on how natural resource managers' roles are (1) different than they used to be, and (2) ever-evolving. The undergraduate Forestry Field Station summer program at the University's Piney Woods Conservation Center now emphasizes the importance and challenges of working with the public. The program brings practicing professionals from the Texas Forest Service to describe the real-world challenges they face in communicating and working effectively with the public in their jobs. The goal is that the ATCOFA students, no matter where they are eventually employed, will understand the importance of taking a proactive role in working with the public on interface-fire planning and will have knowledge and information that makes them more sensitive to the complicated underlying issues in natural resource and wildfire 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.
An Examination of State and Local Fire Protection Programs in the Wildland-Urban
Recent years have brought dramatic expansion of residential development into the Wildland-Urban-Interface (WUI). This rapid development places property, natural assets and human life at risk from wildfire destruction. The U.S. National Fire Plan encourages communities to formulate and implement regulatory and outreach programs for pre-fire planning to mitigate the risk to area residents. During 2003, researchers surveyed the administrators of regulatory and voluntary wildfire risk reduction programs in 25 U.S. states. These state and local programs are listed on the USDA Forest Service's National Wildfire Programs website and are concerned with vegetation management on private lands. Empirical analyses of the administrators' responses suggest several new insights about these sub-federal risk mitigation efforts concerning how they are organized and what they are trying to accomplish. First, certain types of program activities -public education, assistance to property owners, and conducting area-wide risk assessments -are highly related, suggesting a common "bundle" of services offered by many of these programs. Second, desirable management activitiesincluding forging collaborative associations with other stakeholder groups and measuring progress toward program goals -are associated with more "comprehensive" programs, those conducting numerous public education activities and offering a variety of services to property owners. Third, many program managers are facing significant obstacles as they attempt to meet the goals and objectives of their programs. These tend to fall into three categories: shortcomings within the broader policy context, such as inadequate scientific knowledge about fire risk; negative attitudes among the public, including resistance from property owners toward vegetation removal; and budgetary constraints. Finally, respondents offer the activities they believe to be most effective along with "measurable changes" in risk conditions they expect to see as direct results of their efforts. This suggests potential indicators of program effectiveness that may be useful in future research, shedding light on which approaches and activities may work best in reducing risk to WUI communities from catastrophic wildfire.
Rethinking the Wildland Fire Management System
Journal of Forestry
In the western United States and elsewhere, the need to change society's relationship with wildfire is well-recognized. Suppressing fewer fires in fire-prone systems is promoted to escape existing feedback loops that lead to ever worsening conditions and increasing risks to responders and communities. Our primary focus is how to catalyze changes in fire manager behavior such that responses are safer, more effective, and capitalize on opportunities for expanded use of fire. We daylight deep-seated, systemic drivers of behavior, and in so doing, challenge ingrained ways of thinking and acting that may be inconsistent with current intentions around wildland fire management. We pose the questions of whether all fires are emergencies that require rapid deployment and concentration of suppression resources, whether rhetoric and actions align with policy and guidance, and whether we can unambiguously define and measure what a safe and effective response looks like. Using the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a relevant test case for systemic investigation, we argue that fundamental changes in how the fire management community thinks about, learns from, plans for, and responds to wildland fires may be necessary. Our intention is to initiate a broader dialog around the current and future state of wildland fire management.
U.S. wildfire governance as social-ecological problem
Ecology and Society, 2016
There are fundamental spatial and temporal disconnects between the specific policies that have been crafted to address our wildfire challenges. The biophysical changes in fuels, wildfire behavior, and climate have created a new set of conditions for which our wildfire governance system is poorly suited to address. To address these challenges, a reorientation of goals is needed to focus on creating an anticipatory wildfire governance system focused on social and ecological resilience. Key characteristics of this system could include the following: (1) not taking historical patterns as givens; (2) identifying future social and ecological thresholds of concern; (3) embracing diversity/heterogeneity as principles in ecological and social responses; and (4) incorporating learning among different scales of actors to create a scaffolded learning system.