Dr. Matt Hamilton, Research Fellow
School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan
“Collaborative Networks and Wildfire Risk Mitigation in the Eastern Cascades”
Large wildfire events highlight the importance of governance systems that address wildfire risk at landscape scales and among multiple land owners and institutions. These governance systems feature numerous collective action problems, because the likelihood that a wildfire spreads to a given location depends on forest management practices on adjacent and sometimes distant lands. A growing body of empirical work demonstrates that environmental governance outcomes depend upon how well patterns of interaction among actors align with patterns of ecological connectivity, such as wildfire transmission. However, the factors that facilitate or inhibit this alignment remain poorly understood. It is crucial to improve understanding of the conditions under which actors establish or maintain linkages with other actors with whom they are interdependent because of ecological linkages.
This presentation explores the concept of “risk interdependence archetypes,” which distinguish between types of costs and benefits of risk mitigation associated with different spatial configurations of ecological connectivity in governance systems characterized by extensive overlap among actors’ jurisdictions. I’ll discuss how colleagues and I have been using tools and perspectives from network science to study risk transmission networks (developed through simulation of wildfires over a large landscape) and a governance network (created from interviews with 154 representatives of 87 organizations involved in efforts to mitigate wildfire risk in the Eastern Cascades, USA).
We found that alignment of the governance network with the fire transmission network is more likely when organizations can capture a greater share of the benefits of risk mitigation. Importantly, not all forms of risk interdependence increase the likelihood of alignment, implying that organizations have limited capacity for interaction and may prioritize certain high-payoff forms of alignment over others. While performance of risk governance systems may depend upon alignment of social and ecological networks, we show that alignment is shaped by actor-level strategies for interaction with other actors.