Remember that your comments and questions are due by noon on Monday before class. This provides enough time for our discussion leads to synthesize questions.
The structure of your questions and comments is up to you. For instance, think about posing some of your questions as the potential for application to real-world settings, policy, or tools designed to improve the management of wildfire risk. Explore particular issues, challenges, or scenarios that you are facing or might face in the future given your career goals. Consider how other stakeholders at risk from fire might approach or perceive of these same topics. Or pose questions as someone who wants to learn more about a way the wildfire management system works.
The structure of your questions and comments is up to you. For instance, think about posing some of your questions as the potential for application to real-world settings, policy, or tools designed to improve the management of wildfire risk. Explore particular issues, challenges, or scenarios that you are facing or might face in the future given your career goals. Consider how other stakeholders at risk from fire might approach or perceive of these same topics. Or pose questions as someone who wants to learn more about a way the wildfire management system works.
I look forward to our next discussion.
1) How can inductive approaches be effectively integrated into local-level wildfire management, particularly in community engagement and policy development, and what criteria (if any) should guide their implementation? What types of training (if any) would research representatives, government officials, and community leaders need to integrate mixed-method approaches into local wildfire management effectively?
ReplyDelete2) Paveglio et al. (2023) defines communities as "emergent and dynamic." - what is an appropriate timeline for revising social conditions (e.g., 5-year cycles, 10-year cycles)? How might this cycle vary among population types?
3) What political characteristics are necessary to support the integration of bottom-up and top-down approaches, and how might these characteristics differ across contexts? In the absence of incentives, what alternative policy mechanisms could foster collective action in communities that respond highly to extrinsic motivation?
Kelly 2019
ReplyDeleteIt is stated that there will be challenges in polycentric governance implication due to coordination, differing capacities and objectives, and regulatory redundancy across organizations. This makes me think about the varying resource availability among distinct organizations. Do you believe this would cause an imbalance in authority and collaborative efforts? If so, how can it be addressed?
Paveglio 2023
Regarding the first figure, which of the characteristics influencing differential adaptation to wildfire among diverse communities do you believe are the most vital?
Paveglio 2019
When it comes to implementing efforts that will change communities into FACs, what steps do you believe must be taken? For instance, do you think insurance companies must provide sufficient incentives for homes to be retro-fitted with fire resistant materials? Perhaps social networks need to be larger to create change?
Kelly 2019:
ReplyDeleteIn relation to the current insecurity of federal fuels treatment funding, as well as to the Klamath case study where funding was lost:
According to Kelly, redundancy increases system resilience. These three case studies all stemmed from the top-down flow of federal funding, which seems to be a common theme in all lands management. Do any non-monetary ways exist to create redundancy in a system reliant on federal dollars? In other words, if federal funding were taken out of the equation, how could wildfire governance be sustained?
Paveglio 2019:
The article mentions that sites with a “legacy of partnership” were chosen for funding. How do funding, wildfire disaster, and partnership impact each other? Which happens first?
Paveglio 2023:
Development of community archetypes allows local-level narratives to be broadly applied. However, the archetypes described do little to address the unique, community-level fire history, which can play a large role in resident behavior and the local narrative. Do you think incorporating fire history into the archetype model (i.e. "high amenity high resource community that has had >2 structures lost to wildfire in the last 10 years") would be beneficial or problematic? Would recent fire impacts strengthen or weaken community ties?
Kelly:
ReplyDeleteIs "polycentric governance" just another strategy to implement one-size-fits-all landscape treatments in different areas? I would be interested in the perspectives of people from these communities who weren't directly involved in the projects: are they aware of what's going on? Do they support the initiatives or see other avenues for adaptation? Also: are the number of semi-structured interviews conducted for each case study sufficient? 17, 11, and 25 seem like relatively small sample sizes.
Paveglio 2019:
What are some approaches to gathering data about communities that can be used to inform adaptation planning? How much and what kind of data is needed about a community, and who collects it? (E.g. teams of researchers going around doing focus groups, local "chess players" drawing connections to community "archetypes", etc.). Where does this data then live?
Paveglio 2023:
What happens after a fire? Can a community change from one archetype to another, or do some adaptive capacity characteristics shift while others remain the same (or even get strengthened)? Can the archetypes and the pathways tools also help understand what communities might need during a recovery process?
Paveglio 2019: Can you explain how you formulated the ANOVA test? Can you explain more about how you chose to use qualitative analysis?
ReplyDeleteKelly 2019: I think that this article did a really good job of inclusion of diverse organizations. I appreciated their inclusion of tribal groups. I was curious as to how family forest owners manager their involvement and input in the polycentric system.
Paveglio 2023: I’m really fascinated with the different adaptive capacity characteristics. Is there one characteristic that is a more powerful influence than others? Are there other glaring characteristics that weren’t mentioned? How could this data be quantified for use in the decision making process? Are we interested in finding common ground between the different community types? This is exactly what I was talking about last week: the importance of understanding social science in making well informed environmental science decisions.
In the Kelly 2019 paper I love this idea of a polycentric system. That said, I worry about communication breakdowns because of how long it takes certain agencies to respond to different things. Meaning that there would need to be new protocols and decision-making processes along with the diversifying of the decision-making process. Also resource disparities within the same region could reduce the overall effectiveness if there’s a large scale emergency one area is able to better execute the wildfire management plan while the other is not due to differing resources.
ReplyDeletePaveglio 2023 paper: I like the idea of this paper like I did the Kelley paper. The problem is the implementation difficulties here? How do we get institutions to change the way that they’ve always done it. it goes back to the point of a person that does not see a is issue with their behavior will not change their behavior. And unfortunately, a lot of times the top bureaucratic entities don’t value or see the value sometimes and local insights and believe that they know better than the people that live in the communities. How do we change that?
Paveglio 2019 my question here would be the same as in the 2023 paper. How do we initiate that change? How do we get others on board for the policy changes for us to be able to practically apply this thought in planning process into an infrastructure that would put this into place? I agree further the research is needed but what does that research look like?
Kelly 2019:
ReplyDeleteIn the constraints section of the paper it discusses issues with the lack of engagement with one particular land owner, How many landowners can be considered "lacking in engagement" while sill having an effective fire management plan.
Paveglio 2023:
It is noted that the authors "we lacked the capacity to make those isolated insights relevant to a broader audience of diverse communities at risk from wildfire or policymakers faced with the task of creating flexible policy that could promote local change." Who would be able to fill this gap? What characteristics or previous life experience should he/she have?
Paveglio 2019:
Since each community wants fire adaption to be tailored to them, what over arching themes were found to be commonly important? Is the idea of "protecting certain scientifically or economically important areas" important, or is their relationship they hold more important?
Kelly et al. 2019
ReplyDelete(1) In the methods section, the authors describe how they identified individuals through GIS and tax lot data. Compared to the article last week that used Zillow data, is this a more common way to get such data or does it provide something different?
(2) The Middle Klamath River Communities Project had a major constraint of a lack of involvement from other partners, like the Karuk Tribe and Mid-Klamath Watershed Council due to the KNF's unilateral handling of the project. Unfortunately, it appears to be a pattern. How can we vouch for polycentric governance, when there are not only historical trust issues, but current stakeholders/partners who are going back on their word?
Paveglio et al. 2019
(3) Since individuals don't like being told what to do/think, could providing varying outcomes/situations through simulations, like an interactive website, to illustrate the importance of the process? This way they are able to see the benefits of the proposed pre-fire mitigation while also showing the detrimental effects "in real time". I think of the driving simulators program, DriveSmart, that was offered through insurance companies for teen drivers. It gave exposure to real life events while incentivizing the time it takes to go through the program with a discount. Is this feasible?
Kelly 2019:
ReplyDelete"... state and federal agencies have coordinated in wildfire suppression, including resource sharing and joint decision-making responsibility, this has not extended much beyond suppression"
From what this quote suggests, there is an existing coordination between state and federal agencies focused on wildfire suppression. How can we extend that to a broader collaborative management effort? If involving family forest owners guarantees that, how do we keep them engage so they actively participate in management efforts?
Paveglio et al.2019:
The reading mentions that some populations may be unwilling or unable to adopt adaption strategies or attitudes about wildfire that will limit their personal freedoms.
How can communities balance their need for fire adaption and land use autonomy? Are there any current examples that do both?
Paveglio 2023:
Distrust of government is a huge factor in determining if communities accept or resist external policies. How can the government "rebuild" trust so collaboration can be improved? Has it gotten to the point where it is impossible to do so? What should the government do if that is the case?
Kelly 2019: Given “polycentric wildfire governance as a governance system in which authorities at nested scales make and implement policies and rules related to shared wildfire risk across multi-jurisdictional landscapes, with multiple centers of power that overlap creating “inter-related decisional contexts”, how can we ensure the proper governance is determining what goes on in a given scale? For example, the USFS is a national agency that determines its governance on a national scale that then trickles down to regions, GACCs, and forests. However, oftentimes what is determined on this national scale is not actually applicable, appropriate, or accurate on a more localized scale (think acres for prescribed fire treatment, etc). So how can we ensure governance in this context is not just top-down, but also lead by bottom-up, more localized, place-based knowledge to inform decision-making?
ReplyDeletePaveglio et al. 2019: Paveglio et al. 2019: In reference to the following: “ordinances, policies, or laws enacted in some locations might be largely ceremonial—their integration into local culture could be a long process or are less likely to occur”, how can we ensure these policies go beyond the ceremonial and instead properly portray the issue/location and enact real change?
After reading about “rural lifestyle” populations that “are more likely to desire personal independence and express less support for formal organizations or rules where they live…” and “see utility in active forest management that benefited the health of the landscape and less desire for establishment of organizations such as Firewise because they felt that most people in the area already had a relatively high level of knowledge about fire risk and what was needed to help reduce it.” I am curious how folks think we can encourage a better balance/integration between the desire for independence and the need for collective work towards common goals (in this case, household community resilience against wildfire)?
Paveglio 2023: Based on our previously discussed scepticism for various study methodologies, do you think there is a potential issue stemming from the author already having a vested interest in supporting Wilkinson’s ideas prior to writing this paper, and therefore already holding a bias that leans in favor of his ideas rather than remaining neutral, objective, and fact-based?
Also, my sincere apologies for posting late, I’ve had a week from hell on all fronts and am just trying to muddle through.