Wildfire Narratives

Mentee:

Michal Russo

Metoring Team:

Alexandra Paige Fischer

Heidi Huber-Sterns

Identifying and Characterizing the Social Narratives of the Western Wildfire Challenges

A pragmatic approach to facilitate knowledge co-production’s aspirational principle of recognizing and legitimizing multiple understandings

Scholarly & Practical Outputs

Purpose

This research was motivated by a need to improve how collaborative environmental governance practices attend to multiple understandings. Specifically, two limitations include (1) a lack of an initial exploratory process for identifying and characterizing actors’ multiple understandings of complex sustainability challenges and (2) a lack of guidance on how practitioners should identify actors who can represent sufficiently diverse understandings of the challenge. This dissertation emphasizes approaches for addressing these limitations.

Research Questions:

How do influential key actors conceptualize the causes, impacts, solutions to the western wildfire challenge?
What research opportunities and needs to key actors identify as important?
What are the common narratives around the western wildfire challenge among key actors?
How are these narratives distributed across the population of key actors and what core beliefs explain these patterns?
How can an understanding of wildfire narratives inform facilitation of collaborative wildfire governance?

Approach

This research was motivated by a need to improve how collaborative environmental governance practices attend to multiple understandings. Specifically, two limitations include (1) a lack of an initial exploratory process for identifying and characterizing actors’ multiple understandings of complex sustainability challenges and (2) a lack of guidance on how practitioners should identify actors who can represent sufficiently diverse understandings of the challenge. This dissertation emphasizes approaches for addressing these limitations.

Comparison of email survey to workshop participants

Russo, M. (2022)

Findings

We conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews with 60 thought leaders to identify the underlying conceptual frames that shape their views about the causes and impacts of the western wildfire problem and how society ought to address it. Based on those interviews, and reinforced by published documents, conferences, websites, podcasts, and films, we identified 9 distinct wildfire narratives, or depictions of the Western wildfire crisis. We illustrate these findings as a wheel summarizing key areas of commonality and differences across the narratives.

Russo, M. (2022)

Analysis

Our findings reveal significant friction driven by the underlying cognitive frames wildfire experts hold. However, the way experts talk about the crisis also reflects a blending across multiple narratives. In other words, experts describe more than one explanation for why we are facing a crisis and what society ought to do about it. This suggests that cultural, disciplinary, and political lines may be blurring, signaling an opportunity for establishing connections across historically divergent communities of practice. Ultimately, gaining a better understanding of the array of Western wildfire narratives may facilitate greater self-reflection and reconciliation in practice.

Key Findings and/or Recommendations for Practice

We identified nine social narratives about the western wildfire challenge: ‘Manage,’ ‘Adapt,’ ‘Revitalize,’ ‘Control,’ ‘Work,’ ‘Market,’ ‘Regulate,’ ‘Conserve.’ and ‘Justice.’
These nine narratives differ on four elements of the storylines – strategies, scales, frames, and language.
‘Manage,’ ‘Adapt,’ and ‘Revitalize’ narratives were more commonly held or dominant social narratives while ‘Control’ was less common.
Two factors explained about half of the variation among the respondents: (1) a view about the role of fire (a desire to control and minimize fire vs. a desire to utilize more fire) and (2) a preference for interventions in the forest vs. in communities.
Our findings suggest that actors’ understandings correspond and overlap with multiple social narratives and do not align with interest groups.

Russo, M. (2022)

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