Co-management during crisis: insights from jurisdictionally complex wildfires
Branda Nowell A * , Toddi Steelman
B , Anne-lise Velez C and Kate Albrecht D
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A North Carolina State University, School of Public and International Affairs, Raleigh NC, USA.
B Duke University, Nicholas School of the Environment, Durham, NC, USA.
C Virginia Tech, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Blacksburg, VA, USA.
D University of Illinois, College of Urban Planning and Pubic Affairs, Chicago, IL, USA.
* Correspondence to: Branda_Nowell@ncsu.edu
International Journal of Wildland Fire 31(5) 529-544 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF21139
Submitted: 30 October 2021 Accepted: 30 March 2022 Published: 20 May 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)
Abstract
There is a general agreement within the wildfire community that exclusively top–down approaches to policy making and management are limited and that we need to build governance capacity to cooperatively manage across jurisdictional boundaries. Accordingly, the concept of co-management has grown in popularity as a theoretical lens through which to understand cooperative multi-jurisdictional response to wildland fires. However, definitional ambiguity has led to on-going debates about what co-management is. Further, there is limited understanding about the nature of co-management during crisis events. This had led to scholars posing the question: what is co-management in the context of jurisdictionally complex wildfire? In this paper, we seek to address this question based on interviews with leaders engaged in the management of jurisdictionally complex wildfire incidents. We propose a multi-level framework for conceiving co-management as strategic efforts of individual actors to cooperatively manage perceived interdependencies with others through one or more formal or informal institutional arrangements. We then demonstrate the value of the proposed framework in its ability to organise a series of questions for diagnosing co-management situations within the context of jurisdictionally complex wildfires.
Keywords: collaboration, collaborative governance, co-management, cross-boundary, disasters, multi-jurisdictional, network governance, wildfire, wildland fire.
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