Applying historical ecology to natural resource management institutions: Lessons from two case studies of landscape fire management

Re-envisioning community-wildfire relations in the U.S. West as adaptive governance

“…Resilience scholars emphasize the problems that arise when management decisions are made at one scale or by one entity while the consequences of those decisions are felt at other scales or borne by other entities; when higher level policies fail to recognize or support local-level constraints and opportunities; or http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss3/art34/ when the incentives and time frames of social systems fail to align with the temporal dynamics of ecological systems (Lee 1993, Ludwig and Stafford Smith 2005, Borgström et al 2006, Cumming et al 2006. Frequently, potentially sustainable locallevel institutions are overruled or disenfranchised by higher level state or private institutions (Murphree 1993, Scott 1998, Petty et al 2015. In response to the problem of resource domination by high-level bureaucracies, many resilience scholars have endorsed the subsidiarity principle, which states that governance authority should be "vested in the lowest level of social organization capable of solving pertinent problems" (Young 2002:284).…”

Using community archetypes to better understand differential community adaptation to wildfire risk

“…Chief among those complexities are the ways that unique local cultures have and will continue to evolve, and the diverse strategies that will be needed to advance natural resource and fire management in ways that correspond to those different populations' values-at-risk [22,29,30].…”

“…Instead, longitudinal lessons from that research indicate that common predictors vary in their importance to the diverse human populations that live with, in and near the wildlands [27]. Wildfire science from locations across the world continues to recognize that the unique social and biophysical characteristics of fire-prone environments, including historical approaches to land management, area culture, amenity migration, locals' perceptions about wildfire and trust between stakeholders can all influence drastically different collective responses to wildfire risk [28][29][30]. Recognition of the ways in which local context influence response to wildfire expand and borrow from larger discourses on community adaptation to hazards or climate change using meta-concepts such as resilience, vulnerability, adaptive capacity, collaborative governance and pyrogeography [20,31,32].…”

Historical perspective on the influence of wildfire policy, law, and informal institutions on management and forest resilience in a multiownership, frequent-fire, coupled human and natural system in Oregon, USA

“…For instance, past forest policies shaped cultural norms, which subsequently influenced later policies. Second, institutions are culturally constituted, that is, culture influences how social groups (e.g., agencies) shape behavioral rules (Folke et al 1998, Petty et al 2015, which may become ingrained over time. In addition, preference for the status quo in the face of uncertainty may partially contribute to the influence of institutional history.…”

“…We argue that in the eastern Cascades system, wildfire management adaptation (changes in forest fuel treatment, harvest fuel treatment, and wildfire incident response) was influenced by the interaction of informal institutions (cultural norms, knowledge system and fire paradigm) and institutional history with formal institutions (policy, law; following Folke et al 1998, Petty et al 2015 because of effects on decision-making flexibility in responding to ecological feedbacks. We also argue that institutional interactions play a role in wildfire-resilient forest structure, which we expected to vary by ownership owing to institutional variation.…”