Exposing hidden-value trade-offs: sharing wildfire management responsibility between government and citizens

Abstract

Abstract. Developing resilient communities and sharing responsibility for hazard management is the key to Australia's 'National Strategy for Disaster Resilience'. There are, however, a wide range of conflicting views on the appropriate responsibilities of governments, citizens and communities that are not well recognised in the national policy discourse. What the ideas of resilient communities and shared responsibility mean for wildfire management and how these ideas might shape wildfire safety thinking and practice is therefore unclear and contested. This paper makes explicit some of the necessary, but often hidden, trade-offs between competing values that are implicit in assessments of where responsibility for wildfire management lies, and how it should be shared. After describing different ways in which responsibility is attributed and legitimated through legal and governance systems, this paper compares and contrasts potential legal and governance implications of four hypothetical scenarios for wildfire management, each of which portrays a contrasting set of extreme value trade-offs. The underlying purpose of the exercise is to encourage stakeholders to draw on the frameworks to explicitly acknowledge and debate the value trade-offs that are necessary, but most often unacknowledged, in more moderate decision-making about how to share responsibility for risk management between governments and citizens.

Social vulnerability to large wildfires in the western USA

“…Gaining insights on social-ecological fire-related interactions can help government agencies prioritize fuel management efforts and reduce fire risk from government (local, state or federal) administered lands to socially vulnerable and underprivileged populations. Previous research has highlighted the need for a coupled analysis of social and biophysical factors in community wildfire protection planning, and the benefits of such an approach include overcoming temporal and spatial scale mismatches in risk mitigation (Ager, Kline, & Fischer, 2015), understanding social-ecological feedbacks and human adaptation in fire-prone landscapes (Spies, Scheller, & Bolte, 2018;Spies et al, 2014), promoting learning among different scales of actors throughout the governance system to support the complexity necessary to match the wildfire problem (Steelman, 2016), identifying specific social vulnerabilities and trade-offs (McLennan & Eburn, 2015), and facilitating adaptation strategies across widely varying public and private landscapes (Moritz et al, 2014). The extensive literature on social science related to wildfire issues (McCaffrey, 2015) has studied risk perception, mitigation decisions and perceived consequences (Champ & Brenkert-Smith, 2016;Champ, Donovan, & Barth, 2013;Dickinson, Brenkert-Smith, Champ, & Flores, 2015;Gordon, Luloff, & Stedman, 2012); community pre-fire mitigation (Cohn, Williams, & Carroll, 2008) and adaptive capacity ; residents' actions and adaptation (Brenkert- Smith, 2006); and community social diversity and vulnerability (Paveglio, Nielsen-Pincus, Abrams, & Moseley, 2017;Paveglio, Prato, Edgeley, & Nalle, 2016).…”

Exploring the Influence of Local Social Context on Strategies for Achieving Fire Adapted Communities

“…These initiatives stem from a growing recognition that ongoing human development can influence the composition of wildland fuels that drive wildfire risk or increase societal pressure to aggressively suppress fires that might adversely impact human values [31][32][33]. A focus on private citizens' shared responsibility for fire management reflects an established body of science stressing that while wildfire occurrence is inevitable, coordinated and collaborative efforts among stakeholders (e.g., land management agencies, communities, counties, tribes, private homeowners) can allow it to play a natural, healthy role in local ecosystems without disrupting ongoing human well-being [34][35][36].…”

“…The researchers chose to operationalize responses to the quantitative questions in the manner described above for a few key theoretical and methodological reasons. To begin, incorporating the perceived likelihood that community members will enact or support the adaptation actions presented recognizes the significant influence that human agency has on the provision of collective fire adaptation [7,11,34]. Community members can choose whether to perform mitigation actions on their property, enact regulations supporting adaptation actions, or comply with such regulations in the absence of direct enforcement (and sometimes not even then).…”

Self-evacuation archetypes in Australian bushfire

“…Bushfire safety policy also promotes the development of a comprehensive bushfire plan, encouraging householders to decide well in advance, whether they will remain to defend property or evacuate. Waiting to see how a bushfire develops before making a decision is discouraged [6][7][8].…”