Boustras, Georgios

Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management. We engage our findings with the wider governance literature to unlock new thinking on wildfires as a process and outcome. This comparative approach enables us to propose a novel framework for analyzing wildfire governance based on four pillars: (1) actor participation in decision-making and decision taking; (2) actor collaboration and coproduction across and within levels, scales, and networks; (3) path dependencies and local place-based dynamics of wildfire incidence and comprehension; and (4) actor adaptation to and anticipation of wildfire risk to fashion effective institutions that address the global wildfire challenge. We show how this framework can help specify a suite of bespoke analytical and policy practitioner approaches to facilitate preemptive and restorative wildfire strategies via new networks between communities, states, and wider society, thus providing the basis for more equitable and sustainable governance of wildfire risks and impacts.

Fire is a fundamental social-ecological process, but a combination of changing climate, land use and values at risk is increasing the incidence of large wildfires with high societal and biodiversity impacts. Academic and practitioner understanding is now converging around the need to manage fire risk as an outcome of intersecting governance regimes, comprising geohistorically defined institutions and decision-making pathways shaped by earlier wildfires. We investigate this proposition through a case study of Italy, a country greatly affected by wildfire and characterised by strong organisational, socio-cultural and geographical variation nationally. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study collecting and analysing qualitative data on how different national and sub-national governance procedures interrelate to promote particular risk management strategies, and support or impede adaptive change. Participants in key agencies were consulted across seven nationally representative regions. Findings show a highly fragmented institutional structure, where wildfire policy responsibilities are increasingly allocated to disparate organisations at a variety of scales. Local stakeholder participation has been displaced by this shift to extra-local actors and networks. While institutions are formally committed to adopting a precautionary approach to wildfire risk, in practice, emergency response remains the default choice, as a result of patchy and uncoordinated legislation. Notably, the wider national and international (EU) regulatory context plays a muted role in governing wildfires. We present our results as a novel action research agenda for Italy and southern Europe more generally, emphasising the urgent need to develop new anticipatory systems of wildfire incidence through closer integration of cross-scale governance arrangements.