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Issue 407 |  September 17, 2021

Policy Barriers to Prescribed Fire: Identifying Opportunities and Mechanisms for Change

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Policy Barriers to Prescribed Fire: Identifying Opportunities and Mechanisms for Change
A firefighter working on ignitions during the Black Lake prescribed fire training exchange (TREX) in Northern New Mexico. Photo Credit: Gabe Kohler, Forest Stewards Guild.
A firefighter working on ignitions during the Black Lake prescribed fire training exchange (TREX) in Northern New Mexico. Photo Credit: Gabe Kohler, Forest Stewards Guild.

JFSP PROJECT ID: 16-1-02-8

Principle Investigator: Courtney A. Schultz
Co-Principle Investigators: Cassandra Moseley, Adell Amos, Christopher Bone
Other key project contributors: Heidi Huber-Stearns, Sarah McCaffrey and Anna Santo 

Prescribed fire is an essential management tool for restoring and maintaining the resilience of fire-dependent ecosystems. This study utilized a mixed methods approach involving spatial analysis, legal analysis, and case studies to identify which policies present the greatest opportunities for change and what the mechanisms are for realizing those opportunities. We found that while many challenges faced by federal units across the American West followed similar overarching themes, each unit we studied faced its own unique combination of primary and secondary barriers. We documented key strategies used by units that have the reputation of being leaders in prescribed burning across the West, including: stronger communication with the public, working directly with regulators, leveraging partnerships, and developing more adaptive or strategic project planning approaches. We also identified that creative problem-solving at the local level appears to be central to success. This underscores the need for building a policy framework and culture in which creative problem solving is encouraged and units are supported with sufficient resources to implement solutions. 

We explored these ideas of leveraging partnerships and creative problem solving further through a recent analysis of network governance in the use of prescribed fire and roles for bridging organizations and other actors (Huber-Stearns, Santo, Schultz and McCaffrey, article forthcoming). This work, which we discuss in our final project report and will be the subject of a peer-reviewed publication coming out later this year, yielded some key findings:

  • Collaboration and capacity building can help address policy and capacity barriers to implementing prescribed fire. In our cases, we found 67 different organizations spanning local to national scales that play a variety of roles to support prescribed fire implementation, including: communications, prescribed burn labor, fundraising, burning expertise, and burning on neighboring lands.
  • We found that most cooperative actors in our case studies were based at the local level. This highlights the value and potential of local collaborations, especially since challenges around developing necessary partnerships for prescribed fire are often locally specific.
  • These findings can help identify strategies to increase the use of prescribed fire by filling capacity gaps and other needs through cooperative partnerships with a range of actors and roles.
Final Report
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