Bruce Evan Goldstein
William Hale Butler
Presented at
The Virginia Tech Symposium on Enhancing Resilience to Catastrophic Events through
Communicative Planning
November 16-18, 2008
Corresponding Author:
Bruce Evan Goldstein
Assistant Professor
Virginia Tech
School of Public and International Affairs
Urban Affairs and Planning Program
201 Architecture Annex
Blacksburg, VA 24061 brugo@vt.edu
*Please do not cite without prior permission from the corresponding author.
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Introduction
Wildland fire management in the United States is caught in what Gunderson and Holling
(2002) call a "rigidity trap" of pathological resistance to novelty and innovation. Since the 19 th century the system has never shifted to a more ecologically and socially beneficial state, despite frequent perturbations and shocks. Nearly forty years ago, fire scientists embraced a dynamic perspective of natural fire regimes and fire agencies called an end to the all out war against fire on the wildlands abandoning a commitment to wildfire suppression that had dominated U.S. fire management policy and practice (Pyne, 2004). Over time, they formally adopted multiple goals including ecosystem restoration, fuels reduction and community protection. Despite these changes in agency rhetoric and fire management policy, fire suppression is continually reinforced through incentive structures, agency budgets, and professional practice (Arno &
Allison-Bunnell, 2002). Instead of making ecological restoration the core of fire management practice, land management agencies devote more resources to suppressing fires whose extent and intensity continue to increase. The social-ecological system is maintained in a highly connected, rigid and inflexible state, and is susceptible to catastrophic events and dramatic, unplanned change.
In response to this social-ecological crisis, the Nature Conservancy, in affiliation with the
USDA Forest Service and the land management agencies of the Department of Interior, initiated the Fire Learning Network (FLN). The FLN enlists partners to collaboratively develop restoration plans across ecologically meaningful scales. Since its inception in 2001, the FLN has grown from an initial 25 project sites to include more than 500 partners distributed across over
80 landscape collaboratives.
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Within a multiscale collaborative structure, the FLN utilizes a variety of mechanisms to ensure that landscape teams engage in restoration planning exercises to address ecological crises specific to their respective landscapes. Through technologies, planning guidelines, and various forms of media, the FLN shapes, transmits, and reinforces certain assumptions and expectations for engaging in ecological fire restoration planning and management. Drawing on the work of
Anderson (1983) and Taylor (2004) we contend that these assumptions and expectations articulate an FLN imaginary that coordinates independent efforts to engage in ecological fire restoration work without need of either hierarchal authority or collective social capital. This imaginary may allow the FLN to draw on the creativity and adaptive innovation of collaboration to spring the rigidity trap and enhance the resilience of fire management institutions and fireadapted ecosystems.
Resilience and Rigidity Traps
Resilience is becoming a universal object of desire. Psychologists associate it with mental well-being. Hazard planners, public administration scholars, security analysts and others have adopted the term to describe efforts to restore and maintain optimal and stable conditions.
Proponents of social-ecological resilience prefer a systems vocabulary, defining the term as an outcome of interaction between unsettling events and a bioculture that could assume multiple stable states. Among these researchers, resilience is not just stability, but the ability to withstand loss and recover identity and structural and functional complexity. These qualities are independent of the temporal, spatial, and organizational scale of analysis, and can encompass firms, communities, states, and societies.
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Across these nested scales, some resilience may actually be undesirable. For instance, resilient management or governance system can be an obstacle to broader social-ecological resilience, maintaining an inflexible institutional configuration through shocks or perturbations that might otherwise catalyze adaptive change (Allison & Hobbs, 2004). Resilience to change and innovation has been called a "rigidity trap” (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). The organization maintains, but as Berkes and Folke (1998, p. 8) suggest, “…tight fit… between society and its institutions… is maladaptive – it is not resilient to changes in environmental conditions.”
Rigidity traps are a variant of a social trap, a term that psychologist Platt (1973) coined to describe situations in which the incentive for individuals to act in a certain way undermines collective well-being. They were first described in natural resource management bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves, even at the expense of the productivity and vitality of the ecosystems that they manage (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). These resource management regimes often reduce natural variation in target resources because fluctuations impose problems for industries dependent on the resource, despite the negative ecological feedbacks associated with these actions, which increase likelihood of catastrophic events and dramatic, unanticipated change
(Holling, Gunderson, & Ludwig, 2002).
One way in which this process might be self-correcting is when extreme events such as wildfire or hurricanes foster change in long-established rules and practices (Schusler, Decker, &
Pfeffer, 2003). However, positive feedbacks can support continuation of the status quo, such as a reliance on financial and/or political support that accompanies continued crisis management.
Institutional rules and procedures may not change even when those operating by these rules recognize that they would be better off under an alternative (Repetto & Allen, 2006). People's willingness to change the status quo is conditioned by the willingness of others to do so, a
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phenomena that Baumgartner (2006, p. 43) calls a "social cascade". Mobilizing those who share recognition to reshape governance and develop new forms of collective knowledge and identity requires mutual trust and social capital (Rothstein, 2005). Without this mutual support, institutional change can be too threatening, since it can disrupt familiar procedures and ways of knowing and require new training and social organization (B. E. Goldstein, 2007).
A rigidity trap is hard to spring because these supportive conditions are largely inaccessible to top-down command and control. Some resilience researchers have suggested that multistakeholder collaborative processes are better suited to spring rigidity traps because they are inclusive, well suited to building trust and social capital, and can enhance innovation by providing a multitude of testing grounds for alternative relationships and work practices (B.
Goldstein & Butler, Under Review; Olsson, Folke, & Hahn, 2004).
Collaboration to spring the trap
Multistakeholder collaboration developed as a way to combine broad democratic legitimacy with the deliberative power of small-group interaction in order to solve disputes that stymied regulatory agencies, representative assemblies, and the courts (J. E. Innes, Gruber,
Neuman, & Thompson, 1994; Weber, 1998). Sustained and close interaction yields timely, costefficient and equitable outcomes by building trust, promoting clarification of motivating interests and encouraging creative thinking (Cormick, 1980; Crowfoot & Wondolleck, 1990; Dryzek,
1990).
Critics questioned whether collaborative agreements could be implemented within adversarial institutions in which disputes had originally festered (Amy, 1987; Flyvbjerg, 1998).
Planning scholars responded that deliberation could fundamentally alter adversarial relationships,
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permitting stakeholders to remain engaged with one another and implement the solutions they had devised (Booher & Innes, 2002; Healey, 1997). As scholars described how collaboration could bootstrap its own enabling conditions, this brought into focus new possibilities. If collaborative agreements could be sustained amidst the mistrust and power dynamics of adversarial institutions, perhaps collaborative processes had even greater potential. Rather than only collaborate at the scale of conflict, perhaps a focus on broader scales could f acilitate adaptation to recurring crises by enabling formation of new collective knowledge and identity, rather than just creating temporary exceptions to established relationships, norms and rules in order to solve disputes.
Sometimes it is easy to settle on the appropriate spatial, temporal, and organizational domain and scope of a collaborative process given the nature of the problem being addressed – such as negotiation of a county-wide habitat conservation plan (B. E. Goldstein, 2004). In some cases, efforts to c arefully match the scale of collaboration to a set of planning or policy objectives may suffice(Fung & Wright, 2003; Judith E Innes, Connick, & Booher, 2007; R.
Margerum, 2008). Other times, problems manifest over different scales and require cross-scale integration (Ansell & Gash, 2007; Bidwell & Ryan, 2006; R. Margerum, 2008; Moore &
Koontz, 2003). Fostering greater institutional resilience is inherently cross-scale, addressing the operation of disparate social and ecological phenomena and requiring cross-scale linkages between individuals, organizations, agencies, and institutions (Olsson et al., 2004). Moreover, cross-scale problems require more than simultaneous collaboration at different scales. In these contexts, a system or set of procedures for creating and sustaining linkages between collaboratives that permits problems to be addressed at multiple scales is necessary.
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Recently, some collaboration scholars have been thinking in similar terms, focusing on the prospects for collaborative governance(Albrechts & Mandelbaum, 2005; M. A. Hajer &
Wagenaar, 2003). They suggest that collaboration could not only yield just and lasting solutions to specific problems, but could also catalyze new institutional relationships that addressed their root cause (Booher & Innes, 2002; Healey, 1997; Judith E. Innes & Booher, 2000). This discussion dovetails with a widespread questioning of classical-modernist political institutions and a rising interest in collaborative governance within the planning and policy sciences(M.
Hajer & Versteeg, 2005; M. A. Hajer & Wagenaar, 2003). In 2005, collaborative planning researchers joined with other deliberative democracy scholars and practitioners in a workshop that envisioned creation of an "ad-hocracy" (Menkel-Meadow, 2005) that was constantly made and remade through ongoing collaborative practice. In their workshop summary ( Synopsis of the
Dispute Resolution/Deliberative Democracy Seminar , 2005), participants concluded that their objective was not only to resolve disputes, but also to "…think about the system that produces each conflict and try to fold what we learn from one occasion into the long-term development of new institutional capacity."
This collaborative governance "ad-hocracy" cannot simply be described in terms of a single scale. A better way of describing it is in terms of a minimum "grain" size and a maximum
"extent", a combination that Weins (1989 ) likened to the mesh size and the overall size of a sieve. The minimum "grain size" would be a place-based collaborative, where individual participants address specific disputes. Cumulatively, across a broader temporal, spatial, and organizational "extent", individuals throughout society gradually reframe their knowledge practices, assumptions, expectations, and norms to accord more with collaborative, consensual decisionmaking.
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Springing a rigidity trap through a multi-sited, coordinated network of collaboratives is more ambitious than a dispute resolution process and more focused and deliberate than an "adhocracy" of collaborative governance. Rather than spontaneously emerging from uncoordinated action across a multitude of collaborative initiatives, a coordinated network can integrate collaborative action across multiple scales to resolve collective problems. At the minimum "grain size", sites share more in common than their collaborative approach - common issues are addressed. At larger scales, a network of sites can create the conditions for its own success by sharing innovation and resources and fostering the creation and maintenance of new sites. At the greatest "extent", the network of collaboratives promote institutional change that enhances resilience and springs the rigidity trap.
Examining watershed-based collaboratives along Oregon's Rogue River, Margerum and
Whitall (2004) describe the advantages of coordination at the river basin scale. They suggest that linking collaboratives enhances the legitimacy of individual sites, facilitates diffusion of innovations, and aids in delivery of useful information, such as funding opportunities and regulatory requirements. They conclude that a network of collaboratives can provide for some aspects of governance, rather than just decentralizing deliberative capacity and authority.
Coordinating arrangements such as what Margerum and Whitall describe can link sites in ways that are coherent and mutually comprehensible, increasing prospects for institutional reform.
However, coordinating collaboration may conflict with the autonomy that each collaborative requires to work effectively. Despite the advantages of coherence among sites, an overly prescriptive approach can be counter-productive if it interferes with each site's capacity to come up with their own problem definitions, take into account local context and contingencies, and generate their own creative solutions (Booher & Innes, 2002; Gray, 1989). A productive balance
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must be struck between the openness required to foster innovation in place-based collaboratives and the coherence necessary to ensure that activities and knowledge generated at disparate sites are mutually comprehensible and supportive.
So far, collaborative planning scholars have yet to provide guidance on how to coordinate between sites in ways that address this tension between cultivating creativity and innovation and ensuring institutional coherence. In their examination of the informal collaborative processes that emerged in a regional water management initiative in central California, Innes et al. (2007) concluded that a remaining challenge both for the regional governance system and collaborative governance processes in general "…is to transform the ideas, informal relationships, and agreements into a more enduring form, without losing the flexibility and adaptiveness of what emerges from the informal system."
In the remainder of this paper, we explore whether balancing the need for creativity, informality, and flexibility at the site scale with coherence and comprehensibility at regional and national scales can be achieved through circulation of a common "imaginary" among sites. As developed by Charles Taylor (2002; 2004) and Benedict Anderson (1983), an imaginary is a collectively held expectation of how things work now, how they are supposed to work, and how to act to make them work that way. This includes an understanding of one's own role in the shared life of the group, as well as how others should act and how to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate action. Shared goals and purposes provide individuals with a sense that they share in the life of a community, reinforcing solidarity within a group with common struggles and pleasures, despite the absence of personal relationships among all members of the group. In this paper, we trace an imaginary within a network of place-based collaboratives created to reform U.S. fire management, a more intimate arena than the national and societal scope of
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Taylor and Anderson. We consider how this imaginary is circulated through media, technological standards, and planning methodologies, and examine the practices through which the imaginary is expressed and reproduced among network participants to reinforce a common identity, knowledge practice, and social order.
Methods
Our analysis of the FLN spans nearly seven years from its inception in late 2001 to late
2008. In developing a rich and detailed case study of the network, we have observed and recorded 12 regional workshops and 3 national meetings, conducted interviews with more than
85 network participants and professional staff, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents.
We have read and examined hundreds of landscape level planning products such as restoration, monitoring, implementation and other plans; dozens of network meeting agendas, minutes, and summaries; drafts and final versions of cooperative agreements, requests for proposals and strategic planning documents produced by professional staff; landscape, regional, and national level semi-annual reports; and all of the network newsletters, briefing documents, stories from the field, and other outreach materials. For the purposes of this paper, we drew on this broad range of data and specifically focused our document analysis on network newsletters, planning guidelines, and technological protocols.
We entered text files of documents, interview transcripts, and observation records into
NVIVO™ qualitative analysis software. To analyze the data, we used a grounded theory approach, an inductive investigative process that allows scholars to formulate theory by applying specific coding paradigms to their examination of the conditions, context, strategies, and consequences related to the phenomenon of interest (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Coding in
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NVIVO, we assigned category names to ideas or action descriptions in the FLN based on thematic similarities. The grounded theory process facilitates linking these categories to emergent core categories as various themes and subthemes converge. We modified and reinterpreted emergent theoretical constructs about a network imaginary, linking categories into interactional sequences and feeding new data into the analysis to complete the "grounding" of the theory.
Crisis in Fire Management
In March 2001, TNC and the USFS, the agency most responsible for national fire research, training and coordination (Pyne, 2004), jointly hosted the "National Fire Roundtable" in Flagstaff, AZ. The two-day forum and workshop brought together more than 60 fire managers and fire scientists from federal and state public agencies and nonprofit conservation organizations. Participants agreed that overzealous firefighting throughout most of the 20 th century threatened the ecological integrity of wildlands and exposed adjacent settlements to more frequent and intense fires. They recommended a reversal of this approach, the deliberate reintroduction of fire through "prescribed burning" under controlled conditions, and proposed that burning be coordinated across public and private jurisdictions at a landscape scale (Schlisky,
2001). An essential part of getting land managers to engage in fire restoration, they agreed, was helping managers overcome organizational barriers to landscape-scale cooperation and resolve conflicting management prerogatives. Working from this basis, roundtable participants developed a framework for nation-wide coordination of landscape-scale efforts to reduce fuel loads and restore ecological functions in fire-adapted ecosystems.
1
1 Ayn Schlisky, FLN Coordinator, Interview, 9-27-2006; Wendy Fulks, TNC Learning Networks Communications,
Interview, 1-15-2007
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Both TNC and the public fire management agencies were motivated to try new approaches to fire management and break from their longstanding autonomy over lands under their control. Since the mid-1980's, the frequency of large wildfires had increased four-fold in the United States compared to the previous two decades, and the area burned annually increased more than six-fold (Westerling, Hidalgo, Cayan, & Swetnam, 2006). Federal firefighting expenditures continued to comprise an increasing share of land management appropriations, rising from an average of $1.1 billion per year in the late 1990's to over $3 billion in the 2000's
(US Government Accountability Office, 2007). The general public had begun to pay attention to this growing challenge after a particularly destructive wildfire season in 2000 that destroyed hundreds of homes and scorched millions of acres of forests. As summed up at the Roundtable,
“The public and Congress are aware, as never before, that we need to rethink our suppressionfocused relationship to fire and fire-adapted ecosystems” (Schlisky, 2001). By the end of 2000, the agencies published what has become known as the National Fire Plan (USDA Forest Service,
2000) and Congress directed $1.8 billion to manage wildfire risk and work collaboratively to protect exurban development that was reaching ever more deeply into forests and grasslands.
At the Roundtable, agency representatives embraced the idea of partnering with TNC, an organization with recognized expertise and experience in fire restoration (Schlisky, 2001). They shared TNC's premise that ecologically-informed fire restoration was needed to address the legacy of a century of single-minded fire suppression. Far from a radical suggestion, this had been the basis of the National Park Service and Forest Service's prescribed burning policies since the early 1970's (Carle, 2002; Pyne, 2004). For the agencies, the challenge wasn't making this policy shift, it was implementing it. From 1995 through 2000, they treated an annual average of
1.4 million federal acres with prescribed fire. Yet in 2001 the agencies concluded that 211
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million acres were in moderate or critical need of fuels reduction (National Wildfire
Coordinating Group, 2001), a backlog that was impossible to clear at current rates, since acres treated often needed to be burned again within a few years. Agency budgets, training systems, and incentive structures remained focused on fire suppression, the only source of budgetary growth in the midst of an overall slide in agency funding, as timber receipts and recreational visitation numbers declined (Arno & Allison-Bunnell, 2002). While some agency managers had become adept in fire restoration, for the most part they operated independently and focused on relatively small and isolated fire restoration projects, reporting their success in terms of area burned, known as “acres black”. As the Director of State and Private Forestry in the USFS put it;
“The agencies understood ecoregions and understood large-scale. That did not translate to land managers prioritizing projects that looked at ecology at a landscape scale.” 2
The leaders of TNC's fire programs were also highly motivated to partner with the agencies. The entire TNC was engaged in redefining its mission from acquiring and managing lands to contributing to the protection of 10% of the world's ecosystem types, a task that would require working with public lands agencies and other large landholders, both in specific priority landscapes and at a policy level. TNC scientists concluded that fire was a critical area for developing these partnerships. Fire exclusion was a factor in the decline in ecological health of nearly half of the ecosystem types in the United States, increasing incidences of disease, pests, and invasive species (The Nature Conservancy, 2001). After the Roundtable, TNC's fire staff developed a proposal to implement a Conservation Learning Network, an approach TNC had developed in the late 1990's for freshwater systems, wetlands, grasslands, and invasive species.
While previous learning networks were primarily internal to TNC, in this case they envisioned an inter-organizational fire restoration partnership. Te partnership would allow TNC to
2 Jim Hubbard, Director of State and Private Forestry, USDA Forest Service, Interview 4-27-2007
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collaborate with agency land managers on multiple landscapes through a coordinated strategy that would both extend ecological restoration beyond the boundaries of TNC landholdings and enhance the importance of fire restoration across US fire management.
The US Fire Learning Network
By the end of 2001, TNC, USFS, and the multiple land management agencies of the US
Department of Interior (DOI) signed a cooperative agreement creating the US Fire Learning
Network (FLN) (Schlisky, 2001; The Nature Conservancy, 2001). Network coordinators were hired to develop planning guidelines for landscape-level collaboration and identify sites where the process might be useful and successful. Using an initial list of 130 priority restoration sites developed at the Roundtable, they sent a request for proposals to contacts in 50 of these sites, and selected 25 landscape collaboratives across the United States to take part in a common 2year planning process intended to operate at “ecologically meaningful scales” 3
. Biennial gatherings allowed participants to exchange information, learn new techniques, and give and receive feedback on planning products (TNC Global Fire Initiative, 2003).
Following this first phase, the cooperative agreement has been renewed twice, extending the partnership through 2011. FLN staff grouped landscapes into regional networks according ecological and social criteria (Fire Learning Network, March 2003). By the middle of 2008, the network involved over 650 participants in 8 regional networks, containing a total of 55 active landscape collaboratives.
4
These landscape collaboratives bring together a variety of stakeholders who have an interest in ecological fire restoration, including agency managers, nonprofit organizations and private citizens that own or manage land within landscape boundaries,
3 Ayn Schlisky, FLN Coordinator, Interview 9-27-2006; Doug Zollner, FLN Coordinator, Interview, 3-7-2007
4 Lynn Decker, National FLN Coordinator, Personal Communication, 8-12-2008
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and other interested parties, including conservation organizations, fire scientists, or unaffiliated citizens.
The FLN links landscapes through national and regional-scale meetings that provide leading participants from each landscape with opportunities to interact with one another. At these meetings, participants present work from their landscapes, critique one another's work, share information on policy developments and scientific findings, and collaborate to build and test new ideas through problem solving sessions, group discussions, and field trips. Professional staff and network leaders support the network in a variety of ways, reviewing agendas, participating in and hosting workshops, and identifying and disseminating innovations through various FLN outlets, including newsletters, briefing documents, presentations, the website and listserv, and word of mouth.
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Network Design: Technologies, Media, and Gatherings
FLN organizers envisioned that the network would build on-the-ground fire restoration capacity by linking collaborative planning processes across the nation. These connections would enhance fire manager's ability to develop fire restoration plans to identify and prioritize fire treatments (The Nature Conservancy, 2001). To this end, FLN organizers designed guidelines, protocols, and means of communication across the network. In this section, we describe three components of this structure —technologies, media and occasional gatherings.
Technologies
Network organizers and leaders promoted adoption of particular technologies among landscape collaboratives including planning guidelines, GIS-based spatial modeling systems for prioritizing restoration activities, and protocols for developing ecological models. Two of the most widely adopted were the FLN planning guidelines and Fire Regime Condition Class protocols.
FLN planning guidelines consist of a four-step series of exercises for identifying past and future conditions, developing strategies, taking action and measuring results. The exercises guide development of ecological restoration plans. First, landscape teams develop ecological models of current conditions and a collaborative vision statement to clarify restoration goals. Second, they map current conditions and desired future conditions to identify the need for change, and begin to prioritize restoration locations. Third, they develop an implementation plan to reach desired future conditions. Finally, partners prepare protocols to monitor results and identify strategies for implementing adaptive management.
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While engaged in this planning process, landscape collaboratives were encouraged to rely on a variety of technologies, particularly mapping and modeling using Geographic Information
System software. One of the highly promoted and consistently used protocols within these modeling systems is Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC). FRCC is used as a way to prioritize restoration sites and is integrated in a variety of FLN prioritization tools as well as LANDFIRE analysis tools, another partnership between TNC and the USFS. In FRCC protocols, current ecological conditions are depicted on a three-part scale that denote the level of departure from a reference or historic ecological condition. A designation of FRCC 1 means that the current conditions closely approximate historical conditions while an FRCC 3 means that they have deviated significantly from the historical condition. FLN landscapes frequently use FRCC as a measure of achieving desired future conditions with a shift from FRCC 3 or 2 to FRCC 1 denoting success. These planning guidelines and modeling protocols provide the framework for
FLN planning efforts in participating landscape collaboratives.
Media
FLN leaders also maintain a variety of ways to communicate throughout the network. A network newsletter, website and listserv are provided to network participants and made publicly accessible. Occasional briefing papers, success stories, and semi-annual reports are circulated within the FLN and to funders, sponsors, and other interested parties, highlighting successes and innovations that the FLN staff regards as worth sharing.
5
In addition, network meetings provide forums for FLN participants to present success stories to attendees, to be recognized for their successes, and collectively to assess the work of FLN landscapes identifying particularly effective network action or outcomes.
5 Wendy Fulks, TNC Learning Networks Communications, Interview 3-7-2007
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The most pervasive media form is the FLN Dispatch: Emerging Lessons from the Fire
Learning Network , a monthly newsletter distributed to network members in print form and posted on the FLN website.
6
The FLN published 33 of the newsletters from June 2004 to July
2007.
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National FLN coordinating staff who write each Dispatch gather story ideas during FLN meetings or follow up on ideas suggested by other network participants. Each Dispatch is a short success story about the activities of FLN participants, describing how they shared knowledge about fire restoration, developed new analytical tools, or collaborated at ecologically meaningful scales. This media form circulates among network members and beyond as registered by the thousands of Dispatch downloads from the FLN website each year (Fulks, 2007).
Not only presented in written form, media also includes forums where key messages and stories are “performed” on the network stage. Award ceremonies at regional or national gatherings highlight particular achievements of individual network participants or landscape collaboratives. Posters or presentations at national and regional meetings display successes of landscape groups as they complete planning exercises, create modeling protocols, engage in on the ground fire restoration activities, build new partnerships, or accomplish other related tasks.
Portions of network meetings are primarily media forums as they facilitate the communication of successes and challenges among network participants who observe and respond to presentations and posters, think through and respond to specific questions in guided brainstorming exercises, or share success stories in small groups in workshop settings. These performances bring representations of network action to life at occasional gatherings at both regional and national levels.
6 For access to all FLN Dispatch newsletters, see http://www.tncfire.org/training_usfln_networkpubs.htm
7 The Dispatch has since been replaced by an e-newsletter called “The Networker” which continues to distribute success stories and lessons learned among network members and other interested parties in digital form.
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Occasional Gatherings
Beyond connecting far-ranging landscape collaboratives through media and technologies, network leaders have fostered face-to-face interaction through meetings and workshops sponsored by funds from the national Cooperative Agreement. Regional networks hold biennial workshops and national meetings occur once a year. National staff review agendas and attend regional workshops helping regional leaders to decide on the content and facilitate activities at the meetings. The gatherings span two or three days and are hosted on location at different participating landscapes. Workshops encourage collaborative interaction as participants engage in peer review, field excursions, and a variety of planning exercises.
Network participants make presentations about their achievements and outcomes of FLN planning exercises. Regional leaders or visiting experts present new planning and analysis techniques or up to date scientific data. FLN participants discuss these presentations and review each other’s work. Breakouts allow individual landscapes to discuss peer reviews of their work and either refine existing planning and modeling products or begin subsequent phases of the planning process. Field excursions to restoration sites near the meeting sites allow the hosting landscape collaborative to demonstrate their successes and present new management challenges to meeting participants. Participants also engage in collective problem solving and brainstorming exercises in the field as they assess restoration projects on the ground.
Summary
Taken as a whole, these guidelines, protocols, and communication modalities are the means by which network leaders guide the work of landscape collaboratives. Planning guidelines and GIS based modeling systems, the primary technologies of the network, set the parameters for
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landscape level planning efforts. At occasional gatherings, landscape representatives are invited to collaborate with other participants to complete specific planning tasks, assisted by planning guidelines and modeling protocols, as well as to think creatively about resolving present and future management challenges. Network action is depicted in media such as newsletters, project guides, briefing documents and websites as well as through presentations and other kinds of performance at occasional gatherings. This provides network participants with an opportunity to both read what it means to be successful in the FLN and to take part in that communication. This array of activities and representations sets the framework for and inspires network action in specific ways. We turn next to a more nuanced description of how technologies and media operate within the FLN.
Technologies Shaping Network Assumptions and Expectations
In this section, we focus on FLN planning guidelines and FRCC protocols, tracing how network participants used these guidelines and high-tech tools to describe their landscapes in ways that reinforced shared assumptions and expectations. Their descriptions, while responsive to local circumstances, reflected commitments to an ecological worldview, common problem definition, shared view of challenges and appropriate actions, and agreement about who can act credibly and legitimately.
Table XXX summarizes how these assumptions and expectations are reinforced by FLN planning guidelines and FRCC protocols.
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Category
Worldview
Problem definition
Appropriate action
Challenges
Credible and legitimate actors and organizations
Assumptions/Expectations
Ecological restoration of fire adapted ecosystems
Pre-European fire regimes were disrupted by agency fire suppression, degrading ecosystems and increasing fire risk
Strategic planning done interorganizationally at landscape scale over long time periods / Tactical fire treatments done by individual management units over shorter time periods.
Barriers to fire restoration are primarily organizational
Resource management professionals are legitimate collaborative actors
Planning Guidelines
Requirement to map ecological features, identify ecological targets, threats, construction ecological models, and monitor ecological processes
Specify pre-European fire regime and define effects of fire suppression on ecosystems, plant and animal communities
Landscape mapping required/ Landscape description sets scale beyond organizational boundaries, but ownership/mgmt/admin responsibilities legitimated
Define barriers related to organizational structure, priorities, regulation and policy
FRCC
Represents ecological conditions and fire regimes over time
Reconstructs historical vegetation type, coverage and fire regime, determines degree of departure from current conditions
Analyze flammability conditions over landscapes, ignoring jurisdictional boundaries/ Prioritization tools inform management within organizational boundaries
Collaboration between ownerships and jurisdictions requires knowledge of ecological science, fire planning and management techniques
Landscape conditions are either in accord with a reference condition or departed from it, supporting assumption that reference conditions can be restored, and are not irreversible or path dependent.
Collaborative synthesis of data across ownership and management boundaries requires knowledge of ecological sciences, ability to operate GIS
Problem Definition
The FLN was initiated as a response to a common problem frame that fire exclusion had altered historical fire regimes. As stated in the summary report of the National Fire Roundtable,
“Decades of active fire exclusion…has resulted in unsupportable fuel loads and vegetation changes that pose a serious threat to both biodiversity health and public safety” (Schlisky, 2001, p. 1). Both the FRCC protocols and planning guidelines reinforced this problem frame, grounded
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in the pre-European past as an original reference condition, impaired though short-sighted agency fire suppression. They guided each partnership through a definition of problems particular to their own landscape while coherent with the National Fire Roundtable and in the
FLN cooperative agreement.
FLN planning exercises guided each collaborative to specify conditions on their landscapes. In the first assignment of the planning guidelines, partners were asked to describe the ecological role of fire before European settlement, assembling their account of the "natural or historical fire frequencies, intensities, and extents" from tree-ring dating, historic records and eyewitness accounts. Each landscape account began with a description of pre-European conditions, which are described as natural, healthy, and unimpeded by human intervention, except for aboriginal burning, which was included in descriptions as a natural process rather than a departure from the historical fire regime. For example, in the Blacklands landscape of the
Southcentral FLN, partners wrote that “Fire is the most important ecological process maintaining the distribution, composition, and diversity of blackland prairie, woodland, and forest communities.” Drawing on detailed scientific studies of the region, the team described the frequency, intensity and seasonality of fires due to lightning strikes as well as aboriginal burning patterns. Their historical assessment concluded that fire burned annually through the Blacklands, maintaining the health of grassland, prairie, and savanna systems by preventing fast-growing red cedar trees from encroaching on the landscape.
Planning guidelines also directed partners to define the effects of fire suppression on the composition and structure of their landscapes during the 20th century, and to describe the impact of fire suppression on wildfire frequency and intensity. Each landscape identified conservation targets and threats that were specific to their own ecosystems, emphasizing the relationship
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between agency-led fire suppression and increasingly catastrophic wildfire to measures of ecosystem health such as biodiversity decline. For example, the Jemez Mountains landscape in the Southwest FLN identified six ecosystems as important conservation targets including mixed conifer forests, ponderosa pine forests and woodlands, piñon-juniper woodlands, grasslands and savannas. All of the systems are threatened by altered fire regimes associated with fire suppression and four of the pine or juniper target systems suffer from “intense fire from surrounding fire prone systems” which can lead to catastrophic changes to ecosystems and associated rare or endangered species. Emphasizing the problems resulting from suppression,
Jemez partners wrote that “Prior to the 20 th
century, extensive crown fires in ponderosa pine were extremely rare, if they happened at all.”
The way that participants were directed to use FRCC modeling closely paralleled FLN planning guidelines. FRCC was recommended as a way to describe original landscape conditions, reconstructing vegetation type and coverage as well as fire frequency and intensity in unaltered, pre-Columbian times. By comparing this to today's conditions, FRCC yielded an estimate of how highly departed their landscapes were from original conditions. For example, in the Northwest FLN, partners relied on FRCC to construct a model of past and existing conditions of the 2 million acre Deschutes landscape in central Oregon. They focused on two natural systems, Ponderosa Pine and Mixed Conifer. The model highlights the extent to which fire regimes were altered and what vegetative cover types were most affected. Comparing the current vegetation cover to their model of historic vegetation cover, the Deschutes team determined that these two systems score an FRCC 2, that is, they suffer from altered fire regimes, attributed to fire suppression.
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Ecological Worldview
FLN planning guidelines and FRCC protocols guided network participants through an ecological landscape assessment that oriented partners toward ecological conditions rather than other goals of fire management, such as property protection or fuels reduction. When these other goals were cited, they were described as the consequence of restoration of a landscape's pre-
European ecological processes and patterns.
Partners first identified how altered fire regimes threatened species, natural communities, and ecosystems. For example, the Northwest Deschutes landscape described how fire suppression stressed Ponderosa pine and Lodgepole pine, the Bayou landscape in the South
Central FLN focused on loss of oak woodlands, and the Onslow Bight landscape in the Southeast region noted declines in red-cockaded woodpecker due to fire exclusion from Long-leaf Pine.
Based on these ecological targets, partners were directed to identify the type and location of natural communities with the greatest need of restoration. Then partners were asked to provide at least two scenarios, one projecting the ecological consequences of continuing current management practices and the other suggesting how target species, natural communities, and ecosystems could improve with restoration of natural fire regimes. The Land between the Lakes landscape team described how maintaining current management practices continue ecological degradation, leading to dominance of closed oak-hickory forests on a landscape that was historically open woodland and grassland. They developed an alternative scenario in which prescribed burning and thinning would restore the historical balance of oak woodlands and grasslands and open oak-hickory forest.
Use of FRCC reinforced this focus on ecological conditions. Modeling divergence of current vegetation cover from historic conditions integrated soil, topographic, and vegetation
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data with historical records such as Government Land Office archives and tree-ring dating.
Using this type of data, the Deschutes landscape depicted historical conditions (titled
"biophysical setting" in figure XXX). Then, they mapped the existing distribution of vegetation cover. They compared the map of existing vegetation cover to the historic map and identified areas where there was a difference between the two. Human land uses, such as urbanized and agricultural areas, were colored grey along with rock, glacier, and lava – areas that had no particular significance for this analysis.
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Appropriate Action
FLN planning guidelines and technologies conveyed a common understanding of what constituted appropriate action. There were two priority actions, each at distinct temporal, spatial and organizational scales. One priority was strategic planning, conducted inter-organizationally, at landscape scales, and with long (up to 500 year) time horizons. This integrative thinking was accompanied by a tactical emphasis on determining precisely where and how burning should be performed. This hands-on fire restoration was conducted principally within individual ownerships and jurisdictions, at the smaller scale of forest stand, and over the time span of a couple of days. These two priorities, one strategic and the other tactical, were closely integrated and mutually supportive.
Planning guidelines supported inter-organizational strategic planning over a long time scale and large spatial scale. Each FLN site was asked to develop integrated descriptions such as landscape-scale maps and ecological models that subsumed smaller-scale features such as forest stands. Sites that were selected for inclusion in the FLN were those that crossed administrative or organizational boundaries and often covered millions of acres, aligning themselves with the agreement at the National Fire Roundtable that, “The appropriate scales of restoration are landscapes and ecoregions” (Schlisky, 2001, pp. E-1). For example, the Onslow Bight in the
Southeast FLN covers more than 1.3 million acres and incorporates conservation lands managed by the Department of Defense, USFS, TNC, North Carolina State Parks, North Carolina
Department of Wildlife Resources, and US Fish and Wildlife Service (see graphic). While most landscapes were TNC and public lands, some included private landholdings, such as the
Niobrara in Nebraska, with over 11 million acres consisting primarily of privately held lands including large and small scale ranching operators as well as TNC. Partners were encouraged to
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plan over the time interval required for full ecological restoration. All FLN landscapes projected at least 10 years into the future, and some extended the timeline much further, such as the 500 year horizon projected by the Long Island Pine Barrens FLN.
The mapping of FRCC mapping supported this strategic emphasis, aggregating the percent of vegetation types in different successional states to yield landscape-scale summary statistics. For example, the Deschutes landscape measured coverage of Ponderosa Pine and
Mixed Conifer vegetation types over the landscape, comparing the historic distribution to the current distribution to determine the "percent departed", which was then used in priority setting.
8
FRCC also lent itself to long temporal scales by producing estimates of the "natural range of variability",
9
which is the appropriate fire frequency and intensity within a particular ecosystem, generally ranging from a few years for many low intensity fires to centuries for severe, standreplacing fires.
Delving more deeply into their analysis of existing conditions, the partners sought to use
FRCC rankings to define what subsets of each vegetation type were “treatable”, that is, which vegetation types needed the most work to return to a “natural” condition. Using this approach, partners developed a map, spatially depicting where they should focus their restoration efforts to reach their restoration objectives. The map of the Deschutes landscape (figure XXX) showed the relative abundance of vegetation types across the landscape compared against a model of historic vegetation types. The red, or abundant, areas and dark blue, or trace, sections of the map are those areas with the greatest difference from the historic conditions, that is, they are the areas that are most “altered”. Thus, they represent areas that need significant restoration efforts to return the landscape to the historic or ‘natural’ condition.
8 Amy Waltz, NWFLN regional coordinator, presentation, NWFLN workshop, November 2007.
9 Jim Smith, National Landfire Coordinator, Interview, 3-7-2007
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Based on these estimates, Deschutes partners began calculating the number of acres requiring burning, identifying specific burn locations and desired frequency, and comparing this need to current efforts to quantify a fire implementation gap.
Complementing this strategic emphasis, the FLN guided partners to develop three year fire restoration strategies within individual ownerships and administrative boundaries, or partnering on a small scale across shared boundaries. For example, the Alleghany Highlands landscape of the Central Appalachians FLN developed a plan for prescribe burning on 1200
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acres of Warm Springs Mountain, where TNC and the USFS share a boundary. This crossboundary project could be implemented quickly and was a familiar scope of operation for field staff from both organizations. Participants are also drawn to a more intimate scale of operation when applying FRCC to prioritize landscape treatment priorities. For example, FRCC was used to map and model smaller scale restoration projects in the Deschutes landscape, such as on the
Sunriver Healthy Forest Restoration Project within the Deschutes National Forest.
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Challenges
After FLN partners described how decades of agency-led fire suppression disrupted fire regimes on their landscapes, they were directed to identify barriers to fire restoration. Each landscape was guided through a process that led them to identify the greatest challenges to fire restoration- their own organizations, whose arrangement and priorities made it difficult to connect across ownerships and management boundaries in order to increase controlled burning and fuels reduction.
In accord with the emphasis on organizational reform in the RFAE agreement, FLN planning guidelines directed partners to identify obstacles to connecting across ownerships and management boundaries in order to increase controlled burning and fuels reduction. Partners used FRCC to identify the degree that the landscape had been modified from historical reference conditions, accepting the technology's implicit premise that it was possible to modify landscape conditions to restore ideal conditions. This removed other possible barriers from consideration, such as the possibility that ecological conditions were irreversible, either because altering them would require treatments that were beyond the capacity of scope of fire management or that the ecological conditions were path dependent or would respond unpredictably to intervention.
Responding to this guidance, individual landscapes emphasized barriers related to organizational structure, priorities, and regulation and policy. Other possible barriers, such as a lack of information or understanding of fire regimes or technical obstacles to implementation were rarely mentioned in the responses to this question. As shown in Figure XXX, of the nearly
50 active landscapes in 2003, the top barriers consisted of an inability to coordinate with partners, lack of funding, cultural resistance to fire reflected by the lack of a coherent message in
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support of ecological fire restoration, lack of staff capacity to engage in restoration work, and regulatory procedures [figure XXX, from (Fire Learning Network, March 2003)] .
Collaborating with Credible and Legitimate Partners
While FLN was designed to foster inter-organizational and cross-boundary cooperation, planning guidelines and FRCC had implicit expectations of who would legitimately participate in the collaborative. Anyone could participate in FLN activities, including members of the public or advocates, but in practice only those with training and experience in natural resource management could participate. This largely narrowed collaboration to governmental and nonprofit resource management organizations such as USFS, TNC, and DOI. These constraints on collaboration reinforced the intention stated at the National Fire Roundtable to create an institutional culture in which fire professionals could share resources and knowledge and engage in cooperative activities in order to restore fire-adapted ecosystems at ecologically meaningful scales.
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Partners worked together across organizational or jurisdictional boundaries to develop plans at the landscape scale. Each FLN landscape was directed to recruit partners participating in the project and their organizational affiliations, and planning guidelines emphasized collaboration as an underlying expectation, including instructions such as “Collaboratively draft a three-year implementation plan” and “Collaboratively begin drafting a monitoring plan.”
FRCC analysis supported this effort by requiring partners to gather ecological data across jurisdictional boundaries and collaborate to develop ecological models and prioritize restoration tasks. The Deschutes team's efforts to develop a landscape-wide FRCC model included participants from nearly all the organizations with management and advocacy interest in the area, including two National Forests, a BLM district, the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, state agencies such as the Department of Forestry and Department of Fish and Wildlife, TNC, and the Sierra Club and Audubon Society
However, planning guidelines also circumscribed who could collaborate. This was not done by explicitly defining legitimate partners, but by assigning tasks that only could be conducted by those who understood fire dynamics, the ecological sciences, and a wide range of environmental planning and management techniques. For example, the first activity of the planning guidelines is to define conservation targets and threats. These terms are not defined and no further direction is given other than to prioritize the list related to altered fire regimes. Then, partners are asked “what is the natural or historical fire frequencies, intensities and extents for matrix fire-adapted systems?” These are the earliest and in many regards the simplest components of the guidelines, but for the uninitiated, what is required to define targets and threats or describe fire regimes for “matrix fire-adapted systems” is not likely self-evident. The
FRCC protocols go even further requiring an ability to collect, analyze and map data related to
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vegetation cover, soil types, tree-ring dating, and geologic features, to model ecological system characteristics based on historic data, and to operate in a technological environment that requires spatial modeling, database management and mapping capabilities.
This complexity stymied attempts to open network participation to a broader array of participants, who often were incapable of using the planning guidelines or FRCC protocols. In the Southcentral FLN, the leader of the Land between the Lakes landscape team notes that the range of collaborators was limited because many partners supported FLN work but were not interested in developing complex ecological fire restoration plans.
10
Motivated by a similar concern, the leader of the Bayou landscape informally consulted with his partners since few were willing to participate in the data gathering, analysis, and synthesis required to complete the planning guidelines.
11
Media Reinforcing Assumptions and Expectations
FLN Publications
FLN media reinforced these assumptions and expectations, particularly those having to do with professional practice. Of the 33 FLN Dispatch newsletters, 32 addressed the theme of collaboration, emphasizing how partnerships with other fire management professionals can forward restoration objectives. 29 dispatches addressed the two forms of appropriate action with, with 16 highlighting planning at long term ecological planning at the regional scale and 13 describing on-the-ground burning and other land treatments on smaller areas. Over half of the
Dispatches also described practitioners overcoming organizational barriers to fire restoration particularly through collaboration. Dispatches rarely explicitly argued in favor of ecological
10 Jim McCoy, Interview 3-14-2007
11 John Andre, Interview 6-14-2006
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restoration of fire-adapted ecosystems or described disruption of pre-European fire regimes by agency action, although every dispatch was consistent with these assumptions.
While they contain the same assumptions/expectations, media like the dispatches perform a different network function than planning guidelines/technologies. Rather than guiding partners through tasks that reinforce these common assumptions/expectations, FLN media provides a showcase for exemplary practitioners and collaboratives, role models who use FLN technologies and planning guidelines in their particular landscapes. For example, the October 2005 Dispatch reported on collaborative fire management planning in the half million acre Huachuaca landscape in Arizona, which included stakeholders from federal and state public agencies, nonprofit conservation organizations such as TNC and the Audubon Society, and large private landowners . FLN planning guidelines were used to draw on best available science as well as professional experience to develop cross-jurisdictional ecological maps, design implementation strategies that included large scale prescribed burning, and respond to organizational challenges such as an international border, limited operational capacity, and endangered species regulations.
The Dispatch described the group's prescribed burns on the Coronado National Forest as an expression of the landscape's emergent capacity to implement restoration projects. The Dispatch combined description of how Huachuaca partners were able to overcome organizational barriers that hindered their ability to engage in on the ground fire restoration with discussion of how collaboration enabled larger-scale planning and management.
As this suggests, FLN media accounts do not emphasize conformity with a single vision of how to use FLN planning guidelines and technologies. Rather they illustrate how FLN strategies and goals are interpreted by practitioners who are sensitive to regional history, opportunities, and relationships. This emphasis on individual agency and autonomy is reinforced
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in dispatches that describe how partners rely on both technical and scientific knowledge and locally-situated professional judgment. For example, the September 2004 Dispatch was one of eight dispatches that emphasized how best available scientific knowledge. It described in a 13 million acre rangelands assessment conducted by the Southwest FLN in New Mexico, relying on agency ecological modeling protocols, satellite imagery, and FRCC rankings. Ecological conditions and departure from historical fire regimes were mapped, peer reviewed, and shared throughout the region. The frequency of Dispatch accounts of complex scientific analysis and modeling is matched by descriptions of tacit and field based expertise. For example, the June
2005 Dispatch reports how the Great Plains FLN was organized to enhance sharing of field experience in grasslands restoration. In one instance, two members of a prescribed fire team described their experiences conducting large scale burns with other participants. Through their exchange of ideas based on their situated or local knowledge, participants shared how to improve adaptive capacity and build new partnerships with private landowners. The story concluded that ,
“…p roject teams learn from each other, with groups both contributing to and benefiting from an open exchange of ideas and information.”
Both field knowledge and scientific expertise were promoted and legitimized as core practices in the FLN. This reflected the network organizers expectation that the network would be science driven, as stated within a project scoping document (The Nature Conservancy, 2002) that all network products should meet "… a minimum acceptable standard for ecologically- and scientifically based collaborative fire management planning.” This requirement was matched by the expectation to draw on knowledge from other sources – as the FLN planning guideline for defining desired future conditions stated, participants should “use any and all available information… including historical information, expert opinion, key species requirements,
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feasibility, natural disturbance regimes, spatial characteristics, intuition and gut feeling.” This joint use of situated and scientific knowledge balanced creativity with coherence.
Performative Media
Similarly, dramatic re-enactments provide performative exemplars. Field visits are one form of ‘performative media’ in which host sites lead FLN groups on project site tours. For instance, in July 2008, Central Appalachians FLN partners were taken to a 1200 acre site where the Allegheny landscape team had performed prescribed burning. The team described how TNC and USFS jointly burned their lands in a coordinated effort. Standing on a rock outcropping overlooking the site, the team leader discussed how collaborative relationships with key management professionals enabled them to overcome organizational barriers to prescribed burning on a complex landscape with multiple ownerships. Team representatives fielded clarifying questions from the network participants as they walked around the site, still blackened from the burn. Network participants reviewed the restoration goals with the team and then conducted on the spot assessments of fire effects on vegetation. Then, the group brainstormed ideas about what next actions would enhance the restoration process. This tour reinforced assumptions and expectations about the operational scale of action, collaborating with fire professionals, focusing on ecological impacts of restoration activities, and overcoming organizational barriers through collaboration.
Another performative media form was the "landscape walk” held at the annual national
FLN meeting in March 2007. Beforehand, partners were asked to prepare posters whose content mirrored the planning guidelines. Partners were asked to describe historical and current ecological conditions and organizational barriers, outline their collaborative vision statement and
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long-term landscape-scale ecological objectives, and describe their collaborative planning work and project-oriented training and fieldwork. At the meeting, attendees participated in a
"landscape walk", in which representatives from each FLN landscape set up a table with their poster and other materials. Half of the landscapes were asked to man their tables, while the other half roamed between poster stations, reading and asking questions while filling out an evaluation form. Each roamer was given fake checks and instructed to distribute up to 50,000 "landscape dollars" to those projects that they judged as having great potential. Roamers and those at the table were then asked to switch, allowing everyone to play both roles.
Acting both as landscape representatives and external evaluators, partners aligned activity at each landscape with their collective assumptions and expectations. On their fake checks, where they were asked to respond to the question, “What about this project’s history says
“success!” to you?” partners reinforced key FLN themes, including collaboration and regionalscale integration among agencies and landholders, protection of particularly sensitive or important ecological features, on-the-ground fire restoration projects, and development of planning tools such as burn prioritization models. At the final dinner of the meeting, partners from the landscape that received the most landscape dollars were recognized and received an award.
Landscape walks and field visits were a kind of participatory media, either describing or performing exemplary FLN practice. Acting at different times as both audience and performer,
FLN partners were encouraged to work in ways that were coherent with shared assumptions and expectations while also improvisational and responsive to local culture, conditions, and circumstances. Rather than prescriptive, this encouragement was mutually reinforcing, as exemplary action elicited positive responses from other participants. Published media reinforced
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these landscape performances through efforts such as the posters that accompanied the landscape walk, or the FLN coordinators compilation of information about individual landscape's planning, modeling, restoration action, and collaborative partnerships, which they published in an FLN field guide of 37 exemplary landscapes (The Nature Conservancy, 2007).
Summary
Both published media and performances circulated images of exemplary network partners, engaging in practices that cohered with the common FLN assumptions and expectations in their respective place-based collaboratives. This promoted creativity and flexibility in interpreting FLN principles in each landscape, since the exemplars themselves were situated within landscape-specific ways of knowing. Through the various media forms, the FLN conveyed and reinforced a common network imaginary across a network of locally situated actors. By reading about or listening to other practitioners, FLN partners were invited to imagine their own positioning within the network, acting on their common assumptions and expectations to re-orient their way of being in their landscape.
These various forms of media and FLN technologies permeate the network, shaping and reinforcing assumptions and expectations as participants repeatedly interface with them. For example, Jim McCoy came to the FLN in 2003 while serving on the Bayou Ranger District as a
Wildlife Biologist trainee. He refers to his introduction to the FLN as an epiphany, a moment when he was “exposed to a different [way of thinking]…that people weren’t talking about much” that emphasized ecological health at the system level and the need for fire restoration to deal with problems associated with past suppression efforts. He views his time as a trainee on the
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Bayou and his introduction to the FLN as formative in shaping his approach to fire management.
12
When he transferred to the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area (LBL),
McCoy convinced his supervisor to allow him to enlist a project in the Southcentral FLN.
13
Using the FLN planning guidelines, he worked through the process of identifying conservation targets and threats, implementation strategies, and barriers to fire restoration that were specific to his landscape. Like other FLN participants, he discovered that most of his barriers were related to organizational structures, the most persistent in his case being procedural requirements of the
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). At the fourth workshop of the Southcentral region,
McCoy relayed a story about how working on the FLN planning guidelines had created opportunities for collaborating both with outside partners and internally among the LBL staff as they creatively attempted to overcome key barriers to implementation. The national coordinator of FLN was in attendance and called out to McCoy, “That’s a Dispatch story.” 14
The following month, McCoy’s story about collaborating to develop restoration plans and overcome organizational barriers to implementation was published in the July 2006 FLN Dispatch.
Since then, McCoy has served as a mentor and resource for other sites including the
Central Appalachians regional network which invited him to present his success stories and facilitate discussions at their first regional workshop. From his introduction to the process on the
Bayou Ranger District through participating at the regional and landscape level as a project leader himself, McCoy has constantly been exposed to the assumptions and expectations of FLN through media and technologies as well as served as an agent for their deployment. In turn, he
12 Jim McCoy, Interview 3-14-2007
13 Bill Lisowsky, LBL Supervisor, Interview 11-28-2007
14 South Central FLN Workshop 4, Observations, 6-12 to 6-14-2006
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has been recognized for applying technologies in a manner that is both coherent with FLN expectations and adapted to his particular landscape.
The Imaginary
FLN planning guidelines, technologies like FRCC, and the various kinds of FLN media reinforce common assumptions and expectations among network participants. Their assumptions and expectations constitute more than a common story about landscape-scale fire restoration , or a shared set of ecological goals shared by the FLN founders and sponsors. They include an understanding of the historical basis of the problem and the appropriate strategic and tactical response. In addition, they are collectively oriented toward overcoming organizational barriers and share tacit agreement that fire managers possess the credibility and legitimacy to participate in FLN collaborative efforts. Taken as a whole these assumptions and expectations support a social imaginary among network participants, a common understanding which enables partners to carry out the collective practices of the FLN.
Benedict Anderson (1983, p. xxxi) first proposed the idea of an imagined community, stating that “… members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” The concept was expanded by Taylor (2002; 2004) as a “social imaginary”, a collectively held expectation of how things work now, how they are supposed to work, and how to act to make them work that way. Taylor emphasized how imaginaries might originate as concepts or theories – as the FLN was originally described in the National Fire Roundtable and cooperative agreement – but that theories are not imaginaries, any more than a landscape map is the same as a fire manager's knowledge of their landscape. Imaginaries take shape through social
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practices like the planning guidelines and FRCC. These practices may not be new, but are taken up and transformed by association with the imaginary (Taylor, 2002, p. 110).
FLN assumptions and expectations guide individual action, but not the same way an individualistic ethic does. The FLN imaginary provides a bridge between the fire manager and the emergent collective, since their goal is an individual's but not only their own. This shared goal and purpose provides FLN participants with an understanding of what it means to be a member of the group and a sense of their role in shared community life, a horizon and context for action that delimits appropriate behavior for self and others in the pursuit of ecological fire restoration. This reinforces their solidarity within a group with common struggles and pleasures, despite limited personal ties or mutual accountability among FLN partners. Taylor (2004, p. 23) defines these imagined ties as ‘‘…common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.’’
Rather than provide a set of explicit rules, the FLN imaginary indicates what the rules should be and the relationship between these rules by informing partner's s elf understandings, practices, and common expectations. As Taylor writes, an imaginary “begins to define the contours of [a participant’s] world, and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention.” [cite] The FLN imaginary includes things that are rarely explicitly stated, yet commonly held. For example, the FLN newsletters did not argue in favor of ecological restoration of fire-adapted ecosystems or describe how fire agencies disrupted pre-European fire regimes. Each Dispatch was consistent with these assumptions, which underpin the normal expectations that FLNers have of each other, and enable them to carry out their collective practices.
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Situated in Practice
While the FLN was founded on the premise that there is a nation-wide problem with the degradation of ecological health in fire adapted ecosystems (Schlisky, 2001; The Nature
Conservancy, 2001), the planning guidelines and technologies enabled each landscape collaborative to situate the FLN imaginary in participants’ own experience and context, through their own actions, collective reasoning, and choices. In this way, in Taylor's words, the imaginary was “nourished in embodied habitus” through practices that were engendered by FLN guidelines and technologies [cite]. Practices and imaginaries were co-produced, rather than being one cause and the other effect, or both being dependent on an overarching theory. Practices are possible and make sense within the imaginary's assumptions and expectations of one another, while carrying and legitimating the imaginary. This dialectic supports a "repertory" of collective actions. As Taylor (2002, pp. 106-107) notes, "These understandings are both factual and normative; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice." If FLN tasks were defined too narrowly, this would squelch the energy and initiative characteristic of collaboration.
Instead, while the goals and strategies of each site-based collaborative was coherent and consistent with the FLN imaginary, their analysis and plan of action was grounded in the specific attributes of their region, a process that required creative interaction in each landscape.
Media Exemplars
FLN publications such as the dispatches and performative media like the landscape walk also reinforced the assumptions and expectations constituting the imaginary. Like the newspapers Anderson (1983) described, dispatches contributed to FLN partner's awareness that
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there were many others who shared in similar struggles and pleasures. Dispatches enhanced network participants’ capacity to “achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis”
(Anderson, 1983, p. 77) by reading stories characterizing similar projects and practices. Taylor
(2004) argues that a social imaginary is effectively distributed through images, stories, and legends because these forms are accessible to a broader audience than theoretical or formal arguments. This firm distinction does not apply well to the FLN, whose members were technical experts to whom scientific and theoretical arguments could be dramatic and compelling evidence. Instead, we suggest that the dispatches be understood as technical accounts that were also exemplars, helping FLN participants define who they were, how they should act, and how to judge others.
An exemplar, as opposed to a typical member of a class or "prototype", is a concept that
Kuhn (1970) defined as "concrete problem-solutions" to the puzzles that are encountered within an overarching paradigm, such as the well-known evolutionary exemplar of the European peppered moth. In this sense, the dispatches cited above were exemplars of how partners should deploy technical and scientific knowledge and locally-situated professional judgment. Strongly particularized and normative, each of these Dispatch stories shows how individual practice expresses a feature of the imaginary. Unlike a technical description, exemplars enhance coherence while not inhibiting innovation and creativity, since they provide a particular solution to a general problem. Performative media such as field trips and the landscape walk were also exemplary in this sense, and added a performative as well as communicative component, reinforcing the imaginary for both media presenter and recipient.
Self-sustaining Collaboratives
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The FLN imaginary helped to create and maintain the collaborative network, entraining individuals as they circulate through the network in association with planning guidelines, technologies, and media. Jim McCoy exemplifies this, participating in one FLN landscape where he became a key player, and then becoming instrumental in creating another site. These circulations, once begun, can be self-perpetuating like a community of practice (Lave & Wenger,
1991) in which participants start as legitimate peripheral participants and assume leadership roles as they acculturate. Where the FLN is distinct from a community of practice is in relying not only on personal mediation but also on action at a distance. Human agency is delegated (Latour,
1995) to planning guidelines, technologies, and media in order to reproduce assumptions and expectations and a common imaginary within an expanding network. Alignment between sites still requires human contact, but much less than a collaborative usually requires. In the FLN, performative demonstrations like field trips and the landscape walk took place at biannual gatherings, where partners were also acquainted with the proper use of planning guidelines and technologies through PowerPoint presentations and mutual "peer review". This inter-personal interaction permits transference of the tacit, embodied knowledge required to implement a standardized technique (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985)
Springing Rigidity Traps
A shared imaginary not only can allow a network to continue to regenerate and expand, it might also enhance resilience by springing rigidity traps that block institutional change. A network of collaboratives with a common imaginary could diffuse innovation throughout a trapped institution, operating both at place-based sites and through the influence of partners on their participating organizations. This combined action is coherent but not centrally coordinated,
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as partners act independently in similar ways and autonomously speak with a unified voice. The network infrastructure of planning guidelines, technologies and media fosters this solidarity without the need for pervasive authority or personal ties. This offers an alternative to what Fung and Wright (2003) call the unworkable models of democratic centralism and strict decentralization. They note that central control is often incapable of learning from local experience or taking into account local circumstances and intelligence, to which we add that central approaches may disempower local initiatives by constraining their creativity and initiative. Fung and Wright (2003) also dismiss uncoordinated decentralization as isolating, unable to diffuse innovation or be accountable to a shared objective that can only be achieved through coordinated effort.
The FLN imaginary did not create an appreciation for ecological fire restoration among partners, who were part of a profession that had recognized the need for change for decades
(Pyne, 2004). Instead, this imaginary crystallized a wider grasp of their whole predicament, a recognition of why their expectations were not being met and their experiences were dissonant with their assumptions. In a collaborative setting, partners were given the opportunity to translate this dissonance into an alternative approach that could repurpose familiar relationships and practices to provide greater meaning and significance for their actions as fire managers.
Unchallenged, the longstanding social imaginary in the fire professions would "… define the contours of [their] world, and… eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention" (Taylor, p. 22). Cultivating new "…forms of social selfunderstanding", they were collectively defining a new social order (Taylor, 2004, p. 69).
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