Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.
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Title:
Do community collaboratives build or borrow social capital? Equity implications for improving resilience to wildfire
Abstract:
Collaborative governance is a ubiquitous tool for addressing policy problems that cross jurisdictional or administrative boundaries, particularly in the environmental realm. Although it’s commonly regarded as a tool that helps enhance social capital among collaborative participants, we know little about whether collaborative governance builds new social capital–that is, relationships that create access to new resources and knowledge–or borrows it from pre-existing relationships or conditions. Such an understanding is important for determining the equity implications of using collaborative governance as a tool for developing plans and policy for environmental issues. If collaborative governance only exists in places with high pre-existing social capital, all of the benefits that presumably accrue from collaboratively developed plans–including leveraging resources for implementation, expanding the scope of management, and achieving collective goals–may be flowing disproportionately to the social-capital-rich. Thus, we ask: to what extent does collaborative governance perpetuate the status quo or enable transformative change? Using a dataset of collaboratively-developed Community Wildfire Protection Plans from the fire-prone western US, we assessed the social-ecological factors associated with the emergence of collaborative plans and networks for wildfire adaptation. We used publicly available datasets of social capital metrics and wildfire risk in a time-to-event model to understand the extent to which social capital is borrowed from pre-existing relationships or built in response to elevated wildfire risk to engage in collaborative planning. Results from our time-to-event analysis suggest that collaborative emergence may initially exacerbate social capital disparities associated with wildfire, however a subsequent preliminary network analysis reveals that this effect may be somewhat dampened by sharing social capital through key brokers across planning networks. Our results challenge commonly held, but rarely empirical, truisms in the collaborative governance literature about social capital being an inevitable outcome of collaborative processes. We end with a question for discussion–to what extent does the sharing of institutional knowledge across communities with different levels/types of social capital enhance collaborative benefits or limit institutional fit of a plan to a community?
Bio:
Holly K. Nesbitt is a social-ecological systems scientist studying collaborative governance as an approach for achieving sustainable and equitable adaptation to global change. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Boise State University (Idaho, US) focused on the utility of collaborative governance as a policy tool for societal adaptation to wildfire. She draws on theories of social-ecological system resilience and transformation, institutional development and fit, public policy, planned behavior, social relations, and scale and uses predominantly quantitative methods including social network analysis and regression. Her previous work has examined other cross-boundary issues including invasive plant spread, wildlife movement, and watershed connectivity. She has a PhD in Forest & Conservation Sciences from the University of Montana and seven years of experience facilitating diverse groups to develop plans and policies that address environmental issues.
Co-authors on the associated paper: Nícola Ulibarrí, Matthew Hamilton, Matthew Williamson
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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.
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