From Checkers to Chess: Using Social Science Lessons to Advance Wildfire Adaptation Processes

This synthesis uses an overarching analogy to outline key wildfire social science lessons and present human adaptation to wildfire as an ongoing process of negotiated trade-offs dictated by the site-specific context of particular places. Use of an overarching analogy allows presentation of cross-cutting concepts or considerations for: (1) documenting local social diversity and determining how it might influence future efforts for wildfire adaptation; (2) understanding how landscape-scale patterns of social diversity or land management influence efforts to ‘coexist’ with wildfire; and (3) determining how alignments between local, regional, and federal influences necessitate diverse experimental adaptation approaches. The synthesis closes with specific recommendations for fostering wildfire adaptation coordinators and systematic processes that help facilitate diverse, tailored efforts from which generalizable best-practices could be derived. This article also outlines key considerations for research or monitoring of emergent organizations and efforts that bridge scales of collective action surrounding wildfire management. Study implications: Synthesis of existing science indicates that efforts to promote wildfire adaptation should be tailored to the unique social circumstances that affect broader landscapes. Approaching tailored adaptation to wildfire requires a series of considerations that help assess social diversity, better conceive of opportunities for community development that span landscapes, and evaluate how efforts at various scales (e.g., local, regional, state) enable or constrain the development of best practices. The overarching analogy provided in this article helps cut across divergent concepts to articulate existing approaches and concepts that can help achieve the above goals.