Performative planning creates a values mismatch between wildfire plans and community needs

Abstract

To mitigate the potential impacts of wildfire, communities across the United States are engaging in collaborative wildfire risk mitigation planning. Planning involves identifying a set of goals, developing management strategies to achieve those goals, and codifying the goals and strategies in a written document. A plan’s goals and strategies are informed by values—the things plan authors and communities want to protect or enhance. Identifying and evaluating these values can give insight into whether a plan is meeting the needs of local wildfire risk and vulnerability, incorporating best practice from national policies, or simply reflecting broader cultural trends. This paper explores these tensions using the case of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs), which are local (neighborhood to multicounty) plans developed collaboratively by diverse wildfire-related stakeholders. Drawing on a combination of manual coding and computational text analysis, we first characterize the values to be protected in 2268 CWPPs from across the United States. We then evaluate what shapes the values articulated in individual CWPPs, exploring the degree to which values reflect local wildfire risk and socioeconomic vulnerability, updates in policy guidance from US federal agencies, and/or broader cultural trends. This paper makes three primary contributions: 1) mapping local wildfire values at the national scale; 2) understanding tensions in environmental governance in a multilevel federalist system; and 3) advancing values as an important metric for evaluating the quality of management plans.