Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 125, November 2021, Pages 87-95
Environmental Science & Policy

Changing bushfire management practices to incorporate diverse values of the public

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.07.027Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Observed how bushfire management practice changed to incorporate diverse values.

  • Alignment of values and existing practice partly explains how values were considered.

  • Change enabled by consistent norms and alignment with decision maker priorities.

  • Experimentation and cross-agency collaboration support value inclusion.

Abstract

Practice change is essential if environmental agencies are to incorporate diverse values in decision making, but little is currently known about what constrains or enables such change. Over a 19-month period, we observed how environmental professionals responded to an agency request that they consider a wider range of values in strategic bushfire management planning than had been considered in past practice. Through participant observation, interviews and document analysis, we examined how practices did and did not change and what contributed to these outcomes. Practices for assessing well understood values (e.g. towns and houses, ecological resilience) were refined, while practices for handling less familiar values (e.g. animal welfare, economic values and Indigenous cultural heritage) were either maintained, adapted or transformed, with outcomes varying across values and regions. The findings partly confirm expected biases toward values that can be spatially located and quantified, and point to other conditions supporting change to incorporate new types of values: alignment between policy and planning guidance, alignment between a value and priorities of professionals and agencies involved in planning, collaboration that supported input from cross-agency actors, and scope for experimentation. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for agencies seeking to incorporate values in environmental planning.

Introduction

There is increasing impetus to consider values of the public in environmental policy and planning, often to better align government decision-making with societal expectations (Ives and Kendal, 2014). Agencies find this particularly challenging when values are contested among stakeholders and members of the public (Thacher and Rein, 2004). Recent research supports this endeavour, providing insights to how values might be conceptualised within management (Gorddard et al., 2016; Jones et al., 2016; van Riper et al., 2018), identifying values of the public that are relevant to management (Williams et al., 2018), and examining how values are managed in professional practice (Ford et al., 2019; Artelle et al., 2018). Such research points to the complexity of incorporating values of the public in planning and management: while policy may demand changes in the ways professionals work with values of the public, meeting this goal depends on new practices being developed among professionals.

There is a relationship between the way values are understood and managed in environmental management. Values have been conceptualised as ecological properties, psychological ideals, market-based economic values, and culturally bound connections between people and place (Tadaki et al., 2017). When values are understood to be objective properties or objects, they can be mapped and quantified; values understood to be context dependent or subjective cannot be assessed in this way (Rawluk et al., 2019). Research identifies that values of the public relevant to bushfire and forest planning are diverse, ranging from abstract ideals of benevolence and security through to tangible valued entities such as homes and livestock (Williams et al., 2018). Incorporating diverse values of the public (hereafter, values) in environmental policy and planning therefore requires diverse practices.

The requirement for practice change is clear when considering how values are typically managed in bushfire planning. Values are most often considered in the form of ‘assets’ such as houses, electricity lines and schools (Ford et al., 2019). Managing risk to these kinds of values involves spatial location of assets, using technical knowledge of bushfire behaviour to assess risk to them, and selecting actions that quantifiably reduce this risk (Neale, 2016). While such assets are indeed valued by members of the public, so too are more abstract ideals and attributes of landscapes and communities that cannot be mapped or quantified (Rawluk et al., 2019). Incorporating values of the public in bushfire and ecosystem management therefore requires new practices, including new forms of community engagement and use of qualitative data (Rawluk et al., 2019; Tadaki et al., 2017).

Numerous writers have provided advice for working with values in environmental management (e.g. Artelle et al., 2018; Gorddard et al., 2016; Gregory et al., 2012; O’Brien, 2003). Less is known about how this advice is translated into practice. We are aware of only two studies (both conducted in Victoria, Australia) that directly observe how agencies incorporated a broader range of values in decision making. Rawluk et al. (2020) examined professionals developing new tools to incorporate values in bushfire management and found values were selected and adapted by professionals, often to make value concepts fit better with existing knowledge practices. Williams et al. (2020) explored how collaborative research supported professionals learning to incorporate values in bushfire policy and planning and found change was constrained by lack of expertise relevant to some values, institutional framing of bushfire as a techno-scientific problem, and a perception that some values were too abstract to manage. Viewed together, these studies suggest fit between values and existing practice will shape whether values of the public are considered in environmental management.

We contribute new insights by exploring change and stability in practices among environmental professionals who were explicitly requested by agency leadership to consider a wider range of values in their decision making. We examine this in the context of strategic bushfire management planning (SBMP) in Victoria, Australia. SBMP in Victoria brings together land and fire management agencies and other stakeholders to understand bushfire risk to assets and identify strategies to reduce that risk. Historically, decisions have focused on when, where and how to manage fuel on public land, particularly through planned burns. The study builds on long-term research conducted with the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) to explore how values can be incorporated in bushfire management (Williams et al., 2020). We pose the following questions:

  • Do practices change when professionals are asked to consider a broader range of values in their assessment?

  • What enables and constrains the consideration of values in bushfire management?

Based on the evidence above, we anticipated values that could be incorporated in decision making by adapting existing practices (i.e. spatial location of values and quantifying risk or change through modelling processes) would be more readily incorporated than values that could only be understood and managed through new practices (e.g. community engagement or use of qualitative data).

We consider agency efforts to incorporate values in environmental management through the lens of professional practice. Practice is understood not simply as activities shared and repeated across time, but as comprising structures of knowledge, rules, meanings and goals that direct action, as well as material components of activities such as people, objects, technologies and spaces (Hager, 2012; Kemmis, 2009). It is common to view professional practice as linear application of specialist knowledge to a specific context, however practice theory suggests that knowledge is also evoked within practice (Cook and Wagenaar, 2012; Schön, 1992). This is seen in bushfire management when risk analysts work with fire models, questioning model outputs based on broader experience to draw nuanced inferences (Neale, 2016; Sherry et al., 2019).

Practice change in organisations can be considered to occur through social learning, which Pahl-Wostl (2009) suggests takes three forms. Incremental change (single loop learning) involves refining existing routines through practicing well (Gherardi, 2012) or adapting existing practices to new problems. For example, Williams et al. (2020, p.6) described “identifying a broader range of values relevant to objective setting and analysis in bushfire management” as single-loop learning, evidenced by adaption of an existing framework. Innovation in organisations requires more significant change (Gherardi, 2012), which Pahl-Wostl (2009) describes as reframing (double loop learning) or transformation (triple-loop learning). For example, Williams et al. (2020, p.6) observed how bushfire professionals reframed their community engagement practice as “listening to and documenting values of public/communities”, characterising this as double-loop learning.

Change in any component of practice may evoke a new dynamic, while stability in components may maintain practice even in the face of drivers for change. Past research suggests this involves complex interactions between knowledge, context and activity (Cook and Wagenaar, 2012). For example, new knowledge can inform practice change, but change may not occur if it requires knowledge outside practitioners ‘field of vision’ (Kemmis, 2009) or if technology and other material components of practice are inconsistent with these directions (Fenwick, 2012). Similarly, introducing new actors to an organisation may spark change, but change is unlikely if knowledge is ‘stranded’ within part of an organisation because connections between actors are weak (Gherardi, 2012).

Past research into bushfire management suggests several aspects of professional practice that are likely to be decisive in how values are incorporated in decision making. The first relates to institutional narratives. The prevalence of “command and control” narratives in bushfire management is well documented (Bosomworth, 2015; Ruane, 2020). Paschen and Beilin (2017) observed how responses to new Victorian policies varied depending on their fit with this narrative. For example, policies requiring greater consultation and deliberation with communities and stakeholders were less readily developed, a pattern also reported in a Northern American context (Cheng et al., 2011). We expect these narratives to be evident through policies, institutional guidance, and the meanings that professionals attribute to values and practices. A second aspect concerns techno-scientific approaches to decision making associated with these narratives (Paschen and Beilin, 2015). These epistemic dimensions of practice are evident in the forms of expertise, data, and technologies that are harnessed to support bushfire decision making and which may result in some values being ‘managed out’ without conscious decision (Neale, 2016; Ford et al., 2019). A third consideration relates to actors and influence in decision making. Otero et al. (2018) noted how social power determined whose knowledge and values were considered in Spanish fire planning. Other research points to the importance of collaboration in fire management (Brummel et al., 2012; Ruane, 2020). It is important to consider both who is involved in decision making and how they influence decision making.

This conceptualisation of practice and practice change guided our analysis. It led us to consider whether the request to consider a broader range of values in assessment resulted in practice being maintained (no evident change), refined (continued development of existing practice), adapted (applying existing practices to new values), reframed (new ways of thinking about values though activity largely unchanged) or transformed (new ways of thinking and acting in relation to a value) (Gherardi, 2012; Pahl-Wostl, 2009). It also shaped our approach to analysing what constrains and enables change, drawing attention to aspects of institutional narratives (policy, norms and meanings), epistemic approaches (data and technology, expertise) and actors and influence (participants, values and advocacy).

Section snippets

Values and bushfire management in Victoria, Australia

Since colonisation, significant learning in fire management has followed large fire events in the fire dependent and fire prone landscapes of Victoria (Dwyer and Hardy, 2016). In recent history, the Royal Commission into Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday fires led to multiple changes (Teague et al., 2010). State Government established a code of practice for managing fire on public land, including objectives to protect multiple value categories: human life and property, infrastructure, public

Do practices change when professionals are asked to consider a broader range of values in their assessment?

Table 3 summarises practice change in the two study regions. Columns show change across time, outlining existing practice, requested changes, and changes observed in each region, while rows mirror the value categories of the Valuation Framework (Table 1). We observed variation in whether and how practice changed across different values and across the two regions.

In both regions, practices were refined for two value categories already well established within SBMP: human life (using property as a

Do practices change when professionals are asked to consider a broader range of values in their assessment?

We commenced this research expecting that value categories were more likely to be included where they could be managed by maintaining or adapting existing spatial and quantitative practices. Given evidence that institutional narratives and techno-scientific approaches stabilise practice even in the face of direct requests for change (Paschen and Beilin, 2017; Williams et al., 2020), we anticipated less tangible value categories were less likely to considered. The findings both support and

Author statement

Kathryn Williams: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review and Editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Rebecca Ford: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Review and Editing, Funding acquisition. Andrea Rawluk: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Review and Editing, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) through the Integrated Forest Ecosystem Research program. The authors acknowledge the contributions of professional staff from this and other agencies who generously allowed them to observe their decision-making practices.

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