Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Institutional Effects on Decision-Making & Performance in Public Land Agencies: The Case of Wildfire in the Interior West of the U.S.

这项提案将调查最近美国西部公共土地上灾难性野火增加的原因。 由于许多西部生态系统的森林密度和燃料积累显著增加，减少燃料已成为公共土地机构火灾管理的指导原则。 然而，减少燃料的努力继续遇到许多障碍。 这是一个特别令人困惑的政策问题，原因有两个：1）几十年来，机构官员已经理解了减少燃料的重要性，2）很少有政策行为者从灾难性的破坏性火灾中受益。 因此，存在着知识和合作的激励，这两者，人们可能会期望，将推动努力，以减少燃料在高风险地区。通过做广泛的档案研究，并通过采访利益相关者和政府官员在国家和州一级，本项目将审查的决策方法使用的美国林务局，国家公园服务，和两个州土地机构（在亚利桑那州和科罗拉多）。 该研究将制定野火管理的相对成本，处理高风险地区所需的程序步骤的时间和数量，联邦法规和合规要求的影响，诉讼和法律的并发症的影响，以及机构与社区和利益集团的关系的措施。 对这些机构内部决策的比较研究将有助于本项目确定阻碍全国努力减少野火规模和成本的关键因素。

This proposal will inquire into the reasons for the recent increase in catastrophic wildfires on public lands in the American west. Due to a significant increase in forest density and fuel accumulation in many western ecosystems, fuel reduction has become the guiding principle for fire management within public land agencies. However, efforts to implement fuel reduction continue to encounter a multitude of obstacles. This is an especially puzzling policy problem for two reasons: 1) the importance of fuel reduction has been understood by agency officials for several decades now, and 2) few, if any, policy actors with a stake in forest resources benefit from catastrophically destructive fires. Thus there exists knowledge and the incentive to cooperate, both, which one might expect, would drive the effort to reduce fuels in high risk areas.By doing extensive archival research and by interviewing stakeholders and public officials at the national and state level, this project will examine the methods of decision-making used within the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and two state land agencies (in Arizona and Colorado). The research will develop measures of the relative costs of wildfire management, the time and number of procedural steps required to treat high risk areas, the impact of federal regulations and compliance requirements, the impact of lawsuits and legal complications, and the relationship of agencies with communities and interest groups. A comparative examination of decision-making within these agencies will help this project identify key factors which are disabling to a nation-wide effort to reduce the magnitude and costs of wildland fires.