Cognition of complexity and trade-offs in a wildfire-prone social-ecological system

Abstract

Wildfire risk is a defining environmental challenge throughout much of the American West, as well as in other regions where complex social and ecological dynamics defy simple policy or management solutions. In such settings, diverse forms of land use, livelihoods, and accompanying values provide the conditions for trade-offs (e.g. between protecting homes from uncontrollable fires and restoring low-severity fire to ecosystems as a natural disturbance process). Addressing wildfire risk requires grappling with these trade-offs at multiple levels-given the need for action by individuals as well as by large and diverse stakeholder groups-and under conditions of considerable complexity. We evaluated how individual and collective perception of trade-offs varies as a function of complexity through analysis of the cognitive maps-representations of perceived causal relationships among factors that structure an individual's understanding of a system-of 111 stakeholders in the Eastern Cascades Ecoregion of central Oregon. Bayesian statistical analysis revealed a strong tendency against perception of trade-offs in individual maps, but not in a collective map that resulted from the aggregation of all individual cognitive maps. Furthermore, we found that lags (the number of factors that mediated the effect of an action on multiple valued outcomes) limited perception of trade-offs. Each additional intervening factor decreased the likelihood of a trade-off by approximately 52% in individual cognitive maps and by 10% in the collective cognitive map. However, the heterogeneity of these factors increased the likelihood of perception of trade-offs, particularly among individual cognitive maps, for which each unit increase of the Shannon diversity index translated into a 20-fold increase in the likelihood of perception of trade-offs. Taken together, these results suggest that features of complexity have distinct effects on individual-and collective-level perception of trade-offs. We discuss implications for wildfire risk decision-making in central Oregon and in other complex wildfire-prone social-ecological systems.

Cognitive Maps Reveal Diverse Perceptions of How Prescribed Fire Affects Forests and Communities

“…Taken together, our findings highlight the value of cognitive mapping for evaluating how stakeholders perceive complex sets of interactions by which prescribed fire affects valued outcomes. Cognitive mapping has been productively utilized to evaluate how stakeholders grapple with complexity in fire-prone social-ecological systems (Zaksek and Árvai, 2004;Zhang and Jetter, 2016;Walpole et al, 2017;Hamilton et al, 2019), and we advance this literature by demonstrating how the prospects of scaling up a particular management approach hinge upon perceptions of how it directly and indirectly affects a multitude of processes within the broader social-ecological system.…”

“…Cognitive maps ranged in size from 9 to 48 factors. Collectively, the 111 cognitive maps featured 1310 unique factors, which were assigned to parent classes (e.g., outcomes), child classes (e.g., valued outcomes), and sub-child classes (e.g., aesthetic value) as described in greater detail in Hamilton et al (2019). We analyzed cognitive maps as networks (Figures 2A,B), which allowed us to apply graph theoretic approaches to measure perception of the impact of prescribed fire on valued outcomes.…”

“…Recent research has highlighted the value of adopting a systems perspective to analyze the dynamics that interact to perpetuate undesirable forest conditions and amplify wildfire risk to communities (Calkin et al, 2015;Fischer et al, 2016;Hamilton et al, 2019). Decisions about forest and fire management play out in complex settings shaped by interactions among physical, biological, social, economic, and institutional processes.…”

The relationship between social identity and cognitive diversity in environmental stakeholders

“…The frequency distribution of these micro motifs in one cognitive map -also known as directed graphlets of size two and three-can provide useful information about how one individual sees the causal interdependencies and can be used as a tool for deep-level comparisons (Tantardini et al, 2019). Theoretical and empirical studies have frequently suggested the use of 7 simple micromotifs (see Table 1) to exemplify common patterns of perceived causation (52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58). We…”

Assessing Policy Issue Interdependencies in Environmental Governance

“…This is different from identifying overarching interdependencies between ambitious and high-level policy goals, or from mainly assessing how systemic factors relate to one another (the latter often assessed using cognitive mapping, e.g. Hamilton et al 2019;Özesmi & Özesmi, 2004). Hence, the question underlying this study is: how can we better assess policy issue interdependencies in ways that correspond with what measures and possible solutions policy actors have at their disposal in specific cases for specific environmental problems?…”