Wildfire narratives: Identifying and characterizing multiple understandings of western wildfire challenges

Western wildfires present a complex sustainability challenge characterized by more severe fires and escalating risks. To mitigate western wildfire risks, collaborative management practices need to transform the processes involved in knowledge production, seizing the opportunities and overcoming obstacles associated with actors’ multiple understandings. Knowledge co-production represents an increasingly referenced process for bringing together diverse actors, including scientists from different disciplines and non-scientists, to construct place-based and action-oriented knowledge. While knowledge co-production scholarship emphasizes the importance of recognizing and legitimizing multiple understandings, processes for attending to multiple understandings lack a systematic exploratory method for identifying and characterizing what those understandings are. We employed a narrative analysis to empirically investigate multiple understandings within the context of western wildfire challenges. Based on sixty semi-structured interviews with influential actors, we identified nine social narratives that capture distinctions in the connections actors make between the causes, consequences, and solutions to wildfire challenges, in the spatial and temporal scale they emphasize, in the way they frame the challenge, and in the language they use. We also found differences in how actors demarcate social narratives' credibility, legitimacy, and saliency. Our research suggests that analyzing social narratives fills an essential gap in practice by providing a pragmatic exploratory process for identifying and characterizing actors’ multiple understandings. [Display omitted] •Narrative analysis is applied to identify and characterize multiple understandings.•Investigation identifies nine social narratives of western wildfire challenges.•Wildfire narratives are distinguished by their strategies, scales, frameworks, and language.•Findings guide the selection of a more representative breadth of understandings.•Research bridges the gap between knowledge co-production’s scholarly aspirations and pragmatic needs.