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Political ecology seeks to address notable weaknesses in the social sciences that consider how human society and the environment shape each other over time. Considering questions of ideology and scientific discourse, power and knowledge, and issues of conservation and environmental history, political ecology offers an alternative to technocratic approaches to policy prescriptions and environmental assessment. Integrating these insights into the science-policy interface is crucial for discerning and articulating the role of local resource users in environmental conservation. This paper applies political ecology to addresses a gap in the literature that exists at the interface of narratives of local environmental change and local ecological knowledge and doing so builds a nuanced critique of the rationality of local ecological knowledge. The ways that we view nature and generate, interpret, communicate, and understand the "science" of environmental problems is deeply embedded in particular economic, political, and ecological contexts. In interior British Columbia, Canada, these dynamics unfold in one of the most rigorously documented examples of the negative effect of anthropogenic disturbance on an endangered species – declining mountain caribou population. Science notwithstanding, resource users tell narratives of population decline that clearly reflect historical regularities deeply embedded in particular economic, political, and ideological constructions situated in local practices. This research assesses these narratives, discusses the implications, and explores pathways for integrating local knowledge and narratives into conservation science and policy. A more informed understanding of the subjectivities and rationalities of local knowledges can and should inform conservation science and policy.Keywords: Political ecology, local ecological knowledge, narrative, environmental change, environmental management, British Columbia, Rangifer tarandus caribou.

This report describes the joint research and practitioner-based effort to understand the network and narrative that shapes Hill Country conservation opportunities and outcomes. From April 2015-July 2016, we collected and analyzed over 40 hours of interview data and developed an extensive database of information in an attempt to better understand the organizations and agencies that work to make the Hill Country a socially and ecologically thriving landscape. Our mixed-methods research approach also included an online survey. Through these efforts, we believe that opportunities exist to improve coordination of activities, leverage and pool resources, increase and use social capital, enhance conflict management (i.e., prevention, reduction, resolution), and improve knowledge management (i.e., generation, translation, and diffusion). Understanding the inherent capacities that a networked approach provides can identify opportunities for successful conservation action by leveraging largely informal networks that bridge geographic, economic, cultural, and political differences. The report that follows summarizes these efforts and offers insights and recommendations based on the analysis. ; LBJ School of Public Affairs

Increased interest in combining compound flood hazards and social vulnerability has driven recent advances in flood impact mapping. However, current methods to estimate event specific compound flooding at the household level require high-performance computing resources frequently not available to local stakeholders. Government and non-government agencies currently lack methods to repeatedly and rapidly create flood impact maps that incorporate local variability of both hazards and social vulnerability. We address this gap by developing a methodology to estimate a flood impact index at the household level in near-real time, utilizing high resolution elevation data to approximate event specific inundation from both pluvial and fluvial sources in conjunction with a social vulnerability index. Our analysis uses the 2015 Memorial Day flood in Austin, Texas as a case study and proof of concept for our methodology. We show that 37 % of the Census Block Groups in the study area experience flooding from only pluvial sources and are not identified in local or national flood hazard maps as being at risk. Furthermore, averaging hazard estimates to cartographic boundaries masks household variability, with 60 % of the Census Block Groups in the study area having a coefficient of variation around the mean flood depth exceeding 50 %. Comparing our pluvial flooding estimates to a 2D physics-based model, we classify household impact accurately for 92 % of households. Our methodology can be used as a tool to create household compound flood impact maps to provide computationally efficient information to local stakeholders.

40 pages ; Over the past century, wildland fire management has been core to the mission of federal land management agencies. In recent decades, however, federal spending on wildfire suppression has increased dramatically; suppression spending that on average accounted for less than 20 percent of the USFS's discretionary funds prior to 2000 had grown to 43 percent of discretionary funds by 2008 (USDA 2009), and 51 percent in 2014 (USDA 2014). Rising suppression costs have created budgetary shortfalls and conflict as money "borrowed" from other budgets often cannot be paid back in full, and resources for other program areas and missions are subsumed by suppression expenditures. Significant policy making over the past 15 years has been designed, at least in part, to address these issues and temper wildfire costs. Effective political efforts and strategies to control public spending on suppression rely on a thorough and comprehensive understanding of the drivers of suppression costs and recent trends. ; Funding for this publication was provided by the Joint Fire Sciences Program.

Increasingly, natural resource conservation programs refer to participation and local community involvement as one of the necessary prerequisites for sustainable resource management. In frameworks of adaptive comanagement, the theory of participatory conservation plays a central role in the democratization of decisionmaking authority and equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. We observe, however, that the institutions of state, society, and economy shape the implementation and application of participation in significant ways across contexts. This paper examines the political ecology of participation by comparing and contrasting discourse and practice in four developed and developing contexts. The cases drawn from Central Asia, Africa, and North America illustrate that institutional dynamics and discourse shape outcomes. While these results are not necessarily surprising, they raise questions about the linkages between participatory conservation theory, policy and programmatic efforts of implementation to achieve tangible local livelihood and conservation outcomes. Participation must be understood in the broader political economy of conservation in which local projects unfold, and we suggest that theories of participatory governance need to be less generalized and more situated within contours of place-based institutional and environmental histories. Through this analysis we illustrate the dialectical process of conservation in that the very institutions that participation is intended to build create resistance, as state control once did. Conservation theory and theories of participatory governance must consider these dynamics if we are to move conservation forward in a way that authentically incorporates local level livelihood concerns.Keywords: participatory governance, political ecology, community-based conservation, environmental governance, discourse

22 pages ; The U.S. Forest Service is facing unprecedented challenges in wildfire suppression, and increasingly depends on private wildfire suppression to bolster capacity for direct attack resources, such as aerial resources, firefighter hand crews and other equipment. The processes and procedures employed for contracting such resources are complex and can be difficult to follow and understand. The purpose of this paper is to provide a clear and step-wise presentation of the private contracting system for wildfire suppression on federal lands, highlighting the key actors, actions, policies and procedures used throughout. ; This study was made possible by funding from the Joint Fire Sciences Program.

AbstractThe Intermountain West's rapid changes in population growth and land use may be welcome to some, but others perceive such changes as threats to sense of place. The objective of this study is to assess whether New West and Old West contextual variables predict how agricultural landowners view threats to agricultural lifestyles and sense of place. We analyze survey data collected from 2,270 agricultural landowners in Colorado and Wyoming utilizing a multilevel regression model (MLM). We posit that this analytical approach is effective for evaluating hierarchal New West or Old West economic configurations that may otherwise be difficult to observe. Our study specifically examines whether population pressures threaten agricultural lifestyles in the amenity‐based New West or in Old West economic regimes with proclivity toward large‐scale agricultural production. Our results show that landowners in farming‐dependent counties and in high‐amenity areas express greater concern than other landowners surveyed about increases in population growth that could threaten an agricultural way of life. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these perceptions relate to whether individuals reside in New West or Old West counties. In summary, some of the contextual variables of New West and Old West economic structures predict whether individuals perceive population growth and land use changes as threats to sense of place.