After the Wildfires: The Processes of Social Learning of Forest Owners’ Associations in Central Catalonia, Spain

Roser Rodríguez-Carreras, Xavier Úbeda, Marcos Francos and Claudia Marco
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Roser Rodríguez-Carreras: Department of Geography, Faculty of Geography and History, University de Barcelona, Montalegre, 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
Xavier Úbeda: Department of Geography, Faculty of Geography and History, University de Barcelona, Montalegre, 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
Marcos Francos: Departamento de Ciencias Históricas y Geográficas, Universidad de Tarapacá, 18 de Septiembre, 2222, Arica 1000000, Chile
Claudia Marco: Department of Geography, Faculty of Geography and History, University de Barcelona, Montalegre, 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 15, 1-25

Abstract: Over the last few decades, according to the Forest Fire Prevention Services of the Catalan Government, a small number of fires (less than 1%) have been responsible for the destruction of more than three quarters of the burnt forest area in Catalonia. However, while these wildfires have transformed many components of the landscape, including its vegetation and soils, they offer landowners the opportunity to learn from past decisions. This article aims to analyze the responses of forest owners in Central Catalonia after the great forest fires of the 1980s and 1990s, including the way in which their objectives and strategies are defined and their actions implemented. By conducting interviews with the members of forest owners’ associations and by means of participant observation at association meetings, we seek to examine the processes of social learning experienced by this collective and to identify the mechanisms used in their efforts to create socio-ecological structures that are less vulnerable to fire. Associationism is unusual in the world of Catalan forest ownership, despite the great number of private forest areas. In our results, however, associationism emerges as a strategy for cooperation, a recognition of the need to link ecological and social structures in the territory, and one which we define as a form of ‘socio-ecological resistance’. Our study highlights that the goals and actions of forest owners’ associations have both an instrumental and emotional component, so that reason, emotion and action have come to form the three vertices of socio-ecological resistance to fire.

Keywords: large wildfires; forest management; forest owners’ associations; social learning; resistant socio-ecological structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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