Distributed Knowledge and the Creation of Public Value: Community-Based Organizing and Wildfire Management in Northern California
研究社区自组织与跨层级协作如何利用分布式知识减少市场摩擦、提升野火管理效果，发现采取本地行动并与州联邦协调的社区火灾损失更少。
We build on extant theories of collective action and public–private collaborations to unpack the distinctive role self-organizing communities may play alongside other organizations in the creation of public value. We suggest that, when communities self-organize to address a common goal and, in particular, when they collaborate with higher-level public organizations, they discover more and better opportunities to reduce market frictions. Using an original longitudinal dataset of community-level fire prevention plans in Northern California from 1998 to 2018, we find that communities taking local actions and coordinating them with state and federal organizations manage wildfires better and experience fewer property losses than communities that do not organize. The number of stakeholders participating in these collaborations and the extent of the collaborations across hierarchical levels reinforce this effect. We conjecture that one possible mechanism explaining why self-organizing and cross-level collaborations tend to yield positive outcomes may be because they allow stakeholders to benefit from otherwise idle local knowledge. Unpacking the role played by self-organizing communities and their cross-level collaborations is important because it may enable contextualized solutions and prevent the potentially ineffective application of homogenous practices to heterogeneous problems, even in the absence of formal contracts.