Distributed Knowledge and the Creation of Public Value: Community-Based Organizing and Wildfire Management in Northern California

Author(s) Information: 
Maria Minniti (Syracuse University), Devin Stein (University of Alabama – Former Whitman EEE Ph.D. student)

Journal:
Academy of Management Journal - Forthcoming

Summary:
To date, researchers who study how to create public value have focused primarily on formal contractual relationships between organizations. For example, partnerships between public and private organizations, or public organizations and NGOs. We expand this line of research and conceptualize self-organizing communities as a type of organization whose members have aligned incentives and sufficient agency to pursue common goals. Specifically, we examine how local communities that voluntarily self-organize can create public value through non-contractual collaborations. Communities create public value because they possess unique local knowledge that often remains underutilized without community involvement. When self-organizing communities collaborate with higher-level public organizations, for example a local volunteer fire department collaborating with the US Fire Service, their collaboration facilitates knowledge exchanges that enhance public value creation even without formal contracts. To test our theory, we analyzed community wildfire prevention initiatives in Northern California from 1998 to 2018. Our findings demonstrate that self-organizing communities experience significantly fewer fire-related losses compared to communities that don't self-organize. Our study also reveals that the participation of many stakeholders and collaborations across jurisdictional levels (local and state organizations, local and federal organizations, etc.) enhance public value creation, with effectiveness depending on the intensity of these collaborations. In addition to addressing a very timely grand challenge, i.e., the spreading of massive wildfires, our research contributes to understanding non-contractual governance mechanisms in general, and highlights the important role that local communities can play in addressing complex grand challenges characterized by specific local dimensions, such as wildfires, pollution, crime, and homelessness, among others.

Research Question:
We investigate the potential collective benefits that can be derived from the involvement of local stakeholders (individuals plus private, public, or non-profit organizations) in identifying solutions to complex problems which are usually delegated to large government entities.

What We Know:
Prior research established that self-organizing communities can effectively manage common pool resources through collective action. This literature demonstrated that public-private collaborations and hybrid organizational forms can create public value through contractual arrangements and formal governance mechanisms (e.g., procurements, formal partnerships). This existing work primarily focused on formal contractual relationships and well-defined governance arrangements, largely overlooking how informal, non-contractual collaborations between groups and higher-level public organizations might contribute to superior outcomes in public value creation.

Novel Findings:
This study provides empirical evidence that self-organizing communities create significantly more public value (measured as reduced wildfire property losses) than communities relying solely on existing public organizations. Our research reveals that broader stakeholder participation and extensive cross-level collaborations between communities and higher-level public organizations enhance these positive outcomes. We also demonstrate that the intensity and type of collaboration matters—extensive cross-level collaborations yield the best results, while limited collaborations showing mixed effects. We suggest these superior outcomes emerge because communities serve as repositories of local knowledge. This knowledge can be mobilized through self-organization, enabling more contextualized solutions and preventing the ineffective application of homogeneous best practices to heterogeneous local problems, even without formal contracts.

Implications for Practice:
Our findings indicate that non-contractual governance mechanisms, often overlooked in management, are highly relevant for task managers to face. In addition to socially conscious considerations, our work shows how managers and entrepreneurs can support public initiatives to foster and maintain stakeholders’ support, and to expand the scope of their private firms. In other words, we provide strong evidence-based arguments that participation in the creation of public value provides positive value spillovers to private stakeholders.

Implications for Policy:
We provide significant evidence that bottom-up contextualized solutions tend to be more effective than generalized best practices and, as a result, that some degree of decentralized decision-making is important, especially in situations where large transfers of public funds are used or when government-level best practices are implemented.

Implications for Society:
Our work enriches our understanding of non-contractual relationships among stakeholders. In particular, our findings indicate that non-contractual governance mechanisms, often overlooked in management, are highly relevant for the management and solution of complex social challenges such as wildfires, homelessness, and pollution, among many, but also for the emergence and success of emerging transformative industries, such as unmanned transportation and AI.

Implications for Research:
Our work enriches our understanding of non-contractual relationships among stakeholders, and posits broad participation and active cross-level collaborations as a vehicle for capitalizing on communities’ local knowledge advantages. We also provide details on what specific forms of cross-level collaborations are most effective. Finally, we use a difference-in difference approach with and without instrumental variables and community fixed effects. This enables us to leverage our data as a natural experiment.

Full Citation:
Stein, D., Minniti, M. (2025) Distributed Knowledge and the Creation of Public Value: Wildfire Management in Northern California. Academy of Management Journal- Forthcoming

Abstract:
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 friction. Using an original longitudinal dataset of community-level fire prevention plans in Northern California from 1998-2018, 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.