Local Knowledge Helps in Fight Against Wildfires

When a wildfire ravages a region, it usually rolls through like a wave—relentless, fast-moving and devastating. Sometimes, maps of the aftermath reveal small pockets of land that remain untouched and can’t be explained by geographical barriers. That was the case during the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed most of Paradise, California, but left significant portions of neighboring towns relatively untouched.

“We started asking ourselves what’s going on? What creates these differences?” said Maria Minniti, director of the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society and the Louis A. Bantle Chair in Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.

Minniti and her former advisee, Devin Stein ’23 Ph.D., now an assistant professor at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business, explore this question in a new paper forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal. Their research zeroes in on community wildfire prevention and management initiatives in Northern California, drawing from a rich dataset covering 1998 to 2018.

The authors found that self-organized communities—groups that arise voluntarily and may include residents, businesses, NGOs or local associations—create significantly more public value than communities relying solely on existing public agencies. These informal groups, which often lack legal status, collaborated to write fire prevention plans, apply for grants and implement tangible safety measures like clearing underbrush, creating firewalls and identifying where alternate routes or water pipes are.

“Those things can make a huge difference with respect to both prevention and responses to even massive fires,” Minniti says. “These communities use their local knowledge to reduce the impact of the disaster. That’s why those self-organized, smaller initiatives work so well.”

The broader the participation of stakeholders, from local to federal levels, the more successful these communities were at minimizing damage. By combining bottom-up local knowledge with top-down best practices, communities could mount more effective responses.

The study challenges traditional views of how public value is created. While past research has focused on formal relationships among public, private and nonprofit organizations, Minniti and Stein expand the concept of what counts as an organization in this context to include such informal, voluntary collaborations.

Their findings offer a blueprint for addressing other grand challenges, from infrastructure and education to public safety and health care, by tapping into the potential of self-organizing communities and local knowledge.

Minniti, M. (2025), Distributed Knowledge and the Creation of Public Value: Wildfire Management in Northern California (with Stein, D. ’23 Ph.D.), Academy of Management Journal (forthcoming).