The question remains, however: What is the appropriate balance
between bonding and bridging structure for landscape-scale
planning, and at what scale? Excessive bonding social capital can
give rise to homogeneity, jeopardizing a network’s ability to maintain
a diverse knowledge base, and too much bridging social capital
may make it difficult to build the trust and norms of reciprocity
needed to efficiently communicate and act on new ideas (Borgatti
& Cross, 2003; Burt, 2004; Reagans & McEvily, 2003; Reagans &
Zuckerman, 2001; Ruef, 2002). To effectively address the problem
of increasing wildfire risk policies must encourage sufficient
interaction between forest restoration and fire protection organizations
to foster complex problem-solving without compromising
the social cohesion within these subnetworks that allows for communication
and coordination. Moreover, policies should encourage
interaction between organizations in different geographic subregions
to the extent that it is practical and does not divert resources
that could otherwise be invested in management at smaller landscape
scales. Atthe spatial scale of ecoregions, which are composed
of multiple, more coherent social territories, weak bridging structure
may be sufficient for planning and joint problem-solving.
Assuming the number of relationships organizations can enter into
is limited, it may be more importantfor parties to investin relationships
at scales at which work (e.g., implementing fuels reduction
treatments) can be coordinated.
5. Conclusions
Management of ecological conditions and processes in multiownership
landscapes requires cooperative planning among
diverse stakeholder groups. This is especially true in arid humaninhabited
forested landscapes of the world, where increasingly
large and intense wildfires burn irrespective of property boundaries
and land designations. In these areas, organizations involved
in the restoration of forests and the protection of property from
wildfire could benefit from working together to share information
and coordinate strategies. The structure of organizational networks
can indicate potential opportunities for communication, coordination
and joint implementation of landscape-scale natural resource
management plans.