Identifying misalignments in wildfire management: Opportunities for plan integration and stakeholder collaboration

Wildfire management across different planning mechanisms remains a growing yet understudied policy challenge worldwide. California's Wildfire Resilience Plan Alignment Guide is meant to leverage collaboration among different local planning mechanisms to build wildfire resilient communities. Referring to this toolkit, we identified six themes of plan alignment opportunities among three primary local planning mechanisms: the General Plan, Hazard Mitigation Plan, and Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Building on a Wildfire Planning Effectiveness protocol and evaluation, we developed a model measuring degrees of plan alignment among these planning mechanisms. We find that overall plan alignment among the three plans is low, particularly as related to vulnerability assessments. We also find that regional, private sector, federal, state, and tribal stakeholders are inadequately involved in local planning processes. We further investigate the relationship between plan alignment evaluation, stakeholder collaboration, and each county's social vulnerability, wildfire risk, and wildfire planning effectiveness. We find that counties with higher levels of social vulnerability may experience less comprehensive stakeholder collaboration, while counties with higher wildfire planning effectiveness have better alignment in wildfire management themes. The results highlight gaps and opportunities in California's wildfire resilience planning, offering insights for more efficient and effective planning and policymaking in building wildfire-resilient communities for other fire-prone regions.