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Browsing by Author "Scott, Ryan, advisor"

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    Community capacity and collaborative wildfire planning: the role of capacity in acquiring federal mitigation grant funding
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Ryan, Benjamin, author; Scott, Ryan, advisor; Goes, Iasmin, committee member; Burkhardt, Jesse, committee member
    Since the passage of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act two decades ago, Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) have become the predominant planning tool for community preparedness, risk mitigation, and response; improving coordination between governments, natural resource management agencies, and residents; give communities the ability access federal grant funding programs in the Western United States. Research on CWPPs has mainly been the focus of case studies, with relatively few large-scale studies to understand how a community's biophysical, socio-economic, vulnerability, and social conditions account for the variation in federal grant allocation. This study includes over 1,000 CWPPs in 11 states to evaluate the conditions that precipitate the allocation of grant funds for risk mitigation and community resilience. Through the estimation of a Binomial Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation Model to estimate the probability of winning grant funds based on the included indicators. Findings indicate that grant winnings are closely correlated with biophysical risk, financial capacity, and CWPP Update status, while socially vulnerable communities were more likely not to receive grant funds. However, we fail to find evidence that social capital affects the likelihood of winning grant funds. These findings suggest a need for a more equitable distribution of federal grant funds to mitigate wildfire risk properly.
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    NEPA implementation and trust: linking stakeholder trust to substantive effectiveness in U.S. Forest Service fuels reduction projects
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Hall, Hailey R., author; Scott, Ryan, advisor; Gottlieb, Madeline, committee member; Schultz, Courtney, committee member
    Trust matters; but, rather than take it as a given, this study presents an empirical snapshot of how trust matters, what types of trust matter, and how those trust types interact within and on National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) substantive effectiveness. I define substantive effectiveness as the degree to which the policy meets its established aims of considering environmental effects and including the public in the process. Using documents and public comments from two U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Fuels Reduction projects in the Boulder Ranger District in Colorado, I assessed stakeholder trust judgements by coding trust types and frequencies. I then used process tracing to examine how stakeholder trust types interact with one another and relate to substantive effectiveness. I found that interpersonal trust, interpersonal distrust, and institutional distrust play prominent but varied roles within the NEPA process. First, interpersonal trust mediates the effect of institutional distrust on the substantive effectiveness of the NEPA process. Second, higher levels of institutional and interpersonal distrust result in more substantive changes in the NEPA environmental assessment process. Through improved understanding of the roles and functions of stakeholder trust types on the NEPA process, we add nuanced understanding to established expectations of how trust and distrust operate within natural resource planning and management.