Spatio-Temporal Dynamics and Diversity of Approaches in Multiscale Fire Governance

One of the most striking realizations of this research was the highly dynamic nature of FG. Several phases have led to the present configuration of FM activities in the area:

In Phase 1 (pre-1998), documented by previous research (Gutiérrez et al. 2017) and also by several interviews with both governmental and community actors, local communities used fire in two very distinct ways: either in a controlled manner to maintain fields and pastureland, applying cultural fire knowledge, or without any apparent care and control measures, to extend the agricultural frontier (the mentioned authors cite locals with the phrase “may the sea put it [the fire] out”, Gutiérrez et al. 2017:44), mainly without any direct external involvement.

Phase 2 (1998 to 2000s) brought the introduction of formalized FM in many parts of Mexico, including the recently established LSBR, following the extreme 1998 wildfire season, aided for a limited time by actors such as the US Forest Service, the international NGO The Nature Conservancy, and the national NGO Pronatura. Both federal and state environmental agencies began developing plans for FM, assigning specific personnel, and gradually establishing inter-institutional cooperation; at the beginning, fire suppression approaches and oppression of agricultural burning prevailed in the region. However, the external actors sought to involve local communities, initially in a rather top-down manner, with varying degrees of success and accompanied by conflicts, as outlined in the subsequent sections. Several stakeholders from state and federal environmental agencies slowly started adopting an IFM approach, as already noted by Gutiérrez et al. (2017), through contact with foreign actors and their own experience. The phase coincided with the introduction of the Official Mexican Norm on fire use (in short NOM-015, promulgated in 1997), which regulates permits for agricultural and technical burning.

During Phase 3 (the 2010s) (Fig. 2), the area established a relatively organized management approach based on the coordination of an operational group at the level of the state of Chiapas and regional FM centres separated into three regions, Valles Zoque, Istmo-Costa, and Frailescana, and a primarily harmonious relationship between local communities and the governmental agencies, confirmed by actors from both groups.

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Phase 4 (2020-2022) (Fig. 3), besides minor effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, brought considerable disruption regarding FG, with main responsibilities assigned to the previously scarcely involved state government’s civil protection (CP) department According to a wide range of interviews at different levels and as observed in the field, this change generated conflicts and affected cooperation.

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Phases 1 and 2 were mainly reconstructed from literature and memories of some of the leading actors, limiting access to detailed information. The best documented phases were 3 and 4, based on fieldwork, enabling the drawing of actor interactions models, shown in Figs. 2 and 3. The identification of phase 5 considered information obtained during the last fieldwork, but was not complete enough for a full representation.

The category of governmental agencies includes a wide array of actor groups. The armed forces (the Marines, the Military, and, recently, the National Guard) participate exclusively in suppressing large fires. They usually lack specialized equipment and specific FM training. In recent years, CONAFOR promoted capacity building among soldiers; however, given the military personnel’s quick rotation, these efforts have had limited success, as observed in the fieldwork.

Federal and state environmental attorneys are responsible for investigating environmental offenses, including arson in forest areas. In the early 2000s, federal authorities issued fines and even jailed some locals for agricultural burning-related accidents, leading to asymmetric conflicts between the government and local communities, as documented by Guevara-Hernández et al. (2013). However, in recent years, several other governmental actors have complained about the attorneys’ inactivity and lack of interest, leading to complete impunity of documented arson cases. The only exception was sporadic participation in legal prevention patrols alongside other actors.

The municipal governments are a highly diverse category, characterized by frequent rotation of personnel (usually, the departments in charge are those dedicated to CP and environment or agriculture) and different approaches in each of the six municipalities that share parts of the LSBR: Cintalapa, Jiquipilas, Villaflores, Villa Corzo, Tonalá, and Arriaga. While the latter two are usually less dedicated due to lower wildfire incidence, the other four generally assign some of their resources to FM, finance their own municipal brigades, and manage brigades financed by CONAFOR. While municipal involvement in fire suppression is relatively high compared to many other areas of Mexico, preventive activities at the municipal level are scarce, besides participation in cultural prevention events organized by CONAFOR and CONANP. According to NOM-015, municipalities should implement burning permits, but according to the interviewees’ general experience, this has occurred only in a few exceptional cases.

The second outstanding actors, aside from governmental agencies, were local communities. Almost all of them had originally used fire to burn stubble on fields and to renew grasslands, based on local knowledge developed over generations (although some communities have migrated here from other areas in Chiapas and had to adapt their practices to the local environment), and usually with mutual assistance by people from the same community. Furthermore, cultural FM involves the empirical management of low-intensity wildfires in savannahs and pine forests by some local communities to obtain optimal fire benefits, documented by Pantoja-Campa et al. (2018:3, own translation): “Here a conducted wildfire is considered a wildfire which occurred under conditions which implicated a low to moderate intensity, which is why the ejidatarios decided to let it advance, like a controlled burn, with the objective to reduce forest fuels and regenerate the tree cover and the pasture. They limited themselves to following it and observing it, ready to proceed to control it in case the conditions would change (…)”.

Another interaction between communities and the government in recent years (since phase 3) has been the establishment of local CP committees. Due to changes in responsibilities at the state level in phase 4, they were then also considered relevant for FM. At the CP central office in the state capital, these committees were presented as an effective solution for local preparedness. However, they were hardly mentioned by the secretary’s regional delegates, and other governmental actors criticized the committee’s objective as primarily political campaigning and lacking relevance for firefighting, an impression confirmed by field observations.

The interviews with community representatives revealed that those inside the LSBR and who use forest resources, such as pine resins, are keen to conserve forests, as outlined in a community representative’s remarks: “Now we are in a resin cooperative here in the ejido (…) and now it is my priority employment. I have another activity, which is corn and beans, but it is minimal (…). Since 2015 to this date, thank God, there has been no wildfire. Everything is controlled, at least for now. Well, we are resineros (resin cultivators), we protect our forest”. In contrast, interest in agriculture-based communities at the reserve’s borders is lower. There are also stark differences in opinions within communities, including those of avencidados, local inhabitants without land and rights to vote in the ejido assemblies. As observed in conversations with locals the communities Tierra y Libertad and Tiltepec, they often hold anti-fire opinions, experiencing only adverse effects (fire smoke, water shortages attributed to forest degradation) but none of the benefits. Overall, concerns regarding adverse effects of wildfire and the need for an effective control of fire use seem to be widely based on personal experiences (damages to forest resources and crops, smoke). However, outright anti-fire sentiments at the local level are generally the product of external influence, as is reflected, most notably, in the total fire ban in the community Tiltepec, reflected in the words of a local firefighter: “We in this community have this zero fire rule, it is for the wellbeing of the community, right, because by burning, to begin with, they harm the environment (…) some farmers still do it, but they shouldn’t, due to the community rule, because this causes the shortage of water.”

Regarding the loss of cultural knowledge and lack of internal cohesion, the situation is generally more problematic in larger communities at the reserve’s outskirts, and less critical in small communities located close to the core zones. Also, communities outside the LSBR are influenced by a variety of governmental actors with conflicting perspectives on FM. In contrast, those within cooperate predominantly with environmental agencies. The results were inconclusive regarding the functioning of local governance structures; overall, interviewees reported that people tend to respect local FM rules, which are usually the result of agreements made by the community assemblies; however, some complained about a few exceptions of young community members using fire carelessly or of fires caused by other neighboring communities.

As outlined in the previous paragraphs, the roles and interactions of the actors have changed throughout the different phases, which is also visible in Figs. 2 and 3. The following lines resume the most important changes observed between phases 3 and 4 apparent in the figures: Regarding actor roles, the most striking change was the transition of the state secretary of CP from being listed among the actors with low interest in FM to becoming the leading actor, and related to this the disempowerment of the state environmental secretary; both changes altered the actor relationships; CP already had held ties with many other actors before, but these got stronger now and, in some cases, more conflictive. The changes at the state level had further repercussions at lower levels, with the increased relevance of regional delegates and state CP brigades, and the additional attributions of local CP committees. Municipal brigades increased their capacities, partly due to the advancement of capacity-building programs and partly by contracting personnel laid off in the state environmental secretary. Moreover, the figure shows the strengthening of the cooperation between CONAFOR and the military.

Regarding cooperation, there is no evidence in the FM context in the area prior to the 1998 fires, except for inter-community collaboration in conducting controlled burns. The large 1998 fires prompted spontaneous cooperation among diverse actors across the country for fire suppression, including La Sepultura. Later, little by little, actors started to align their FM efforts. At the regional level, 2005 marked the beginning of a formal IFM program for the reserve’s administration, CONAFOR, municipalities, and communities, funded by The Nature Conservancy. Later, this formal program stopped for lack of continued financing, but the same actors kept working in a coordinated manner, further including the state government’s environmental agency. Overall, the cooperation between local communities and the central responsible governmental institutions nowadays can be seen as relatively harmonious, as one firefighter contracted by the CONAFOR told: “Fortunately, we have this good coordination with the ejidos, there is communication, if there is a wildfire, the people assist. We just went to a fire over there in Villa Corzo and the people responded very well (…) it is not in all municipalities and in all ejidos, but generally we receive help from the people”.

However, as Huffman (2010:25-26) observed, there is a “delicate balance of power, cooperation and subtle resistance that producers and reserve managers constantly negotiate through daily actions and participation in government-sponsored programs”. As governmental, NGO, and community representatives alike observe, this balance is challenged by cuts to environmental programs and by unaligned policies across different governmental agencies. Factors contributing to successful cooperation are the longstanding experience and contacts of many of the involved persons, and the openness towards flexible, locally adapted solutions, for instance, regarding the application of the NOM-015.

A specific, strong cooperation has been established since the late 2010s for the realization of experimental prescribed burning efforts, under the auspices of the Chapingo Autonomous University, and with the participation of the NGO Biomasa, CONAFOR firefighters, municipal and community brigades, as well as the LSBR’s administration, supported by the Mexican Fund for Environmental Conservation. However, to date, these practices have been limited to small experimental patches, with none of the stakeholders being willing or able to provide resources for a larger-scale prescribed burning program, despite the declarations of NGO and governmental representatives that there was an urgent need in the reserve for more effective fuel management.

At the state level, a technical operative group has been set up to institutionalize cooperation in fire suppression, capacity-building and, to a lesser extent, fire prevention efforts, comprising CONANP, CONAFOR and state government representatives. In each region there are regional FM centres, including three in the LSBR area, further involving the representatives of the municipalities. Due to the discontinuity of municipal personnel, maintaining this cooperation is an ongoing struggle.

Conflicts and disagreements were a crucial issue in the first years of the LSBR’s existence, when it faced limited acceptance from local communities due to the lack of a genuine participatory process to establish the reserve. The start of organized FM activities was also not without different degrees of conflict at the local level. One of the most critical examples reported by Guevara-Hernández et al. (2013) involved the issuing of a fine by the Federal Environmental Attorney following a report from CONANP to a community as a whole for supposedly being responsible for having started a wildfire; some time after, two young men in the community were put into jail for some time because of an accidentally caused fire. In the first case, municipal authorities served as mediators between the community and federal agencies.

In contrast to the direct conflicts between communities and authorities, the relationships later became more complex, with lines of conflict extending across previously defined blocks. Within communities, there are varying degrees of tolerance for fire, and generally the community as a whole sanctions indiscriminate fire use, leading to intra-community conflicts with those who use fire without necessary control measures, and sometimes even against those who use fire in a controlled manner. There are also issues between communities, with accusations against neighboring villages for causing fires that spread beyond community limits, as reflected in the following statement of a community representative: “They may cause a fire from another place. I tell you, last year they affected us. Over there, they affected us (…). We had a meeting with them where we told them that it can’t be that every year, they affect us. They said, well, it wasn’t us. But then, where did the fire come from?”

At the same time, as some authorities, especially the main actors in the environmental sector, adopted an IFM approach, they came into opposition with other actors, most notably several former state governors who issued temporary fire-use bans, including prescribed burning. The implementation of these bans was limited in practice, but it contributed to distrust between communities and government actors. The situation escalated in phase 4, following the removal of the state environmental secretary from FM activities and the transfer of principal responsibility to state CP, who lacked training and know-how in FM and pursued an anti-fire policy. This led to conflicts, with a total break-up of communication in some cases, and problems in cooperation in others. According to some interviewees, this led directly to a wider spread of some fires (due to incomplete fire breaks caused by disorganization or lack of know-how) and, on one occasion, to an accident involving three persons suffering severe burns. The degree of conflict varied across the region, with most problems in the northwestern part of the reserve. One representative of a governmental institution summed the situation up like this: “And this change provoked a certain friction between the institutions and has affected the issue of cooperation. In which way? In not sending brigades or if they are combatting, in putting them under much risk to put out the fire”.

Phase 5 brought about a relaxation of this situation, as was clearly observed during the last field visit, especially among local actors, with enhanced cooperation in firefighting and with CP officials adopting a more open position toward IFM (In the words of the representative of another governmental institution: “Previously, civil protection issued a zero-fire decree. Zero fires in the state; it is not possible to burn, anyone who does it goes to jail. And what did the farmer do? Well, with this fear, he went, set fire, and went to his home. Who burned it? Who knows. But now civil protection has joined the issue of the official Mexican norm, so that people can use fire responsibly”). The main remaining point of conflict was the reporting of fire numbers, with CP and environmental actors accusing each other of artificially inflating or minimizing burned-area figures, serving the political agenda of their officials. This conflict mainly persisted at the state level, with regional actors stating they got along well with each other, while their superiors were fussing over the numbers.

The description of the different phases already names some external influences, such as the involvement of national and even foreign actors in Phase 2, the pandemic, and political decisions on the federal and state levels that sparked Phase 4. Regarding politics, further external aspects to consider are a perpetual increase in environmental budgets in Mexico at the beginning of the new millennium and then a drastic decrease since 2015: from this year to 2020, Vega (2020) documented an overall reduction of 56% in nominal terms, affecting particularly CONAFOR (minus 66%); CONANP’s budget got reduced by 27%. Numbers provided in the transparency section on CONAFOR’s website (Comisión Nacional Forestal 2025) reveal that between 2020 and 2024, there was a 19.8% recovery in nominal terms. However, given the high accumulated inflation of these years (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2025), this was still a decrease in real terms of 4.5%.

The direct impact of this recent development on FM is unclear from official documents and appears to have had minor effects on personnel in official wildfire brigades in the study area, according to the interviewees. However, following the data provided by CONAFOR’s website, there were direct consequences regarding accompanying programs, such as payments for environmental services (on the national level there was a decrease from 390,000 ha supported by the CONAFOR in 2015 to 177,387 ha in 2023) and temporal work programs that financed prevention activities carried out by local communities. In the interviews, one community representative remarked: “Lately they [fire breaks] got abandoned, no one does it any more“. The total number of maintenances of existing and the establishment of new fire breaks reported by the CONAFOR at the national level in 2015 was 4590 km, and in 2023, only 830 km. Moreover, in recent years the Military sector has undergone considerable strengthening, and a new entity, the National Guard, has been established that also participates in wildfire suppression. Other factors influencing FG include international migration (as challenge to the continuity of personnel in local fire brigades), the deteriorating rule of law in Mexico, and climate change.

Most management issues are interrelated with external influences and the actors’ objectives and interactions. The following paragraphs are ordered by their perceived importance, based on the number of interviewees who mentioned them. The recent disaggregation of cooperation at the state level and, relatedly, the politicization of FM were the most mentioned issues, leading one firefighter to observe that “the technical part, the operational part, usually do not go well hand in hand with the political part”. The “technical and operational part” refers here to the work of local fire managers and firefighters, while the term “political” in this context referred to personal political agendas of government officials and the rivalry between different secretaries and the related politicians (partisan politics were less critical, as the same party held the federal, state and all municipality governments in the region); another firefighter added “Sometimes it is not so much that people here wouldn’t like to work together, but there are other people at above levels, where there is much jealousy, much dispute”. Related to this, one of the most mentioned problems was the state government’s fire bans, which many other governmental and NGO actors saw as ineffective and counterproductive, reflecting a top-down approach that fails to consider local needs. The lack of cooperation is also related to some actors’ insufficient capacities and know-how, hindering effective fire suppression and putting firefighters at risk. At the same level were the lack of funding for prevention (relating to only temporarily activated brigades) and the loss of cultural fire knowledge.

The loss of fire knowledge was related to emigration, abandonment of agricultural activities, the lack of this topic in formal agricultural training and education (evidenced during the visit to a local agricultural school), and general disinterest among the younger generation. The results are, in some cases, a reduction in agricultural burning, but in other cases, an increasing tendency towards careless fire use. However, one representative of an indigenous community contradicted the official data presented in the paper’s Methodology and the discourse of agricultural burning as the primary fire cause (and not other causes mentioned in some interviews and related mostly to people coming from outside the LSBR, such as hunting, cigarettes along roads, and arson), exclaiming: “There is the problem, well, I have heard this news, that it is the farmers, that it is the producers of corn and beans, who provoke the fires. It is a lie; on this side of the road where we plant corn there are no fires, absolutely, it is on the other side where there are.” To a lesser degree, other community representatives, while not negating the role of agricultural burning, also underlined the importance of other causes and the inappropriateness of placing the blame solely on burning. Also, during the field visits, it was observed that many fires occur along roads used by people passing through the reserve. Markedly, most legal and cultural prevention activities designed top-down by federal and state actors focus almost entirely on agricultural burning.

Whereas most actors, from different actor groups, mentioned these first issues, the following aspects appeared in four interviews each. The first were perverse outcomes of governmental payments for conservation, which are closely related to the loss of cultural traditions mentioned before and, together with budget cuts by the government, have caused a decrease in the maintenance of fire breaks between communities, with one government official stating “today they do not do this anymore, or if they do it, it is because of a governmental program, but not for free, because this custom has been lost, our own governmental system has induced this in the people”. Another issue was the lack of adequate equipment, especially at the community level, including the availability of radios for communicating during the suppression of large fires and the incompatibility of radio equipment of different agencies. Also, four interviewees mentioned dangerous fuel accumulation in areas with effective fire suppression and a lack of prescribed burning, with one interviewee speaking of a “time bomb” regarding potential future megafires. Other aspects mentioned at the same level were the lack of involvement of environmental attorneys, leading to general impunity for arson, and the area’s physical geography, which complicates fire suppression due to steep terrain and frequent strong winds.

Other issues only appeared in three or fewer interviews: the missing participation of agricultural secretaries, increased fire risk due to climate change, the missing spatial fit of prevention activities, security risks for firefighters in areas with presence of criminal groups, a reduction of prevention activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of coordination and mutual help among local communities, missing dissemination of the NOM015, a lack of renovation of management plans, the lack of more widespread participation of civil society in FM, and the discontinuity of personal, especially at the municipal level (in contrast to field notes from direct observation, which identified this issue as a common problem), expressed in the words of a firefighter: “There can enter very good people but three years pass and there is a change, there is replacement, and we start all over again”.

Most of the actor roles and management issues presented previously describe the general situation of the study area. However, there are some essential spatial differences. Formal FM activities are much rarer along the Southern border of the LSBR, and actor cooperation is scarce due to the usually lower wildfire incidence in non-fire-prone ecosystems. However, when fires occur, these missing structures along with greater distance from the main firefighting actors hinder suppression efforts. The remainder of the reserve is divided into a western and an eastern part.

The eastern part overall has a history of stronger community participation, continuity of municipal actors, and NGO and university involvement. Together, the actors in this area achieved a considerable lowering of adverse fire impacts in phases 3 and 4. However, in parts of this area, fire suppression, while effective in the short term, has led to dangerous fuel accumulations. In one of the field visits, the authors observed the suppression efforts of a fire in this area that affected more than 2000ha, a rare event in Southern Mexico. Most prescribed burning efforts also occur here, but their extent is far too low. Conflicts between actors in recent years in this area were mediated by prior acquaintance among environmental and CP actors and a generally more integrated approach.

On the contrary, in the western part, conflicts were stronger; later, state CP changed personnel from the eastern to the western part, which eased the situation. At a lower level, there are disparities between communities. Communities in the interior of the LSBR often receive direct forest benefits or obtain payments for environmental services and have received support to set up their fire brigades, making them generally keener to participate in firefighting and forest protection in general, compared to communities at the reserve’s borders. However, even between neighboring communities, there are often important differences in fire use and FM engagement, depending on their prior interactions with other actors and their histories of wildfire impacts.