2026 Fall Seminar Series Seminar: Matt Hamilton University of Wyoming

Risk governance in coupled human-natural systems: Exploring scale and interdependence across institutional, social, and cognitive processes

Abstract: This talk will draw together recent work that examines how institutional, social, and cognitive processes interact with environmental processes in hazard-prone landscapes, with implications for resilience of human and natural communities. The empirical focus for this work is wildfire risk governance, which is a great laboratory for studying environmental governance in fragmented institutional settings because fire-prone landscapes are managed at multiple spatial scales and because fires themselves often cross administrative boundaries. The presentation develops a broader argument that scale and interdependence are useful organizing concepts in interdisciplinary environmental governance research, especially in settings characterized by overlapping jurisdictions and boundary-spanning environmental processes.