“Fire sees no boundaries”: barriers and opportunities for Tribal-Federal collaborative fire governance between the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and San Juan National Forest

The scales at which social-ecological processes like fire occur on the landscape are often misaligned with jurisdictional boundaries that artificially divide ecosystems. Thus, effective fire governance requires collaboration across multiple land ownerships with differing institutional areas of responsibility. Across the Western US, there is a need to expand collaborative fire governance between US federal agencies and Tribes to effectively address forest health challenges at meaningful scales, yet Tribal-Federal cross-boundary fuels reduction planning and implementation remains limited. We address this gap through a case study with the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado, using a participatory action research approach and a mixed-methods design including interviews and focus groups. Qualitative coding revealed four unique fire-use contexts that motivate Tribal-Federal collaborative fire governance within our case study. We find that barriers and opportunities for collaborative fire governance are diverse and interrelated, identifying 31 types of barriers and 28 types of opportunities. Our findings highlight the need for mechanisms tailored to address the unique circumstances of collaboration between US agencies and Tribes.