Mapping Fire Management: A Spatial Social Network Approach

Maps are an essential tool to inform fire governance and management. For instance, they can highlight which areas are most vulnerable to adverse fire impacts or be used to plan interventions for risk reduction and prevention. In recent years, several studies have mapped the fire management activities and the networks between the multitude of involved actors. They build upon previous advances to combine quantitative and qualitative social network analysis with geographical analysis and cartography, aiming to highlight areas of opportunity to enhance fire governance. This paper continues this line of research, examining cooperation in fire management within the south-eastern part of the state of Chiapas. This area is the main fire risk area in Southern Mexico, characterised by the involvement of many different fire management actors. The paper proposes two advances to better visualise the networks between these actors—integration with modularity clustering and a thematic map integrating different spatial scales—and discusses the implications of these fire network maps for governance. The paper's main results are, first, the confirmation of the considerable influence of spatial distance and aspects of human and physical geography on network formation. Second, it shows the capacity of mapping to inform regional fire management arrangements.