Plans on the shelf or living frameworks? Community wildfire planning and adaptive capacity in the Pacific Northwest

Climate change is intensifying wildfire risk in the Pacific Northwest, placing local governments and First Nations at the forefront of navigating disturbance and adaptation. This study draws on resilience theory to examine how Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) in Oregon and Washington, and Community Wildfire Resiliency Plans (CWRPs) in British Columbia shape the adaptive capacity of communities—or, conversely, are constrained by institutional inertia and uneven resourcing. CWPPs/CWRPs are treated as both policy instruments and adaptive governance arrangements, with analysis focused on four interrelated outcome dimensions: collaboration, mitigation effectiveness, implementation, and preparedness. Using cross-jurisdictional survey data from 189 communities, counties, and First Nations collected in 2024–2025, the study provides a comparative assessment of plan prevalence, scope, and perceived effectiveness across distinct governance and funding regimes. Results show that CWPPs/CWRPs are broadly viewed as enhancing wildfire resilience, but performance is uneven: Oregon and Washington consistently report stronger outcomes than British Columbia across all four dimensions. Multivariate discriminant analyses reveal a strikingly consistent pattern across outcomes: community education and outreach is by far the strongest and most reliable predictor of high performance, dwarfing all other factors. Remoteness, funding availability, and monitoring and updating mechanisms play secondary, enabling roles, while participation structure matters primarily for collaboration rather than for implementation or outcomes. By operationalizing resilience theory through concrete governance outcomes, the study clarifies when community wildfire planning functions as a living, learning-oriented framework for adaptation and when it instead reproduces institutional inertia through weakly resourced and communication-poor implementation. The findings underscore the central importance of social learning and sustained outreach as the foundation of effective community-scale wildfire resilience in multi-level governance systems.