Changing bushfire management practices to incorporate diverse values of the public

Abstract Practice change is essential if environmental agencies are to incorporate diverse values in decision making, but little is currently known about what constrains or enables such change. Over a 19-month period, we observed how environmental professionals responded to an agency request that they consider a wider range of values in strategic bushfire management planning than had been considered in past practice. Through participant observation, interviews and document analysis, we examined how practices did and did not change and what contributed to these outcomes. Practices for assessing well understood values (e.g. towns and houses, ecological resilience) were refined, while practices for handling less familiar values (e.g. animal welfare, economic values and Indigenous cultural heritage) were either maintained, adapted or transformed, with outcomes varying across values and regions. The findings partly confirm expected biases toward values that can be spatially located and quantified, and point to other conditions supporting change to incorporate new types of values: alignment between policy and planning guidance, alignment between a value and priorities of professionals and agencies involved in planning, collaboration that supported input from cross-agency actors, and scope for experimentation. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for agencies seeking to incorporate values in environmental planning.