Crisis Leadership and Collaborative Governance in Forest and Land Fire Management: A Systematic Literature Review Using the TCCM–ADO Framework

Abstract

Forest and land fires require leadership, interorganizational coordination, information management, resource mobilization, and community participation. Yet research on wildfire leadership, cross-jurisdictional collaboration, firefighter safety, and forest-and-land-fire governance differs in context, unit of analysis, and outcome measures, which limits comparability. This article presents a systematic literature review of 51 studies published in 2015–2026 (43 core and 8 comparator articles), selected from 447 Scopus records (440 after deduplication) records and reported following PRISMA 2020. The literature is mapped with the Theory–Context–Characteristics–Methods (TCCM) framework and synthesized with the Antecedents–Decisions/Practices–Outcomes (ADO) framework. In the response phase, the most widely coded themes are strategic communication and shared situational awareness (22 articles) and cross-actor coordination and resource negotiation (20 articles). The most widely coded constraint is resource scarcity, time pressure, workload, and fatigue (23 articles), while open information flow and negotiated interdependence each appear as supporting factors in 19 articles. These counts indicate thematic coverage, not effect sizes or causal evidence. The review identifies nine gaps, chiefly the need to link leader competencies and governance conditions to collaborative mechanisms and to operational, safety, and socio-ecological outcomes; to understand power asymmetries; and to test the transferability of wildfire models to Indonesia. The article proposes an integrative ADO model and nine propositions for comparative, longitudinal, and mixed-methods research.