Mediterranean territories have co-evolved and been shaped by fire throughout history. However, global environmental change conditions are increasing the size, intensity and severity of wildfires, which have gone from a regular natural disturbance to a serious threat for civil protection, surpassing firefighting capacities. Therefore, building resilience in fire-prone territories is an increasingly relevant policy and management objective. However, the notion of resilience has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to key social issues such as socio-political dynamics, power imbalances and societal change. At the same time, social science contributions to wildfire research are still rather limited. In this paper, we bridge social innovation theory to resilience theory in order to create a territorially embedded and socially sensitive framework for assessing socio-ecological resilience. From this perspective, we then examine how Forest Defence Groups (ADFs, by their Catalan acronym) have evolved from grassroots, bottom-up initiatives to well-established bottom-linked institutions and we evaluate their contributions to socio-ecological resilience in the territories where they operate. Our results show that ADFs contribute in several aspects to socio-ecological resilience and that the pave the way for opening up spaces of dialogue and collaboration through which local communities can engage with the issues that directly affect them, such as wildfires.

在整个历史中，地中海领土共同进化并被火塑造。然而，全球环境变化条件正在增加野火的规模、强度和严重程度，野火已经从常规的自然干扰变成对公民保护的严重威胁，超过了消防能力。因此，在易发生火灾的地区建立复原力是一个越来越相关的政策和管理目标。然而，韧性的概念因对社会政治动态、权力不平衡和社会变革等关键社会问题关注不足而受到批评。与此同时，社会科学对野火研究的贡献仍然相当有限。在本文中，我们将社会创新理论与复原力理论联系起来，以创建一个地域嵌入和社会敏感的框架来评估社会生态复原力。然后，我们从这个角度研究森林防御小组（ADF，以其加泰罗尼亚语的首字母缩写词）已经从草根、自下而上的倡议演变为成熟的底层联系机构，我们评估了它们对所在地区社会生态恢复力的贡献。我们的研究结果表明，ADF 在多个方面有助于社会生态恢复力，并为开辟对话和合作空间铺平了道路，当地社区可以通过这些空间参与直接影响他们的问题，例如野火。