Commonly owned forests and common property regimes are types of forest ownership that exist in many European countries in various forms: they include traditional commons with a more or less unbroken history of 500 years or more, typically to be found in Austria, France, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland (Živojinović et al., 2015). As an outcome of land reforms in the 18th and 19th centuries, community-owned or-managed forests were established for instance in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Sweden, and also very recently in the UK (Weiss et al., 2017a). Especially in such recent developments in the UK, third sector ownership is the principal type: it is social enterprises, environmental or other non-profit distributing 1 organisations that increasingly acquire forest for special management objectives that often are also in the public interest. "Social enterprises", also called "social business" (European Union, 2014, 67f.) or "social economy" (European Union, 2014, 37f.) all include not-for profit enterprises who can be promising drivers of social innovations in structurally weak rural regions. Such enterprises strive to tackle social problems and to stabilise and improve the living conditions in these regions. One important factor for their functioning is volunteering. Volunteers are important for social connectedness, social inclusion and enhancement of wellbeing within communities (Brodie et al., 2009). The definition of social innovation (SI) developed within the SIMRA-project 2 is "the reconfiguring of social practices, in response to societal challenges, which seeks to enhance outcomes on societal well-being and necessarily includes the volunteer engagement of civil society actors" (Polman et al., 2017). From this definition it becomes clear that SI is not limited to being associated

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