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
Over the last decade, the term social innovation has received increased attention as a potential solution to address complex global social problems and to add collective values to society. The forest sector has great potential for fostering employment, community development and reducing increased emigration from rural to urban areas. This potential is not always realised, especially in economically weak and remote rural areas. Hence, this paper tackles the question of how social innovations in forestry are able to succeed under adverse circumstances and contribute to respond to some of the before mentioned challenges? To answer this question, we first identified four very different cases across Europe that are compatible with the criteria of social innovation. Proceeding from this starting point, comparative research was undertaken with the aim to identify the cases´ specific features and key criteria for success. In the cases considered, it is evident that the sheer determination and voluntary investment of time and effort by key individuals, who were convinced of the value of the idea for the community, provided indispensable impetus to all four social innovations. In drawing its conclusions, this paper highlights the principal areas that need consideration and that hence have implications when developing supportive policies. Furthermore, we provide some insight into future research topics that would allow us to better understand the positive impacts of social innovation in the forest-based sector.
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