Governance Capacity of Public Actors for Forest-Based Social Innovation

As forests provide multiple goods and services (e.g. wood, carbon sequestration, tourism, etc.) forestry is one of the sectors with very high potentials for eco-innovation and a potential contributor to wicked problem solutions. At the same time, forestry is one of the traditional forest sectors, with the hierarchical organization and domination of public actors – the traits that are considered as barriers to innovation. The public sector is under increasing pressures to innovate and collaborate in solving wicked problems and providing public goods and services. In the last decade, the European Union strongly promoted social innovation as a mean for solving collective problems. Socially innovative solutions include shifting the roles of the public sector towards civil society in and provisioning public goods and services. As the governance capacity of public actors for forest-based SI is a new and under-explored field, this research aimed in filling this gap. Thus, this research explored governance capacity of public actors for forest-based SI using several methods (literature review and analysis, survey, in-depth case study) that correspond to four interrelated studies: 1) development of analytical framework; 2) testing on the assumption of the role of public actors in SI; 3) in-depth analysis of public actors roles in the Charcoal land initiative and their capacities; 4) analysis of policy framework conditions. As concepts of governance capacity and SI are very broad and elusive, the first study of this research identified key constructs of governance capacity and SI. Key identified constructs were actors (individual, organization, and SI initiative), their roles, governance sub-capacities (task-related and personality-related), and context (temporal, spatial, and social). The central construct of the framework was one of the roles, as it makes a bridge among individual actors, public organizations, and SI initiatives. The proposed analytical framework assumed that public actors act as agents of SI. The first empirical step was to identify the organizational roles of public actors in SI and to test if those roles significantly influence SI initiatives. With this aim, the European wide online survey was used as a basic method in the second study. Although the response rate of the survey was too low to test the hypothesis, results indicated that public actors have multiple roles in SI initiatives. These roles ranged from an administrative and advisory role to lobbing, resourcing and networking role. Results also indicated that the roles of public actors do influence SI initiatives, both positively and negatively. A proposed analytical framework was further applied in an in-depth case study using unstructured and semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The case study explored the Charcoal Land initiative that innovated and reconfigured traditional charcoal burning practice, and led to its spreading in Slovenia. The third study of overall research focused on the constructs of individual and organizational actors, as well as their roles. The results of this study indicated that individual public actors act as bridges between their organization and SI initiative. Results also pointed out that personality-related capacities - adaptive, learning and deliberative are crucial for obtaining organizational support and accessing resources necessary for initiative development. The fourth study on policy framework conditions for SI in Slovenia showed that the current policy framework supports the establishment of social enterprises, so non-market, forestry-based SI initiatives cannot be institutionalized as such. Forest-based SI initiatives such as the Charcoal Land will still have to navigate through policy framework conditions, using their own capacities to apply for resources available through the Rural Development Programme and forest policy instruments that target cooperation and networking.