Abstract The forest sector in various ways fosters employment, community development and prevents depopulation in marginalized rural areas. Since the economic recession in Europe from 2009, there has been a notable change regarding the roles that public and private actors play in tackling current social and economic problems. The term Social Innovation (SI) came up to denote the overcoming of complex societal challenges with an increase of engagement of civil society (private actors). So far, collective values of ecosystem services, health and recreational benefits have been researched extensively. But the role of policies in socially innovative forest sector activities for the enhancement of collective action and collective benefits still leaves room for research. This article asks how relevant were policies as drivers of institutional change for forestry related examples of social innovation? The question is examined across different European countries with a focus on the policies identified as relevant for these innovations by a panel of experts and researchers. We used selected case studies in combination with literature as well as policy document analysis and complementary policy expert interviews. We focus on the policies that have affected these activities and investigate in detail on their relevance for the outcome (the SI). Our findings indicate that there is more than one direction of policies impacting upon the SI initiatives, because vice-versa, there is also SI impacting on the policies. Both directions lead to institutional change in the final outcomes, either in the policy design (bottom-up influence) or in the social innovation (ultimately changes in the actors-institutions relations and the creation of new institutions with the SI). Policies can be either drivers of SI or they can be outcome when new policies were created because of the transformative effects of SI. Furthermore, we detect policies that turn out “neutral” towards social innovation at the moment but with potential effects in future.

中文翻译：

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政策对林业和后退社会创新的影响：作为驱动因素和结果的制度变革

摘要 林业部门以各种方式促进就业、社区发展并防止边缘化农村地区的人口减少。自 2009 年欧洲经济衰退以来，公共和私人行为者在解决当前社会和经济问题方面的作用发生了显着变化。社会创新 (SI) 一词的出现表示随着公民社会（私人参与者）参与的增加，克服了复杂的社会挑战。迄今为止，生态系统服务、健康和娱乐效益的集体价值已得到广泛研究。但政策在促进集体行动和集体利益的社会创新森林部门活动中的作用仍有待研究。本文询问政策作为制度变革的驱动因素与林业相关的社会创新实例的相关性如何？这个问题在不同的欧洲国家进行了研究，重点是由专家和研究人员组成的小组确定的与这些创新相关的政策。我们将选定的案例研究与文献以及政策文件分析和补充政策专家访谈结合使用。我们关注影响这些活动的政策，并详细调查它们与结果（SI）的相关性。我们的研究结果表明，影响 SI 计划的政策方向不止一个，因为反之亦然，也有 SI 影响政策。两个方向都会导致最终结果的制度变迁，无论是在政策设计（自下而上的影响）还是在社会创新（最终改变参与者与机构的关系以及与 SI 一起创建新机构）。政策既可以是 SI 的驱动因素，也可以是由于 SI 的变革性影响而制定新政策时的结果。此外，我们发现目前对社会创新“中立”但在未来具有潜在影响的政策。