Continuous Cover Forestry Practitioners in a Clear-cutting-oriented System: Assessing the Potential to Foster the Practice

Recently, changes in society have brought about the rediscovery of continuous cover forestry (CCF) as a forest management approach that helps to create multifunctional forests. However, the practice of CCF is only used in a relatively small area in the world, and its development potential is unclear. We studied the potential of forest owners practising CCF to act as niche experimenters to provide clear-cutting-oriented Estonian forestry with experience for the development of CCF for specific needs. We adopt a multi-level perspective of socio-technical transitions, which proposes that forest owners’ silvicultural choices develop and are stabilised in a complex, change-resistant and cross-sectoral framework that is formed by actors’ networks, material artefacts and rules. The spread of the alternative silvicultural approach depends on the susceptibility of this framework, but also on owners’ ability to form experimental niches: protected “incubation rooms” of change. To explore that potential, we visited eighteen forests and interviewed their owners to study their experiences in the enhancement of CCF. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates that the wider adoption of CCF is hindered due to several lock-in mechanisms in Estonian forestry but supported by related sectors. Some owners can apply CCF even within the present forestry framework due to their particular social embedding. However, it is unlikely that forest owners will start using CCF unless the forestry framework changes. We propose an analytical tool to enforce experimental CCF niche formation among the forest owners, as the necessity to apply CCF in the nearest future may increase.