Is forest related decision-making in European treeline areas socially innovative? A Q-methodology enquiry into the perspectives of international experts

Treeline areas provide a range of ecosystem services, but there are diverging views as to how and for whose benefit, these ecosystem services are managed. Applying a Q-method, we explore experts' attitudes towards forest related decision-making and governance in treeline areas to reveal the attitudinal divergences that exist and analyse patterns of shared assumptions forming attitude-related communities. Experiences, trends, opportunities and challenges in European treeline area decision-making are considered. Our results reveal four attitude-related communities, representing four distinctive types of expert attitudes. Findings demonstrate a number of similarities in attitudes among experts indicating, for example, that treeline area decision-making is hardly socially innovative as it tends to happen in a top-down manner. However, some do and others don't see tree-line governance beneficial from an ecological perspective. The attitudinal heterogeneity identified offers insights into treeline decision-making and could, therefore, be useful to public decision-makers in addressing the opinions of each attitudinal group on a case-by-case basis. The general conclusions are that forest related decision-making in treeline areas requires social innovation and a high level of stakeholder competence and capacity-building; and that an improved knowledge of experts' attitudes, together with an emphasis on increased participation in decision-making, could be of help to policy and practice communities in triggering innovative changes locally.