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Organizations, such as forest management cooperatives (FMCs), are established to support private forest owners to deal with structural and natural challenges that they cannot handle on their own. In 2018, Feil et al. found in a nationwide survey that only 30% of German private forest owners are members of FMCs. This low participation rate of private forest owners in FMCs in Germany poses a problem for the further development of organizations that can better consider the needs of private forest owners and also meet the timber market's long-term requirements for larger quantities of timber as well as become an equal negotiation partner of the sawmill industry. This problem can be attributed to social interactions, which are considered influential for cooperation between private forest owners. This paper aims to highlight different groups of private forest owners in Germany and their cooperation based on social interaction. To do so, it refers to the categories of actor-centered institutionalism (ACI) and complements these with symbolic interactionism. Methodologically, the paper is based on a quantitative online survey of 1007 private forest owners in Germany. The survey itself was prepared by the authors and conducted by the pollster firm forsa, Germany in the period from 14 to 29 July 2020. In addition to standard research topics in forest related research, such as family tradition and income generation, the questionnaire also focused on social interaction. A hierarchical cluster analysis based on the values of a principal component analysis (PCA) was used both to ensure a neutral view on the data and to create heterogeneous groups of private forest owners. Four distinct clusters were defined through the cluster analysis: “actively exchanging”, “perceivers”, “uninterested” and “self-referential”. These clusters differ mainly in relation to their preferred forms of social interaction. It can be concluded that not only communication but also social interaction in the form of symbolic interaction has an influence on forest owners' cooperation with FMCs. For forestry practice, this means that in regions where there are currently no FMC members, new members could be won in the future by creating forest management activities that encourage cooperation with FMCs.

Collaborative participatory policy approaches based on foresight methodology have recently been proposed as promising governance tools to achieve sustainability in general, and address and manage challenges of integrating competing demands on forest land use (e.g., timber production, nature protection, recreation) in particular. Their main argument is that participatory processes will bring policy actors together. Based on long- and short-term future-oriented thinking and actions, they will overcome their previous value-laden and interest-based conflicts through informed communication, deliberation, policy learning and mutual cooperation. But do policy actors learn when they are thinking, debating and shaping the ‘forest futures’ they want to achieve or avoid? To what extent are current beliefs, values, worldviews, and conflict structures projected onto the future? What are their impacts on policy learning today? This paper addresses these research questions from a knowledge-based perspective of relevant policy learning theories. We trace changes and stability in beliefs, values (perception) and behavior (cooperation/conflict) among the involved policy actors. We assess to what extent future-oriented thinking and discussions contribute to, or inhibit, policy learning today. Empirically, the paper is informed by three case studies of regional ‘forest futures’ processes in Germany. They include forest landscapes in Upper Palatinate and South of Munich in Bavaria, and the Black Forest National Park in Baden-Wurttemberg. They represent different cases in terms of levels of stakeholder conflicts, integrative/segregative forest land use approaches, and the rural/urban divide. The paper is based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and documents about past and future forest land use, and observation of participatory scenario-building and back-casting workshops during 2011–2014. In our analysis, we found that forest policy actors adhered to their pre-existing beliefs and remained divided in terms of present and future aspects of sustainable forest management. That is, we observed no substantial or only strategic policy learning among the involved policy actors. We explain these findings in terms of competing actors' belief systems and worldviews that lead to competing understandings and expectations of ‘forest futures’. We discuss our research against the theoretical propositions and in view of the state-of-the art. We draw conclusions relevant for scholars and policymakers interested in collaborative policy learning processes, and suggest possible topics for further research.