Working the insider–outsider hyphen in action research for sustainability: tensions in citizen-led multi-stakeholder forest dialogues

Socio-ecological crises such as global warming and biodiversity loss have resulted in calls for action research for sustainability. This article provides an account of one action research for sustainability to expand the understanding of how such processes can address the cultural dualisms and hierarchies identified in ecofeminism. The need to both protect and use forests has resulted in heated debates in which citizens are underrepresented. I as a scholar was involved in a working group that established and managed a citizen-led, multi-stakeholder forest movement that organised 15 forest dialogues between 2018 and 2022. This article describes what happened when the Our Forests citizen movement entered the heated Finnish forest policy debates. More particularly, I explore my movement as a scholar and that of the Our Forests working group in the insider–outsider hyphen. While Our Forests managed to attract key forest stakeholders to dialogues to enrich participants’ understandings and learn from each other, mistrust and looping forest debates undermined further consensus. To enable societal transformation, paying more attention to hyphen-spaces along which participants move can reveal what is shared – and what is not – between participants in action research for sustainability and form new alliances.