Assessing Policy‐Oriented Learning About Climate‐Related Forest Disturbances in Europe

ABSTRACT European forests provide multiple ecosystem services but are increasingly under pressure from climate‐related disturbances such as droughts, storms and insect calamities. Forest policy is an important driver for the adaptation of forest management practices to climate change. The paper aims at exploring how individual policy actors from four European countries perceive and learn about various forest policy topics in the context of climate‐related disturbances. Informed by the Advocacy Coalition Framework, it addresses the research question of how flexible and divisive their beliefs about different topics are, in order to identify areas with high and low propensity for policy‐oriented learning. Based on focus group discussions and the assessments of policy actors' beliefs at three points in time between 2023 and 2025, we found for about half of the assessed forest policy topics a relatively high propensity for policy‐oriented learning through contestation or collaboration. All assessed empirical policy core beliefs about policy instruments and approximately half of the studied normative policy core beliefs on the perceived importance of forest uses and about whose welfare counts most in forest management showed a rather high degree of belief alteration. Contrary to theoretical expectations, the results did not show a higher degree of alteration for secondary beliefs than for policy core beliefs. The paper thereby makes an empirical contribution to research on forest and environmental policy and, through its analytical framework to assess the propensity of policy‐oriented learning, a theoretical contribution to the literature on policy learning and the Advocacy Coalition Framework.