Experiencing forests as professionals: Meanings and tensions in sustainability transitions

Forest professionals' lived relationships with forests are deeply entangled with meanings that shape management practices, responses to sustainability challenges, and interactions with stakeholders. This study examines how these meanings emerge through embodied experience, personal life histories, and socialisation into historically rooted professional cultures. Drawing on 37 interviews with Finnish forest professionals and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the findings illuminate the forest as a central part of their lifeworld—an embodied, sensory space where human and tree generations intersect and where interspecies and interpersonal relations unfold. Participants experienced the forest as socially shared yet professionally governed—a source of security, belonging, and continuity. These relationships were shaped by situational roles in work, family, and leisure, and marked by psychological ownership, embodied attachments, and hierarchical norms. While forests were often understood and framed as resources for human well-being, professionals also articulated meanings that disrupted dominant narratives, exposing tensions between economic rationalities and more relational, socio-ecological understandings. The findings further show how belonging to a historically rooted professional community fosters cohesion but may also limit the expression of alternative values. In conflict situations, rational, fact-based discourse often conceals emotional and ontological dimensions, hindering dialogue and deepening tensions. Recognising these lived connections brings to light a shared experiential ground that underlies dialogue and shapes possibilities for professional well-being and collaborative approaches to sustainability transitions. • Professional expertise and lived knowledge foster a felt sense of ownership. • Forests are lived as embodied, intergenerational spaces of security. • Professional culture shapes norms, belonging, and identity. • Economic meanings anchor community, though not always shared. • IPA illuminates lived forest meanings through participants' voices.