Project Lead
Challenges
To ensure economic well-being in island and rural areas it is essential to enhance the knowledge base to enable evidence-based policy decisions that demonstrate an understanding of rural and island economies and better target infrastructural and business support investments. Rural and island-proofing our future economic policies and funding streams can ensure these regions and communities are no longer considered disadvantaged. Rather they are endowed with the necessary opportunities to increase well-being and sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
The evolving evidence base reveals that the rural business base is different from urban areas. Further, new economic opportunities are emerging for rural businesses in terms of Green Recovery and growing the natural economy. Our rural infrastructure underpins the success of these rural and island economies' opportunities. However persistent issues regarding affordable housing, transport and digital connectivity continue to hinder economic development in some locations. New measures and metrics are required to assess the contribution of these activities fully and accurately to improving health and wellbeing and reducing inequalities.
Community Wealth Building (CWB) is of increasing importance to the Scottish Government to ensure “local people and businesses have a genuine stake in producing, owning and enjoying the wealth they create”. New CWB research is needed to highlight opportunities and challenges for rural businesses and communities.
With the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU) complete, there remains uncertainty over the funding budgets and priorities, particularly regarding replacements for EU support mechanisms that many rural economies, communities, and particularly farms and crofts have become reliant on. There is an increased need to evolve the way we approach food production to meet environmental and climate-related goals. In this context, there is a greater imperative within Scotland to explore options for measuring the resilience and challenges of local food production, processing, and distribution.
Providing evidence on business support and infrastructure gaps and opportunities can help both the Scottish and UK Governments better target future support stimulate infrastructure investment, foster innovation, and improve economic resilience in rural and island economies and communities, particularly in the context of a Just Transition and the Scottish Government’s climate change ambitions.
Questions
- How do we identify and address the opportunities and challenges of rural enterprises, to contribute to a well-being economy?
- How can we best measure the opportunities, extent and barriers facing community wealth generation in rural contexts?
- What are the barriers and opportunities to meeting rural housing requirements?
Solutions
The purpose of this project is to provide an improved evidence base for rural and island economies. The project will generate innovative thinking and recommendations to overcome perceived, often embedded, challenges and highlight opportunities to maximise opportunities for rural and island areas to “flourish.”
Rural Enterprises
- We provide quantitative evidence on the rural and island business base in Scotland, including insights into their characteristics, challenges and changes over time.
- We develop business operational insights from priority rural and island business sectors, with associated policy recommendations.
- We are generating evidence on digital use and barriers across business sectors.
This work blends quantitative analysis of secondary data with primary data collection (digital survey) and qualitative contextual case studies across industries and geographies.
Community Wealth Building
We are assessing the rural and island implications and impacts of the CWB concept and its operation in practice through case study work of rural CWB projects. This includes identifying and analysing international CWB projects to learn appropriate lessons for rural and island communities in Scotland. Linked to community empowerment, the project explores ways in which rural and island communities might be empowered to influence local decisions, shape rural and island services, and directly address poverty, through the encouragement of local economic development.
Agriculture beyond EU-Exit
We expand our models of agricultural support payments to assess how future changes to the agricultural support framework in Scotland may impact individuals, sectors, and geographies (including the islands) on farms and crofts as well as in upstream and downstream industries. We are establishing a platform to highlight opportunities and risks to the agriculture sector emerging from new UK Free Trade Agreements.
Regional Food Economies
During the Covid-19 pandemic, some businesses were able to pivot to local demand and saw real growth in online sales and direct-to-consumer sales with increased investment in digital marketing supported by novel platforms such as the neighbourhood or open food network. We examine the role that local food economies can play in bringing about a more resilient, healthy, and environmentally sustainable Scottish food system and what is needed to release the potential in local foods. The pandemic and impacts of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, coincided, impacting our food systems through changing demand profiles for food and processing plants as well as logistical disruptions.
Assessing Peripherality
This cross-cutting and experimental research investigates methodological options for assessing economic peripherality based on industrial sectors. This novel work aims to provide context-specific peripherality maps concerning economies or communities.
Economic Infrastructure
This cross-cutting theme relates to housing, transport and digital connectivity infrastructure and services that underpin economic activity in the islands and rural areas. We embed infrastructure analysis and data collection through all areas of this project to draw out relevant themes, conclusions, and recommendations from this work.
Rural Exchange
We are establishing Rural Exchange as a key knowledge-sharing platform This web-based platform provides access to summary data (following data-sharing protocols) and relevant outputs and includes a social media presence to inform a wide range of stakeholders. Rural Exchange helps deliver to the open science agenda and provides a new way of gathering ideas, information, and commentary from rural and island businesses – giving them a voice.
Project Partners
Progress
The operating environment for rural businesses is evolving rapidly (e.g., Brexit, Covid, cost of living crisis, high fuel prices, postal strikes, workforce shortages), whilst policy developments also affect business confidence and resilience (e.g., agricultural support, land reform, community wealth building, housing, energy, marine protection). This project has started to provide improved quantitative and qualitative insights on the factors affecting rural and island economies (important to Research Questions (RQ) 1 'Rural Economies'), using a wide variety of data into topics as diverse as rural housing, fuel costs, electric vehicle charge points, regional and sectoral economic performance, business confidence and resilience, housing affordability, etc. This evidence has provided the context to develop case studies on the operational ('lived-in') experiences of entrepreneurs in our rural and island regions (to address RQ7 'Rural Exchange') - focusing on the hospitality and seafood sectors due to the impacts of Covid and Brexit on their customer base and operating environments.
Our research has started to explore the particular opportunities and challenges that Community Wealth Building (CWB) approaches can bring to rural and island contexts (RQ 2 'Community Wealth Building'). We find that emphasis on progressive procurement processes, embedding fair work principles, and shared ownership and management models regarding enterprise and natural capital, all provide opportunities to grow and circulate wealth in communities.
Our models and analysis demonstrate how important agricultural support mechanisms are for farmers and crofters (RQ 5 'Assessing Peripherality'), particularly in remote and island areas that are often blessed with biodiversity and climate mitigation opportunities. Our research is also assessing agricultural policy impacts on wider rural and island economies through wider agri-food supply chains - including the growing importance of local food and regional food economies in rural and island locations (RQ 7). Our new conceptual and analytical framework to reimagine economic peripherality uses weighted distances to upstream and downstream supply chains.
Embedded across our research is a lens on how infrastructural barriers (e.g., transport, housing and digital connectivity) impact on rural and island communities and economic performance (RQs 3 'Agriculture beyond EU-Exit', 4 'Regional Food Economies' and 6 'Economic Infrastructure'). That infrastructure has come into sharp focus during Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. House price inflation - driven in part by post-Covid out-migration from urban areas is a particular barrier to local economies - with businesses reporting problems attracting workers to some areas due to the lack of affordable housing options.
Our new Rural Exchange platform has developed an innovative approach to open science and knowledge exchange. We are developing interactive data presentation, podcasts, reports, blogs, etc. that draw on our analytical outputs and provide real opportunities for two-way sharing of ideas that can provide feedback loops from stakeholders, communities and businesses.
Impact of this project
Our researchers are heavily embedded in the development of agricultural policy in Scotland using data and models developed in this project. We continue to support the Scottish Government's agricultural reform programme through commissioned advice, concepts and analysis, but also through the Academic advisory Panel for the Agriculture Reform Implementation Oversight Board (ARIOB) - including membership of ARIOB sub-groups on (i) future support for less favoured/peripheral areas and (ii) animal health and welfare.
Our researchers were also active in providing an independent evaluation of the Starter Farm Initiative, reporting to the Farming Opportunities for New Entrants (FONE) Group, and have written a policy brief that considers policy implications from the finding in the context of new farming entrants, land reform and agricultural tenure.
Expertise on agriculture and land use has resulted in the principal investigator of this project being appointed as a Commissioner within the Just Transition Commission in 2023 that provides an opportunity to embed wider rural and island community and economy into the Commission's and Scottish Government thinking on the Just Transition Plans.
Link to the associated National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE) where we are associate partners and the Scottish hub.
There has been a lot of activity in generating new data insights from many novel databases and building new databases and models using Scottish Government official data.
In Work Package 1: Rural Enterprises we published our 2023 Rural and Islands Insights Report that provides new evidence of demographic change, housing affordability and second homes, transport, the enterprise base, workforce, earning and gender pay gap, impacts of Covid, etc. We also published our new NISRIE analytical framework that specifically brings attention to very remote (more than an hours drive from a major urban centre) mainland towns and rural areas as well as Scotland's Islands. We published findings from interviews of businesses engaged in the short term rented accommodation sector showcasing their 'lived in' experiences and providing a spotlight on the challenges faced regarding Brexit, Covid, the cost of living crisis, access to labour, affordable housing and regulations. We are gathering new evidence from the sea fishing sector, ferries, broadband and mobile coverage, energy performance ratings of housing, agricultural change, etc for the 2024 insights report.
We have collated insights on Community Wealth Building (CWB) in Work Package 2 and have developed a report on policy considerations for rural and island contexts and the issues of implementation in dispersed, and remote (from urban centres), communities. We have provided some insights from international examples of CWB and working with Scottish Government to complete our planned work on lessons from case study examples from within Scotland.
In Work Package 3 we have now received Scottish Government data that has permitted the development of our data platform and the development of our Scottish Agricultural Economic Model that uniquely estimates economic data for all businesses claiming agricultural support. The model has been evolved further to respond to policy requests on predicting uptake and compliance costs for future agriculture policy scenarios. Long term trend databases have been developed for agricultural holdings and businesses that will enable delayed narratives on how Scottish agriculture is transforming to be told. Whilst work on international production and trade data has been delayed due to our database building it will be forthcoming in 2024.
In Work Package 4 we have published a report on concepts around local food and regional food economies, considering the Scottish context and available data sources. We have also scrutinised available data to provide an overview and analytical findings report on food and drink sector including relative densities of clusters of food and drink businesses across Scotland's regions. We have had to rebuild our Rural Exchange due to factors beyond our control and are populating this with reports, insights and data. Whilst the Rural Exchange in our related ReRIC project prioritises the site to engage with rural dwellers, in NISRIE the site is more focused on developing data insights (including interactive) and report repository. Our novel experimental framework to assess economic peripherality of businesses within a sector is completed and has been trialled on 2 economic sectors with a report due in March 2024. There has been positive feedback to the Rural and Islands Insights Report 2023 (>900 unique downloads) that provided novel data insights on rural and island communities and economies. There has also been considerable interest in suggesting topics for the 2024 report that we have been working on. Stakeholders have reported the positive contribution that the NISRIE analytical framework provides (separating very remote mainland and islands in the Scottish Government's urban rural definitions) in considering national topic narratives.
Work on agricultural policy impacts includes: (1) a new economic model for assessing agricultural policy impacts; (2) New panel databases at agricultural holding / business level that are being used to provide change narratives within sectors and across geographies; (3) Policy interactions at all levels (including industry liaison) are offering our data and expert insights to a wide audience. New lived in experiences of businesses operating in the Scottish tourism accommodation sector have shone a light on the challenges businesses have had to endure in the last few years with Brexit, Covid, cost of living and our new infrastructure analysis is shining a light on transport, digital and housing challenges. In-person end-of-year workshop planned for June to share update and increase policy engagement.
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