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Novel insights on Scotland’s rural and island economies

Novel insights on Scotland’s rural and island economies

  • Rural Economy
  • 2022-2027
Sustainable Development icon: decent work and economic growth
Sustainable Development icon: reduced inequality
Sustainable Development icon: sustainable cities and communities

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 on 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 Covid-19 pandemic and the impacts of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU coincided, impacting our food systems through changing demand profiles for food and processing plants and 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.

Related Projects

How rural economies can adapt to key external drivers

The aim of this RD is to improve understanding of recent and anticipated adaptive responses to environmental change, policy drivers and market shifts. This will identify processes of innovation, diversification and collaborative action in agricultural household adjustment and assess future influences on the adaptive capacity of segments of the agriculture sector. 

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Resilience of rural economies to key external drivers

The aim of this RD is to address how well Scotland’s rural industries (e.g. farming, forestry and tourism) can cope with outside pressures such as price volatility, new trade agreements and changes in government policies. The key drivers for this research are:

  • There are concerns about the long-term viability of some rural businesses due to their lack of profitability.
  • ...
  • Improving Agricultural Practice
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