Anchor Institutions for Community Wealth Building
The Scottish Government wishes to transition towards a wellbeing economy. Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a key means to enable this transition. CWB takes a people-centred and place-based approach to improving the wellbeing of communities, placing control back into the hands of local people and redirecting wealth locally. CWB is a core part of the Scottish Government's wider National Strategy for Economic Transformation and aims to "enable more local communities and people to own, have a stake in, access and benefit from the wealth our economy generates... [partially through] community-owned assets and shorter supply chains." This could be achieved by "developing more local and social enterprises", for example. This policy agenda is underpinned by the 4th National Planning Framework (NPF4) which aims to reform the planning system to deliver "radical change... and create great places" (p.95). NPF4 identifies CWB as core to the development of these places and to support other positive outcomes related to communities.
Within CWB discourses (and other related discourses, such as Entrepreneurial Ecosystems), the role of Anchor Institutions in rural areas has been highlighted as critical in providing greater economic and social resilience. "In a rural context, a network of local institutions scaffold together to create an anchor network" (McAreavey, 2022) with physical infrastructures acting as nodal points in these networks for activities to occur from. The main activities pursued in these places vary, from providing workspaces (including co-working spaces) for rural businesses, social events, warm hubs, meeting spaces, shops or community services.
As budgets have tightened and the public sector has withdrawn from many communities, the role of providing essential services has increasingly been undertaken by community, voluntary and third sector organisations. The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 provides a mechanism which enables communities to initiate Asset Transfers for buildings or land that they feel can be managed in ways that would deliver better outcomes than through the public sector, such as disused or under-utilised buildings.
However, despite their growing importance, little is known about the determinants of success in community-run infrastructures. Evaluating the success of these projects in economic terms is problematic, and few studies have attempted to use wellbeing metrics of success to evaluate such infrastructures (with the exception of Merrell, Fuzi et al., 2022 for entreprise hubs and Cabras et al., 2012 for village pubs and halls). The nuances of different ownership models (Development Trust, Community Interest Company, Social Enterprise, Leased etc.) and the extent to which differing degrees of remoteness affects the provision or success of community-led infrastructures is also something that warrants further investigation.
To answer these questions, the Rural Policy Centre has a new PhD project commending in October 2024. The study will utilise case studies of community-owned infrastructures across rural Scotland. Qualitative interviews with managers of these spaces and key stakeholders will help to decipher the main determinants of success. The outcome of this PhD project will be an increased understanding of how these community-owned assets function and their key determinants of success across a range of different geographies and socio-economic challenges across rural, island and coastal Scotland. The evidence will help to inform the CWB agenda and provide a set of wellbeing metrics that will be vital in informing and measuring Scotland's just transition towards a wellbeing economy. There is a clear need for evidence which is also practice-focused, which could help more communities engage in CWB.
We are thrilled to welcome Bryn Smith to the team as our successful PhD candidate. Bryn is an ethnographer and has a First Class BA in Management Studies (with Finance) from the University of Leicester and a Masters (with Distinction) in Social and Environmental Anthropology from the University of Kent. His MA dissertation focused on regenerative agriculture practitioners and alternative food systems in south Wales. This study took an ethnographic approach over a two-month period at a contested ecovillage site.