Community Led Local Development
The Community Led Local Development (CLLD) section of the SRUC report Rural and Agricultural Development: Maximising the potential in the islands of Orkney, Shetland and Outer Hebrides can be downloaded as a stand alone document from the link below. The data for this section of the report was collected through a desk-based review of key documents as well as individual and group interviews with stakeholders across all three island groups. A selection of the points raised in this section of the report includes:
- All three island groups have undertaken evaluation work on their (past) LEADER and (more recent) CLLD projects and activities. These reports demonstrate the diversity of activities taking place, and the range of impacts achieved. The introduction of the Social Value Engine methodology for measuring the wider social impacts of CLLD activity has helped to demonstrate the scale of the important but less tangible aspects of the approach.
- CLLD is important to the resilience and sustainability of island communities and some of the unique challenges faced in delivering it, in all its shapes and forms.
- There are many examples of community organisations delivering a huge range of projects across the islands, from affordable housing provision, to shops, cafes and restaurants, community centres, to electric vehicles for community transport, to small scale funding for wellbeing initiatives and for local people to upskill. However, the loss of EU LEADER funding has been significant for rural and island communities across Scotland.
- While the Scottish Government’s continuation of CLLD funding has been welcomed, it is also acknowledged that there are challenges with this, the most important being the short timescales for delivering CLLD projects - often less than one year and often during winter months when delays are more likely.
- The continuation of local CLLD structures and processes, such as the Local Action Group, are important and could help in terms of the allocation of a range of other funding in future. These are important to ensure CLLD activity meets local priorities, but also deliver to important national policy agendas.
- An island location, and particularly an outer island location, brings a range of challenges to delivering CLLD, not least due to the additional costs and unreliability of transporting people and materials, particularly by ferry. A second key challenge for island communities is a lack of affordable housing. While this challenge is shared by many mainland rural communities, delivering affordable housing on islands is especially difficult again in large part due to the additional costs and unreliability of transport for labour and supplies.
- While islands have risen up the policy and political agenda in Scotland in recent years with new legislation (including to undertake ICIAs) and islands-specific plans, there was a sense in which, despite consultation and engagement taking place, national policymakers do not adequately take islands and their specific circumstances into account in their decision-making.
The download link to this section of the report is found below, or you can return to the main report page here.