Lessons from the Scottish Islands: governance, community and change – Interview with Adele Lidderdale

LGIU’s Head of Research and Policy, Jon Gleek, sat down with Adele Lidderdale to discuss her research on governance and community development in the Scottish Islands, and what these unique contexts can teach the wider local government sector. Their conversation explored themes including centralisation, community-led solutions, wellbeing, and the relationship between local and national government.

Adele Lidderdale is a researcher specialising in island governance and community development. Originally from Orkney, she has worked on a range of renewable energy and community projects across the Scottish Islands. Her recent PhD research, supported by UHI and LGIU, explores the development and impact of the National Islands Plan, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to understand how policy is experienced at the local level.

You can watch the interview on YouTube here

Timestamps

00:54 Adele’s background and PhD journey
01:42 Why Scottish Islands matter as a case study
03:00 Research approach and methods
04:56 Key findings overview
06:34 What was missing from the National Islands Plan
08:31 Centralisation of power
09:35 Balancing diverse community needs
11:31 Examples of successful local solutions
14:44 Is there a shared vision for the Islands?
16:16 Transferable lessons beyond the Islands
18:10 Keeping issues on the agenda
21:05 Language and framing communities
24:00 Measuring wellbeing
26:03 Combining qualitative and quantitative insights
27:21 Central and local government dynamics
30:32 Future priorities for local government

Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

So maybe just as a start really, could you just please tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to studying for a PhD on the Scottish Islands?

So I’m an Orcadian or what we would locally call a local lass. I have lived out my career here on the Islands, particularly in Orkney. I worked through various renewable development projects on the Islands. They really were an excellent vector for communities to affect sustainable change in their areas.

But often what we would find was that we would come up against legislative or regulatory barriers. So the journey supporting these projects into implementation really led up to the policy in the end. So it was really a gift to be able to do this PhD research through the UHI with the support from the local authorities and yourselves at LGIU to have a really good look at Islands’ policy.

What do you think makes Scottish Islands a really important case study for

I think with Islands, what you have is this kind of distinct border around this governance unit. And with Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles, they each have their own unique governing arrangements. They have their unitary authority status. So in a sense, they’ve sort of developed their own ways of working and their own polity, having that insular nature and that decision making for themselves. I think it’s a really good advantage looking at the Island governance and we’ll be touching it throughout the interview today, but there’s something that we can learn from looking at these Island based governance models that can translate to the nation. And we also have had this relationship with European governance as well to support our communities and I guess our governance practice in general. So it impacts wider communities, some of the things we found. We’ll see communities in other Islands or other mainland areas that experience the same issues.

Could tell us a little bit about your research, what was involved and what methods you used?

So I think it’s really important to think about the Scottish Islands Act as being a bottom-up arrangement. So really Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles tend to govern themselves. And what we saw through the Island Scotland Act in 2018, it kind of kicked off a lot sooner than that, in 2013, we saw this really unique arrangement where Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles clubbed together to form this collaborative arrangement, which ultimately led to a change in legislation and the National Islands Plan framework and policy.

It was really interesting to look at that unique circumstance where we had this collaborative element, which was really a change in how things had worked. And also as the Islands Act started to come through and the National Islands Plan was published, suddenly there was a lot more international observance of what was happening on the Islands as well. It was quite intriguing. And I think we’re sort of seeing this policy trickle up, what’s the opposite of trickle down? You know, we’re starting to see community wealth building, changes to empowerment acts and things like that in Scotland and changes to governance arrangements in England as well. So I think it’s been really intriguing to look at that unique circumstance.

What I found when I started to dig into the data, there was this programme for amassing quantitative data, looking at postcode data, looking at survey data, but the piece that was missing was really that qualitative aspect, which provision for that was contained within the Island Scotland Act itself. So asking Islanders and asking those local authorities who were involved in developing the Act how they were experiencing this change in policy. So I had a qualitative aspect, but I did have a quantitative aspect as well, and I was able to triangulate those two methods throughout my thesis journey.

I’m sure your PhD was a hugely in-depth piece of research but for the purposes of this interview and just to kick things off, if it’s not an impossible question, what were your main findings or what findings would you really want to highlight to an LGIU audience?

I think that participation in governance across different layers from individuals, community groups, local authorities, up through the different civil servants and government all the way up to ministers. I think the participation is important, not just policy to achieve outcomes. I think what we’ve seen with the National Islands Plan is that where people are not feeling included in meaningful ways, it really does impact how successful the policy is going to be on the other end. So that process is extremely important.

And actually at the inception, the idea of collaboration and centering around common problems was extremely effective for the Islands in negotiating this kind of change in policy for them. And that really an understanding of policy, even though it’s increasingly complex, is absolutely essential because the policies drive investment, allocate resources and change structures and processes. They also offer an insight into future scenarios for your Islands or if you can sort of gather this sort of information about how decisions are going to be made. So I think it’s really important that we get to grips with policy and have that understanding of how it’s going to impact us.

That’s probably a great place to start going into the findings into a bit more detail. The National Islands Plan was created to help and it was created to support Islands but many local councils felt that it hadn’t delivered what it was originally asked for. What do you think were the biggest things missing from this national policy?

I think about the local impact. What I saw across stakeholders – I had 40 interviews with different local authorities, stakeholders, and different community members involved with community groups. But I also had nearly 300 survey respondents from different Islands at that individual level. And really, there was general agreement that the contents of the plan were good. Nothing could be added and nothing could be taken away. So it really was that process, that meaningful representation that something had been missed in capturing how Islands see themselves.

So we call that in Island studies “islandness”. That was the part that was kind of missing rather than having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. With such a strong start from three Island authorities working together, the local tier of governance I felt was maybe underutilised in the delivery of the National Islands Plan.

And what we saw quite quickly was resources and funding from the Scottish government going around local authorities directly into community groups. And I think what happens there is that as we’re kind of through community wealth building, looking at exploring community organisations delivering more public services rather than this additionality. It opens up questions of where’s the assessment of communities that are able to formalise around opportunities and how do we address communities that are not able to formalise?

I think there’s this bigger question about the role of public services in general and whether community groups should be delivering public services. That kind of came out where people were feeling not meaningfully included, but that we were starting to see the use of community groups directly delivering programs for the government without that overarching conglomerating factor of a local authority.

I know your study found that power is actually becoming more centralised and I guess you’ve just touched on that, particularly through the early years of the plan. So how is more centralisation playing out on the ground for local authorities and for the Island communities?

Yeah, there was this echoing theme throughout the research that the National Islands Plan was a plan for Scottish ministers to deliver. So even from the early inception of the local groups, suddenly we have this act and a plan and it becomes the remit of government to deliver these changes rather than local authority. So we now have a legal document that describes what an Island is and what an Island community is. We have a National Islands Plan that set Island priorities within that centralised process and the budgets for this were set centrally also and the communities delivering a lot of the projects were pre-selected by the government. So you know a lot of it now is happening in-house in the government that maybe traditionally would have been done at that local authority level.

So far we’ve talked about the Islands as a group, but I’m sure that even within one Island itself or an Island group, there are different communities and each of those communities will have different needs. So amongst all of that, how have councils balanced out those conflicting local demands or worked with different diverse communities?

I think this is really interesting because yes, culturally the Islands are different and each Island has got different needs. But interestingly, I think when we take this public service lens, all Islands are struggling with transport provision, housing provision, providing education, providing social care. So I think if we look at that public service level, actually, the profile of the Islands the numbers might be slightly different, but in terms of governance, what’s needed to be required or delivered is quite similar.

Having that Island voice to inform the decision making, the ‘what’s important to which Island groups’ – do they prioritise education, do they prioritise transport? It was really interesting looking at some of the statistics at the end of the research that you can’t just consider one public service because there are public services that influence other public services. And right now we have a lot of infrastructure work happening across the Islands for these big energy developments, and we’re needing to import a workforce. But when we do that, what we do is we put strain on transport, we put strain on local housing, we may put strain on local health care. So it’s one thing to build a school, but how are children going to act? With access to school there’s this intimate link between public services where they sort of need to be considered in the round.

You’ve already started to talk about local stories and local solutions that have really helped. I know that in your research, you found that Islands often come up with their own clever ways to solve those challenges that they’re facing. Have you got any examples that really shine out from your research of a local solution that worked better than the standard government approach?

Yeah, we can get bogged down in the problems, but I’m also one to think that we need to find the bottlenecks to be able to address them. So that’s always my starting point.

Even in the National Islands Plan programme, there was a really good example where – so we have obviously got the Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles with their unitary authorities, and then we have other Islands, Cumbrae, Aran, Argyll and Bute that are associated with mainland authorities – and I think perhaps the strategy of collecting information about Islands is splitting off Islands. So we’re used to having an archipelago and having this identity of a group of Islands, but the Islands are being parsed out.

I wonder if a better decision might be to recreate an archipelago for the Islands that are associated with the mainland authority. So North Ayrshire had a really excellent senior officer that was placed in North Ayrshire Council that came up with an excellent strategic overview of the projects that they wanted to deliver so that when funding materialised they were able to act really quickly with the Island groups to identify funding for different projects. They had an excellent ability to get that per capita funding for their Island groups by having that officer in place that translated what the community wanted into how local authorities approached decision making, which I think was a great success.

Also things like addressing carbon neutrality. There was a carbon neutral Islands programme as part of the National Islands Plan where six Islands were doing a carbon audit and looking at projects that suited their Islands to take forward into the future. And Cumbrae and Aran were really, really good at piecing together funding and developing a solar programme and the carbon benefits were the side effect and the home improvements and the cost reductions for the consumer were front and foremost. So there have been some really good examples of the agility that communities can have when they’re allowed to take the project in a local direction, even though they’ve got that steer from the top.

I think that in both of those cases, there was a really good alignment from the local level all the way up to what the national priority was and that’s one of the missing pieces throughout this research – the vision piece. What does a healthy Island look like? How many people would live there? What types of industries will be there? And really, I think we’ve been so busy fighting fires that we don’t really have this overarching umbrella of what a healthy Island community might look like. So it makes alignment quite difficult and a bit more scattered.

Yeah, that’s really interesting to hear. If I could ask you one final question on that, from your research, did that come out as something that communities also felt that they also didn’t feel that there was a vision for their Island and their communities? Or did they have a vision themselves and that wasn’t articulated at a national level?

I think that’s maybe more of an analytical finding, but what I found was there were just lots of different projects, lots of different ideas about policy and lots of different people working in lots of different silos. And even with the government itself, the National Islands Plan funding didn’t necessarily match with the growth deal funding. So I think there were maybe opportunities for alignment even within that government level that didn’t quite come to fruition in that first iteration of the National Islands Plan as different departments tend to do their own thing.

It’s always fascinating when you look at any local government case of actually how many connections there are to other places, even from taking an Island to a very dense, large city, there’s still lessons in connections. You’ve already touched on things like the relationship between the local and the central government, the role of community capacity building and what that means for improving community outcomes.

So what learnings do you think from your research that is applicable to councils in other Island communities to start off with and across the UK and beyond?

I think part of it is that I asked one question at the end of my stakeholder interviews about what being an Islander meant to the participant and they found it really difficult to answer – it’s an identity. There’s some politics of identity and I know we can struggle into territory here in the modern age, but actually it can have this positive impact where people felt incongruence with one another because they have this shared identity that didn’t really quickly explain. I think we can see this when looking at neighbourhood development, say in an urban region where there’s some distinct populations that live and are seeking to develop their neighbourhood regions.

I think when I was working in the community energy space, we would talk about “islanded” communities, so mainland communities that had similar problems with connectivity, transport or digitisation. So there can be similar problems that we can learn from one another. I think that was one of the main things, that island is not just linked to our definition of being surrounded by the water at high tide, and rural policy in the UK has always been a looking glass for the UK government into how policy may be affected in other areas as well because we tend to experience problems quite quickly because we’re at the end of our resilience scale all the time.

So if something does happen we get the side effects quite quickly, and we’ve seen that with things like, well, we had a moratorium on wind connections to the grid in Orkney in 2012. And we’re now seeing that throughout the UK and we’re now seeing governance models that the Islands have had for decades, such as unitary authorities – Scottish local authorities, then got unitary status in 1996 we’re seeing an increase in things like independent councillors, that’s always been our model of governance. So sometimes it’s not that we’re backwards, sometimes it’s that we’re a little bit ahead, but not necessarily out of nous but sometimes just out of circumstance. I think it’s that way that sometimes we’re still seen as parochial and a lot of the policy language is about resilience and community wellbeing, but actually there are pockets of knowledge that have come from this Island governance model that can be useful in other contexts and other governance landscapes as well.

It’s really lovely to hear it framed in that way. Is there a really important lesson or a main set of lessons that a mainland or another rural council can learn from the Scottish Island experience?

I think when I was communicating the research through conferences and things like that, we constantly were asked by other communities, how have you managed to do this? And I think that the Islands have been really good at keeping themselves, we also make ourselves a bit of a nuisance, keeping the headlines in the media, because I think the way that we consider information as researchers is not necessarily what’s important for governors or decision makers. The big headlines are things they want to avoid. So actually by taking issues and making them publicly known and continuing to speak about them, that’s been a really good asset for Islands to keep their issues on the agenda.

We’ve seen it over and over again with the highly protected marine areas, Island community impact assessments, they’re not afraid to vocalise when they feel that they’re not having the just desserts. I think that’s really, really important. And also just having that knowledge of the policy, where it’s going and what the impacts are likely to be. It’s not just one policy. You open one and there’s a reference to five other policies and suddenly the network’s huge, but it’s just one of these things that has to be navigated. And it allows you to hold the decision makers to account to an extent because they’ve said they’re going to be doing this. It’s our job then to make sure that they’re doing it and really you can do all that with policy work.

That’s really interesting to hear. I’m interested in exploring that a little bit more, about language and how different communities are framed. What have you learnt and what do you think the learnings are for other places in context around how we describe particular communities? And do we use asset-based language or do we use deficit-based language of left behind places?

I just came across, or started using, the term “peripheralized” because I see it as an active process. You know, we’re not peripheral and actually there’s a really interesting map that you can view if you look at it from an ocean’s perspective and our Islands happen to be right in the middle. So it’s this view of being peripheral. It’s this idea of being peripheralized. And this did come across actually, particularly with the interviews with the local authorities that our governing arrangements and our issues are very central to us and that the government and centers like Edinburgh or London are actually quite remote from us and our worldview. So it is that language is extremely important.

I think it’s really difficult for communities because they’re now having to deliver services that are provided elsewhere. And I think as we talk about community infrastructure and what we’ve really built up in the Islands and what other rural areas have is proficient community development groups that are able to attract funding and that are able to manage complex projects. But where that was additional things, it’s now housing projects, it’s now delivering energy coupons to people who are struggling to afford to pay their electricity bill. Sometimes it’s managing access to the internet. We’ve had a few Islands who have no internet just this week – we’re relying on satellite broadband and things like that.

So I think, where we see this as a positive, I think we really have to think about how we’re going to support that community infrastructure because I recently read a great article about a programme in Glasgow that supports migrants to the city to settle in and it was discussing running this community trust as a policy failure from the government.

So what we are seeing as a positive asset in another setting is seen as a policy failure. And I think as long as there’s support and funding, that’s great. But where those things start to withdraw and the communities are relying on reduced funding pots and increased delivery of public services, I think we really need to kind of be careful about how we approach that. It’s not negative, but it’s a really positive asset, but it needs to be managed well. And I think, like I mentioned right at the beginning, the ideas about gaps, what communities are not able to provide, what’s going to be in place there to ensure this equality of public service provision, I think is really important.

It’s really interesting to think of it in that way. You mentioned right at the beginning around the quantitative and the qualitative. So I wondered how that would play out when you think broadly around wellbeing and quality of life. And I’d be interested in what you learnt about measuring wellbeing throughout this process and what approaches work well, when there’s a huge range of both statistical and a lot more rich community evidence and data out there?

I think, wellbeing is quite – when we think about the community development term – it’s quite intimately connected with public service provision, with access to education, access to the natural environment, access to work, fair pay and things like that. So really the public services are essential – particularly in places like rural places or Island places – where often there just isn’t a private firm that can provide a service. We really rely on public services. But wellbeing is interesting because it’s both subjective and objective. So what we have in the Islands, and particularly in my area of Orkney, is that we have often got the highest rates of happiness and people enjoying where they live and these really high self-reported views of wellbeing.

But there was a recent report that came out from the Highlands and Islands that showed that rural and Island areas in Scotland were below international human rights standards across a variety of wellbeing indicators such as jobs and things. So on paper, it’s not matching up with what people say. So I think it’s really this balance about the objective measures and the subjective measures and it’s about that process and not being afraid to adjust metrics to help make decisions for Islanders. But we still have high rates of isolation and we have high rates of suicide compared to elsewhere. So it’s not all rosy, but it’s just really interesting.

Through your research, how do you square that circle if you’ve got one set of evidence that says one thing and another set of evidence that says another thing? How have you rationalised and synthesised that and what does that mean for those communities and beyond?

I think even in my quantitative survey, I still had space for survey members to explain their service. And it’s where you get the really rich data when you do qualitative and it does take time and it’s much more complex. It’s definitely not the easy option when you’ve got a statistic. It’s amazing. But like I say, there’s sometimes these interplays that are not quite linear. So people explain why they’ve said something and again, it’s really the process. Sometimes you can have exactly the same input and output but if people don’t feel they’ve been taken along on that journey, it can alter how people feel about the output whether it’s different or not – so that subjective bit shouldn’t be squashed. I think we should embrace asking, speaking and having that process and in some ways be old-fashioned but sometimes coming around on those old skills can be a really good way of navigating forwards as well.

So, thinking about what you touched on at the beginning, what have you learnt about the dynamics between the national government and local communities that you think is relevant for other contexts?

I think it’s really tempting, especially as things get complex, especially as resources become more scarce to centralise because it makes decisions easier in a way. But I think often then the decisions are not so well accepted and actually the efficiency sort of diminishes over the other side when people are not happy with the outcomes.

Like I mentioned before about localism, I think especially at that local authority level and living in the community and knowing full well that local authorities, particularly in the Islands, bear a lot of the brunt of decision making that they have very little control over because they’re the local face of governance. But actually, I think really for a local authority to support, it could actually provide information about what gaps need to be filled. They’re used to making decisions in that local area. But I think it’s a struggle to navigate the diminishing resources and start having to choose between different services. We talked about well-being. They’re really kind of stuck in that place. I think we really need the layers and we need that conversation to flow between the layers as well, because that’s what we didn’t see in the National Islands Plan. There was not really much communication between the government and the local authorities and that really did stifle its outcomes.

One of my survey questions was asking how people – not what they decided – but how they participated in various democratic acts. So I asked about people participating in consultations throughout the national Scottish government and local level. People were more likely to vote in national elections, but they were more likely to participate in consultations at that local level, and I think that tells us something about how people want to participate, but also how we can use that infrastructure to support better decision making. So it seems that people think that local authorities are the best way to interact with the end of decisions. And I think that vision piece should come from that national level. So it’s not one or the other, but I think that they need to be able to influence each other a little bit more.

It’s really great to hear you articulating a complex thing in such a tight and simple way. So I wonder if it’s worth thinking, just as we close this off, about the future. Is there one change that you would want to see, or do you really think that we really need to develop on, whether that’s democracy or democratic infrastructure or wider local government reform? Anything that we want to really focus on, to ensure that local government stays strong for the next 10 years?

I think reflecting on this, during my stakeholder interview process, I interviewed dozens of extremely knowledgeable, caring, competent local decision makers that were more than qualified to make the decisions. They had decades of experience in delivering governance at the local area. Thinking right back to the inception of the National Islands Plan, when they were able to focus on commonalities and foster collaboration, without being forced necessarily, that relationship became extremely important. So that’s that social capital aspect, that trusting relationship, where they were able to then amplify the issues in ways that were picked up by the Scottish government and ultimately by the UK government to enact change. So the relationship is a trusting relationship.

I think throughout the Plan, there was much more use of competitive funding bids where communities were pitted against one another to bid in. And that comes at the local authority level. But actually, that diminishes that collaborative element, which is really important for bringing about innovation, change and shared learning. So I think that was really important, and I think that the communication aspect is not often taken seriously, but it really has an important supportive role to play. And I think that happens at the local governance level as well.

Often the local government will do something brilliant, but the feedback loop hasn’t continued. So people pay in, then they think, I’ve just done these consultations and my advice hasn’t been taken, but we never actually disseminate the process. I think we are getting better at that, but allowing people to know how they’ve played their part has really informed what’s happened. It’s really important. It will repair relationships between citizens and their institutions because much as we love to gripe about them, they are really a stabilizing force in our lives.