Collaborative Action, Policy Support and Rural Sustainability Transitions in Advanced Western Economies: The Case of Scotland

Abstract

Rural areas face profound challenges in transitioning towards sustainability. Intensive agriculture is deeply implicated in high greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity decline and water pollution. As a more socio-economically heterogenous rural Europe emerges with a greater non-farming component, changes such as in-migration and tourism in some areas can also be seen to compromise sustainability, as can an ageing and declining population in others. The dominant means of European rural policy support has been direct income payments to farmers, with modest but increasing expectations of environmental cross-compliance over time. Since the early 1990s, new policy means have been introduced, many based around collaborative actions to enhance sustainability. These include the European Union (EU) Leader scheme, environmental cooperatives, catchment management projects and support for community renewable energy. These changes mark a shift from sectoral support to a more territorial and place-based policy, often built around collaborative partnership models. Scotland has developed a wide and distinctive range of communitarian policies to support sustainable rural development which connect to this territorial approach. This paper reviews the contribution of communitarian and collaborative policies to sustainability transitions, drawing primarily on Scottish policy but referencing these policies against policies in other developed economies.

1. Introduction

Policy for rural Europe has been dominated by an emphasis on supporting the farm sector, and in some countries, forestry, for the last fifty years. As long ago as 1981, the apparently paradoxical coexistence of “strong agricultures and weak rural economies,” [1] was asserted, implying that an overly agricultural emphasis in rural policy could be damaging to emergent visions of more broad-based rural development. By the late 1980s, modest environmental components were introduced into farm policy, but a sectoral rather than territorial perspective prevailed. The Cork Declaration of 1996 [2] ushered in a period in which territorial, partnership-based policies were invoked strongly by the academic and practice communities but were rather weakly embedded in policy. As recently as 2021, it was asserted that little has changed [3], although [4] has recently argued that there have been significant incremental changes over the sixty years of the Common Agricultural Policy’s (CAP) existence.

Commentators point to the breakdown of the complex socio-ecological systems of the rural domain as a classic wicked problem [5], and the drive towards sustainability has been similarly described [6]. The global rural policy community now seems more willing to accept both the existential crises that are caused by climate change, declining environmental quality and biodiversity loss and the farm sector’s complicity, but it is still uncertain as to the best policy means to drive the sustainability transitions that are required for rural areas.

For the programming period of 2023–2027, the CAP has, for the first time, begun to challenge the dualism of Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 policies and raise expectations that the farm sector should comply with the European Green Deal, but doubts have already been raised as to the capacity of the farm policy making machinery to absorb the new imperatives. Saddled with an increasingly diverse set of policy instruments for the farm sector and, with the exception of Leader, a weak set of policies for the rest of the rural economy, the CAP still seems ill-fitted to meet the challenge of transitioning the wider rural economy towards sustainability.

As a devolved nation within the UK, Scotland implemented EU rural policy until Brexit, but the country has also been the setting for many pioneering communitarian policy initiatives; however, the successes and success factors in Scottish and wider communitarian policies have rarely, if ever, been considered in the round.

A central challenge is whether policy should drive change through triggering changes in farmers’ and other rural actors’ behaviour at the individual farm holding, business or household level, or whether changes are better made through collaborative and collective action. To date, both means have been widely used.

Collaborative action has emerged as a focal point for nurturing sustainability transitions in rural areas. In areas as diverse as biodiversity and water management, place-based renewable energy, community land ownership and community-led local development (CLLD), collaborative and communitarian actions have often acted as guiding stars as to how to design and deliver transformational change. This review paper seeks to remedy that omission.

In a world of multilevel governance, deciding how best to design policy to steer an increasingly variegated rural economy towards sustainability has proved a deeply challenging task. In this paper, I focus on whether collaborative agency and place-based policy is likely to be more effective in delivering a just transition towards sustainability than are sectoral policies, using examples from agri-environmental policy, water resource management, biodiversity management, community empowerment policy and energy policy and reflecting more widely on experiences from developed countries.

2. Theoretical Framings of Collaborative Policy

Collaborative initiative can fulfil a variety of roles in sustainability transitions (

Table 1. Different types of collaboration.

Type of Collaboration	Example
In design	Leader Local Action Group
In capacity building and social learning	Landcare group
In collective ownership and management	Community Land Trust

). It can be associated with classic rent-seeking behaviour by groups seeking policy preferment [7], especially where corporatist policy arrangements exist [8]. It can comprise a composite of place-based social and human capital, striving to improve sustainability at the community level [9,10,11,12,13]. It can comprise multiagency area partnerships, typically including public, private and third sector actors working together to realise enhanced sustainability outcomes through coproduced knowledge and practice [14].

Since the late 20th and early 21st century, a significant strand of academic thinking has emerged around sustainability transitions, dominated by the work of Dutch transition practitioners and theorists [15,16]. Increasingly, this body of research has addressed the climate crisis and the need to secure a transition to renewable energy systems [17], although the emphasis has often been more on sectoral rather than territorial transitions. Some applications of transition thinking to the farm sector have been undertaken [18] but none to the wider components of the rural economy as a spatial entity.

The main organising concepts for transition theory are the idea of socio-technical landscapes, prevailing regimes and niches [15]. The highest-level entity is the socio-technical landscape. At the meso-level, there are technical regimes. At the smallest scale is the niche. Where the socio-technical landscape (or regime) is confronted by problems of unsustainability, niches provide the seedbed of experimental change in which new approaches can be tested before upscaling to regime change. This overall package is termed the multilevel perspective. In some cases, transitions appear to be more technically driven, but the relationships between different actors and public policy in upscaling and regime change can be varied. There is no explicit consideration of collaborative action as a means to effective transitions. The multilevel perspective is asserted as both a description of reality and a template for influencing positive change.

The transition management approach is not the only lens through which to explore sustainability shifts. A further body of work on sustainable farming practices has developed around social learning [19], which resonates strongly with work on adaptive behaviour in complex socio-ecological systems. Alongside these transition [20], and social learning approaches, social scientists have used a range of other exploratory lenses in exploring sustainability transitions including actor network theory and innovation systems thinking [21] and lately the idea of coproduction (with partly common roots with transition theory) [22,23].

New governance arrangements, often built around community-led local development, are widely seen as essential in delivering positive change. There is a growing body of research exploring place-based development. In particular, ref. [24] has given strong theoretical and practical endorsement of local place-based collaborative agency to effect beneficial change. This place-based thinking also connects across to new models of collaborative spatial planning in the form of coproduction of sustainability [22], as well as connecting to a wider critique of capitalist development, its distributional consequences and its transformational possibilities [25].

How power is exercised and by whom necessarily frames the scope for sustainability transitions. Both in relation to energy transitions [26] and place-based development by civil society actors [24], power is recognised as a multifaceted, multidimensional concept. [26] (p. 440) asserts that “broadly speaking, we can think of power dialectically as the (in)capacity of actors to mobilise means to achieve ends”. At certain times and for specific reasons, power relations can change, and it is this element of power that particularly interests [24] (ch 6), who seeks to better understand who controls the energy that drives social relations and who can command and manipulate others at a local community level to deliver sustainability gains. However, the overall extent to which local actors have room for manoeuvre, space and capacity to act might reasonably be questioned, as can what might be the best delivery agency to drive the desired direction of travel. The frequent presumption that rural communities tend to act cohesively and collaboratively is questioned by many [27], leading to questions of how power is exercised and for whom. Some policy instruments, such as land reform, community empowerment and community-based local development are designed to be empowering and inclusive at community level, but the extent to which such policy instruments can be captured by local elites is unknown.

In complex socio-ecological systems, environmental breakdown itself has now become a driver of power and governance shifts [28]. Anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss and deteriorating water quantity and quality can be seen as significant disruptive actants. They precipitate collective action. In a rural context, the adverse impacts of modern farming on the environment have shaped power shifts, initially to the state as an arbiter, where negative externalities were widely asserted and sometimes enumerated, and subsequently to consortia of territorial interests. However, it is argued that the state’s power to act has been much constrained by vested interests of the farming lobby [29].

A compelling narrative now exists that biodiversity decline and catchment management can best be addressed by collaborative action at landscape scale. Similar arguments have been made about local or regional food systems as exemplars of food system sustainability. Transition towns are heralded as place-based means of effecting the low-carbon transition [30,31]. In all cases, coalitions or partnerships operating at some kind of “local” or subregional spatial scale are seen as providing the necessary agency to drive effective sustainability transitions. Set against a predominantly siloed arrangement of policies, the extent to which place-based actions by local households, private sector actors and public sector and communitarian agencies can intersect and engage with sectoral policies is likely to be crucial in managing the transition.

By moving beyond individualistic (at household or business level) responses, collaborative and communitarian policies may offer potential for a deeper and wider reach in deepening social learning and delivering sustainability transitions in a potentially cross-cutting way. New forms of agencies (often partnerships) emerge which reflect attempts to grapple with specific place-based socio-ecological complexes, not simply generic concerns. Equally, at meso-scale, Leader groups can reflect the specific networks and cultural and environmental contexts of their territory.

Collaborative action may yield new possibilities for sustainability gains, but this is not necessarily always the case: communitarian responses may comprise defensive localism [32], and what has been termed a dark side of social innovation can emerge [33]. The question then arises as to what factors are conducive to creating effective sustainability transitions and whether communitarian policy responses confer any particular advantages.

3. Results

3.1. The Scottish Policy Context

This section describes the Scottish policy context and uses wider examples of policy for collaborative action in other developed countries which support sustainability transitions in rural areas.

Since devolution and the creation of a Scottish parliament in 1999, Scotland has developed a focused policy agenda relating to empowered local communities, with radical policies enabling, for example, community land acquisition and community renewable energy development. In many ways, Scotland can be seen as an advanced case study of policies which support place-based, collaborative transitions towards sustainability but, as is the case in the rest of Europe, significant tensions arise between the support for the farm sector (which still receives the lion’s share of public support) and more fragmented and more lightly funded policies supporting cross-sectoral and more integrated place-based actions in the transition to a low-carbon and more sustainable rural economy.

The Scottish Government has also been regarded as an exemplar in acknowledging the climate crisis and designing policies to reduce emissions, but with one or two notable exceptions in island communities, most policies have been sectoral rather than spatial. Few countries have been able to develop effective policies for the needed emissions reductions in the farm sector, and Scotland is no exception. Further, having a farm sector where ruminant livestock production is a major component of the national farm creates particularly high emissions, although a policy of increasing forest cover does create scope for land-based sequestration. Additionally, in the wider rural economy, high levels of car ownership, commuting and a preponderance of energy-inefficient, traditional stone buildings mean that the per capita climate footprint of the average rural resident is much higher than that of his/her urban counterpart [34,35]. This implies a need for a deeper transition towards sustainability in rural areas.

There has been a constant struggle in Scotland and elsewhere to challenge agricultural exceptionalism [36]. When farm employment has fallen by so much and rural areas have become much more diverse economic and social entities, the conflation of rural and agricultural is likely to lead to misperceptions of the adjustment challenges towards sustainability. This section explores selected areas of Scottish rural policy in relation to the widely recognised need for it to provide better guidance for a transition from its current state to something more sustainable. Policy silos—essentially sectoral policies that are often driven by individual departments of government—are often regarded as barriers to much-needed cross-sectoral actions to enhance sustainability with respect to environmental quality and climate change but, as [37] argue, silos may simply represent the reality of political bargaining for the policy pound by groups with different capacities to chase and draw down public policy support. However, other studies on policy silos argue for more cohesive cross-sectoral policies and note the capacity of social enterprise to cut across these silos [38].

3.1.1. Farm Policy

The majority of contemporary farm support in Scotland takes the form of direct income payments. This remains largely unchanged from when Scotland was part of the EU, and there has been a reluctance to date to alter this core policy. Even when the so-called second pillar of the CAP was instituted to cover rural development in the period of EU membership, the majority of the Scottish Pillar 2 funds were allocated to farmers rather than other rural development actors. In particular, payments for farmers in less-favoured areas have been made from within the Pillar 2 budget, even when these payments are de facto direct income support supplements [39]. Other Pillar 2 funds were allocated to agri-environmental schemes, woodland creation and community-led local development. Only a minority of Pillar 2 funds actually went to non-farming rural actors.

In both Scotland and the EU more widely, there has been some policy innovation to address agri-environmental problems, including biodiversity loss, water quality deterioration and landscape simplification. The earliest initiatives to address such issues at the landscape scale were the designated Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) which, from the late 1980s, addressed area-specific ecological and landscape decline. They have been described [40] (p. 224) as “the first serious attempt to establish wide-ranging, multi-objective policy measures for a rural development in which farming continues to hold centre stage”. Subsequently, ESAs were replaced by an environmental stewardship scheme which offered area-specific menus of voluntary measures for environmental improvements but were not limited to designated ESAs. The implementation in ESA measures and the subsequent more widely available schemes were both based on individual contracts rather than coherent multiactor landscape-scale interventions, even though the lack of contiguous habitat enhancement was recognised as a major barrier to the success of such schemes.

Specific schemes for farm woodland creation were initiated in the late 1980s, but engagement of farmers with forest creation has been slow, and woodland creation has often been resisted [41]. Woodland creation has been seen as an important part of meeting climate targets, but the scale of change that is needed in transforming mostly low-grade grassland to forests would create major landscape changes [42]. More recently, the acquisition of farms for afforestation and carbon offsetting has become a deeply contentious issue [43].

Scotland is on the cusp of changes in farm policy. When still within the EU, it chose to have the largest proportion of its funding allocated to Pillar 1 of any region in Europe. Countries such as Austria have long had a very different distribution of policy support between Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 of the CAP, and many countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark have created innovative schemes for environmental enhancement using Pillar 2 measures. Scotland’s collaborative policy initiatives have almost all emerged in parallel to the individualistic support of the dominant CAP policy architecture.

3.1.2. Water Policy

Agriculture is implicated as a major source of water pollution. Policies to address pollution have been driven by attempts to meet obligations under EU Nitrates and Water Framework Directives. Diffuse pollution has proved especially difficult both to assess and to treat. In some river catchments where agricultural pollution has been particularly damaging, Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) were established as obligatory means to reduce nutrient runoff. Nutrient Action Plans represent the strongest evidence of compulsory impositions on farmers to reduce nitrate emissions to ensure compliance with the EU’s Nitrates Directive. Farmers were limited as to when they could apply slurry or farmyard manure and were obligated to undertake nutrient budgeting. Evidence is provided of some reductions in N runoff in the Eden catchment in eastern Scotland resulting from policy interventions but a worsening of phosphate pollution [44]. Further evidence that 20 years of nitrate reduction policies on the Ythan catchment in north-east Scotland produced a small reduction in nitrate runoff, but that there are still frequent exceedances at monitoring stations [45]. They [45] conclude that “groundwater nitrate was found to remain elevated across the catchment area and appeared to be highly sensitive to agricultural practices and meteorological forcing”.

The introduction of NVZs was strongly contested by the farming community, even though intensive farming is implicated as a major source of exceedances, even where nutrient plans have been implemented. In some cases, supplementary environmental measures such as buffer strips were encouraged by EU LIFE-funded, area-based schemes, which resulted in both water quality and ecological enhancement. The reluctance of some farmers to engage was also evident. Three groups of farmers are identified [46]: “multifunctionalists” that embrace the measures; those that are apathetic; and those that actively resist them. Unlike most agri-environmental measures, NVZs have been consistent and have maintained their mandatory components, but even with such compulsion, securing the desired water quality improvements remains deeply challenging [45].

The EU Water Framework Directive obligated member states to produce River Basin Management Plans. In a number of catchments, particularly those with strong salmonid fishing interests, Catchment Management Partnerships have been created as new governance vehicles to coordinate actions. They are among the most highly developed place-based institutions which invoke and practice collaborative management of all aspects of water quality [47].

In other countries, the Landcare movement in Australia is widely cited as an exemplar of using collective action to address landscape-scale degradation of water and is based around “local groups of people, autonomous and self-reliant, mainly comprised of land users in rural areas, whose primary aims are to tackle land degradation and develop more sustainable land management practices” [48].

River basin management plans are regarded by [49] as classic examples of moving away from sectoral management of water towards integrated catchment management. The self-evident connectedness of biophysical systems within bounded catchments and the multiple demands on water resources create a strong case for such integrative approaches. The precise form of these multiactor partnerships varies. Sometimes they operate as Rivers Trusts, sometimes as partnerships, though their goals and modes of operating are broadly similar. In the more active catchment management partnerships, collaborative action and social learning are at the core of their activities.

3.1.3. Biodiversity Policy

In Scotland, policies for ESAs and subsequent land management schemes in the Rural Development Plans were the dominant means of trying to deliver improvements in farmland biodiversity. The scheme operates through individual contracts between the farmer and the state which compensate the farmer for income that is forgone to deliver suitable farmland habitat for selected species. A recent Scottish study detected no significant effect of agri-environmental schemes on the frequency of occurrence of five species of farmland birds [50]. More general EU evidence points to a continued decline in farmland birds [51].

NatureScot, the lead government agency in Scotland supporting biodiversity has funded a variety of area-specific schemes to enhance biodiversity. Some of the funds go to private businesses, but the majority go to fund trusts and other third sector bodies, as well as public sector bodies in specific conservation projects. Several projects address peatland restoration, which is promoted both for the benefits from carbon capture and biodiversity.

There is evidence from other European countries of collaborative, landscape-scale schemes for biodiversity and water management [52] and of multiactor engagement in such projects with [53] noting that “spatially targeted results-based agri-environment schemes created using a multi-actor approach are key to improving the environmental performance of farms through improving biodiversity and water quality”. In England, the post-Brexit farm policy reforms have resulted in the promotion of a more collaborative model in which groups of actors work together at the landscape scale to deliver environmental enhancement and a tapering off of Pillar 1 direct income support.

The overall picture for farmland biodiversity at the European scale is one of continued decline in farmland biodiversity and a modest increase in woodland biodiversity. Thirty years of agri-environmental policy have done a little to enhance biodiversity on beneficiary farms and may have slowed down the overall biodiversity decline. Intensification, farming system simplification and high levels of pesticide and fertiliser applications continue to compromise farmland biodiversity [54].

3.1.4. Renewable Energy Policy

Renewable electricity policy evolved around the turn of the millennium as a national- and Europe-level response to the climate crisis and, more recently in most cases, to the desire for energy security. In Scotland, community-owned renewable energy developments have proceeded faster than anywhere else in the UK, although community owners remain minor partners in an energy supply system that has been dominated since privatisation in the 1980s by multinational actors. However, the regulatory structures covering a privatised electricity industry also created opportunities for new entrants, and cooperative forms of ownership emerged from the mid-1990s, building on prior Scandinavian experience. According to [55], the emergence of a community energy sector “was enabled only by what seemed a chance convergence of enabling institutional frameworks spanning land use planning, energy, and public policy domains”.

Scottish community energy developments were supported from an early date by a third sector body, Community Energy Scotland, which was established by the north of Scotland’s regional development agency, which had a social as well as an economic remit. The earliest community energy schemes were mostly isolated off-grid communities, often small islands, but as new technologies developed and institutional arrangements offered support, more diverse communities of place engaged with renewable electricity developments. Two types of institutions were used. Although the earliest UK community scheme was a cooperative, the dominant model in Scotland was the development trust. Typically, a place-based development trust developed the production facilities as a wholly owned subsidiary and used revenue to support a wide range of community development actions. Over time, the cooperative structure—a community benefit society or “bencom”—has become more widely used. Under this model, capital is normally provided by shareholders who receive interest on their investment, with the bencom committing some of its revenue to local community projects.

Because of widespread opposition to onshore wind in the UK, developers, first voluntarily and later under government direction, offered annual payments of up to GBP 5000 per MW of power installed to impacted communities. In communities near large-scale commercial wind farms, the transfer of such funds to community groups can provide funding that is far in excess of that coming from municipal interventions. However, community ownership of the resource remains by far the most lucrative option, generating far larger sums than community benefit funds. More recently, the Scottish Government has recommended that 50% of developers of commercial onshore wind energy offer a community shareholding, which obligates the community to raise the capital but gives them a proportionate share of the revenue and the potential benefits of economies of size and scale.

The Scottish Government has also supported the idea of community-led responses to climate change through the Climate Challenge Fund, which offered discretionary 100% grants to community groups to deliver community-level emissions reductions. It actively selected third sector, place-based groups as the delivery agent [56], although the extent to which there has been whole community engagement with these projects has been questioned [57,58]. After a decade of operation from 2011, the Climate Challenge Fund was replaced by regional Climate Action Networks, whose focus remains on supporting emissions reductions through the activities of community groups.

Transitioning to renewable energy and reducing the climate footprint of houses and businesses has also been supported at an individual level. Farmers, other rural businesses and households were able to engage with almost the same incentive structures as community groups in the production of renewables, with the exception of the Climate Challenge Fund and the Community and Renewable Scheme (CARES) loans and grants to third sector bodies.

3.1.5. Community-Led Local Development

Community-led local development (CLLD) emerged at EU level from experimental practices initiated by some municipalities in the 1980s in two main geographical contexts: in urban regeneration projects to give a voice to disadvantaged communities and in remote rural communities, where top-down policies had often failed to yield any significant trickle-down beneficial effects. At European level, CLLD emerged from the LEADER initiative, which began in the early 1990s as a radical and experimental departure from prior models of disbursing structural funds through highly structured large-scale projects. It hinged on area-based local partnerships as delivery agents whose role was to animate and support small-scale and community-led developments. After the first experimental period, it was mainstreamed in the Rural Development Programme.

In Scotland, since Brexit, the principles of CLLD have been ostensibly retained, and a municipally managed scheme has replaced the EU version. The “municipalization” of LEADER at a time of declining income to municipalities makes it highly susceptible to capture and use for their purposes. For a critique of the LEADER scheme in a Scottish context, see [59].

LEADER has since become an EU flagship for bottom-up community development, and the general principles were reinforced in the Cork 2 declaration, but [60] makes the case for a rebooting of LEADER to try to recapture some of the innovation and creativity which were hallmarks of the more successful local action groups delivering LEADER at a local level in its early days. The scheme has been criticised as being vulnerable to capture by local elites and also for assuming that there is always local capacity to act. Further, the European Court of Auditors [61] has raised questions about the integrity of the scheme’s modus operandi. Others [62] have been critical regarding the ability of LEADER to break down conventional ways of delivering policy support, arguing that “the bottom-up approach and support for social innovations and local actions are being challenged and arguably threatened, only retaining their influence when clearly targeted by multi-level governance structures”. In spite of these criticisms, the EU has shown a strong commitment to retaining the Leader model, and CLLD remains a core strategy to support the delivery of European policies.

3.1.6. Community Land Ownership

The Scottish Government has introduced a number of policies to nurture collective communitarian action. In response to the most highly inequitable distribution of rural land ownership in Europe, it has passed two land reform acts, with the explicit aim of enabling community acquisition of land assets [63], as well as enhancing tenant farmers’ rights and creating a Nordic style of access based on “freedom to roam”. A third Land Reform Bill is currently before the Scottish Parliament. In addition, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015 created a mechanism to enable the transfer of public sector assets to community groups.

The main institution of community ownership is community development trusts and land trusts [64]. These are place-based collectives that own and manage their asset bundle in ways that supports local wellbeing, and much of their work focusses on enhancing local resilience and sustainability. Key areas of action by community land trusts include the development of affordable housing for young people, the development of renewable energy projects as income sources to fund their wider activities and the development of community hubs for business and social activities.

The Scottish Government has also streamlined legislation supporting the creation and governance of third sector bodies. Development Trusts have emerged as significant transformational agencies and have been described as “anchor organisations” [65]. More recent legislation in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015 extended the right to buy underused public sector assets and to enable the purchase of underutilised land to support sustainable development. A publicly funded Community Land Fund provides capital grants to community groups to acquire such land and buildings. A third sector government-funded body, Community Land Scotland, offers a membership group, advisory support unit and lobby for community landowning groups. Third sector groups have become important providers of services but the “reality of localism is that it devolves service delivery rather than power and authority and third sector organisations play a critical role in that service delivery” [66].

3.2. Scotland: A Special Case?

In some respects, Scotland has a well-developed set of policies to support collaborative and communitarian action. It reaches its apotheosis in the community-based land reform policies and in its community empowerment legislation, and the policy support given to the third sector as a provider of key services creates a distinctive policy mix. Scotland’s policies relating to land reform have created the possibility of practicing a different model of development, based around community wealth building, and in some of the remoter communities, where markets are weak and municipalities underfunded to address societal challenges, community land ownership, often supported by incomes from wind energy developments, has had transformational effects.

In relation to other facets of the rural policy, the core farm policy components are still firmly rooted in top-down highly regulated support schemes for individual household or business beneficiaries. This is particularly so in the farm sector, where the Rural Development Programmes have been thoroughly captured by farm business interests. Many other member states of the EU have been more creative and innovative in their application of Pillar 2 funds. And beyond the boundaries of Europe, the Landcare movement in Australia provides an example of how bottom-up problem solving addressing unsustainable land use practices can generate transformative effects [67].

4. Discussion: Reflections on Failures and Successes in Collaborative Policies for Sustainability Transitions

4.1. Introduction

In this section, I draw out some key points that emerge in relation to sustainability transitions and the strengths and weaknesses of collaborative policy support from the foregoing examples. That rural communities need to effect a major transformation to meet climate and biodiversity targets is widely acknowledged. That pollution from various sources, especially agriculture, still compromises the achievement of Nitrates and Water Framework Directive targets remains an uncomfortable truth. How to deliver this transition in inclusive, just and cost-effective ways that avoid threatening the wellbeing of rural people is rather less clear. Further, it is by no means clear whether there are advantages or disadvantages in pursuing sustainability ends through collaborative means.

How well does the transition management model stand up to scrutiny using the case of transformations towards sustainability in rural Scotland, and how well does it nurture the potentialities of area-based community-level action as a vehicle for driving sustainability gains? As the transition management framing has morphed from a sectoral model to something more spatial and more based on collaborative agency, how does rural Scotland stand as an exemplar? This section addresses some of the key questions associated with collaborative and communitarian policies.

4.2. Is There an Underlying Intervention Logic Regarding the Efficacy of Collaborative vs. Individual Policies?

The relative importance of individualist responses vs. collective responses to policies supporting sustainability transitions is unclear. There is often a presumption that sustainability transformations can best be delivered through collective action. That presumption underpins the formulation of the Climate Challenge Fund and various catchment-scale partnerships and the idea of CLLD, and it finds expression in Leader Local Action Groups. But these different policies have different underlying rationales or intervention logics. The Climate Challenge Fund operated in the belief that third sector agency could provide a social learning platform about decarbonizing that, with the support of specialist advisers, could embed low-carbon practices in communities. Catchment-scale projects for water quality and landscape-scale biodiversity projects were premised on the need to consider the socio-ecological environment in a holistic way. Where such policies were solely instructive (e.g., obligating farmers to produce a Nutrient Management Plan), there was little scope for social learning. With catchment management planning, there is a much stronger sense of collective learning and actions, so here, the intervention logic is about balancing conflicting demands among stakeholders and learning cost-effective ways of delivering improvements collaboratively. This is close to the Landcare model. In the case of CLLD, the rationale is to bring key agencies, including civil society actors, together, drawing on their local knowledge to develop a local strategy, the delivery of which is supported by grant aid and project officer support.

4.3. Does the State Have a Consistent View as to the Appropriate Balance between Policies for Collaborative and Individualistic Responses?

The Scottish Government has actively promoted a collaborative, communitarian model in which third sector agency works together with a supportive institutional architecture to deliver sustainability gains. But this vision of communitarian renewal and action does not extend into all sectors. The single biggest policy support mechanism is an individualised farm income support scheme. This was evident during Scotland’s membership of the EU and still is in place in the post-Brexit period. But some facets of farm policy do revolve around collaborative action. The Monitor Farm advisory approach is based around participatory learning and peer learning at an exemplar farm holding, but [68] conclude that the widely used Irish discussion group model is more likely to generate positive outcomes for farmers. The fine detail of the how the monitor farm scheme is managed, the role and character of the extension agents and the degree of creative thinking about solutions that is engendered are likely to be critical in determining the success of such schemes. It is no surprise that, although there are climate monitor farms, the predominant interest on monitor farms is in increasing farm profitability.

To an extent, the Scottish Government seems to be promoting collaborative communitarian action more as a default policy where other policies have failed rather than as part of a normative vision based on a clear intervention logic. Community land ownership was conceived as a policy to address the social injustices of highly inequal landownership and the associated crisis of depopulating peripheral regions. But the roots and rationales of Scottish neo-communitarianism, as it has been termed, are diverse [69,70] and need to be considered in terms of a tripartite relationship between civil society, the state and the market. Often, it is the weakness of market and state that is the prompt for communitarian policy. So, the support of community energy in island communities was initially a response to the failure of the market or state to provide such a service. That the evolving support structures could offer such sustainability gains was an unforeseen bonus [55]. It could be argued that municipal attempts to turn public libraries into third sector agencies, develop community transport initiatives and many other collaborative projects can be seen as opportunistic attempts to get third sector agency to deliver where other forms of agency have failed. What might look initially like a principled support of community might instead comprise an expedient approach to handling public sector austerity in a climate of neoliberalism [70] and thus, indirectly, turn third sector collaborators into clients of the state.

4.4. Can an Upscaling from Niche to Landscape or Regime Level Be Anticipated?

Many observers of sustainability transitions note the importance of context. Context can be considered as the socio-ecological environment, including the policy context. Given the great diversity in rural areas, it may be expecting rather too much for a diffusion process to enable a comprehensive upscaling of sustainability initiatives, especially when the sustainability transition is so multifaceted and the initiatives so diverse. Indeed, the role of policy in upscaling is highly varied. Ref. [71] note that policy can be both enabling of innovative actions towards sustainability or can provide an “accelerator” when other third sector actors have proven that the transition model is viable. Community land policy in Scotland is precisely such a case, with policy developed after pioneers had already proven the viability of the model.

It is a mistake to view even the farm sector as a homogenous entity with respect to engagement with environmental policy. There is a subset of environmentally engaged farmers who will adopt pro-environment components of the menus of rural development programmes [72]. There is also a smaller subset of farmers which, independently of any supportive policy means, is practicing regenerative farming, with carbon sequestration, biodiversity enhancement and water quality improvements at the heart of their actions. This suggests (in transition theory terms) a heterogeneity of niches and actors, but, more importantly, an absence of any single promising niche development that is likely to be upscaled or capable of upscaling.

The desire for upscaling through imitative action is likely to be patchy and constrained by the distribution of local social and human capital, the nature of support of key intermediaries, the extent to which power is ceded to local actors and the nature and capacity of knowledge exchange networks.

4.5. Is There an Appropriate Scale for Communitarian Policy and Action?

The scale at which collaborative policy operates in Scotland varies quite considerably. At the smallest scale are collaborative actions at individual community (village) level, where the entity is a community, a community hub, or a collective of adjacent farmers or landowners. At the largest scale are subregional river catchments of some of the largest river basins in Scotland. In between are the former Local Action Groups of the Leader programme that tend to cover rural populations of between 100,000 and 20,000 people. Some of the collaborative, communitarian initiatives depend to a high degree on local actor networks who are prepared and able to drive, say, a community asset transfer project or a community energy development.

A case can be made for matching the policy mechanism to the socio-ecological object of attention, which may be a landscape tract, a river catchment or a village community and its surrounding land. This suggests a variable optimum scale and a need for flexibility in policy design. However, the choice of spatial entities for Leader Local Action Groups (LAGs) and their successor Community -Led Local Development (CLLD) groups is based more on a fit with municipal boundaries, and this may create rather arbitrary boundaries.

4.6. To What Extent Do Collaborative Policies Entail High Transaction Costs?

It is often asserted that collaborative policies can be associated with high transaction costs. Where multiple stakeholders are involved, there is a natural tendency to allow each voice to be heard, and decision making can become protracted. High transaction costs may be tolerated by membership if a partnership delivers access to resources, but many partnerships do rather little to devolve power to local actors.

Social learning and peer-to-peer learning may take more time than “do-as-you-are- obligated” approaches to sustainability enhancement (such as nutrient management plans). The upside may be a deeper understanding and capacity building for further actions, which promote sustainability transitions, but much depends on the presence of animateurs or other actors who are capable of capacity building in the local community.

4.7. Do Collaborative Polices Genuinely Empower Local Actors?

The extent to which local actors are empowered by collaborative policy is highly policy-specific. In the large-scale community asset transfers in the Western Isles of Scotland, the empowerment of local actors is considerable, especially where they have been able to secure revenues from community energy projects that they own. Many community asset transfers of small areas of land or buildings may represent little more than municipalities or other public bodies offloading degraded assets to community groups to relieve the municipality of the costs of maintenance. If the acquiring community body has to engage in fund raising and grant chasing to fulfil its aspirations as a provider of goods and/or services and meet regulatory burdens, the state as a major funder often becomes a gatekeeper, so there is little real transfer of power.

Where other forms of public agency, e.g., from a state nature conservation body or a publicly funded advisory service are partners in a project, there may be a tendency for community actors to defer to the public agency and be guided by their “expert” knowledge, rather than recognizing and legitimising local knowledge. This is more likely to be the case in collaborative learning projects than in community land acquisitions.

The nature of the sustainability initiative that is carried out by a community group may not be of interest to all members of a physical community which, rather than comprising homogenous entities, are made up of different communities of interest. Albeit in a small sample of Climate Challenge Fund case studies, [57,58] have noted a tendency for incomers comprising the lead actors on community energy projects. The collaborative design and delivery of projects may offer scope for engagement but may not necessarily achieve broad representation from the whole community.

5. Conclusions

Historically, most policies to support rural sustainability transitions have been sectoral and have targeted individual businesses or households. But increasingly, there is a tendency to look to collaborative initiative as the change agent, from collaborative catchment management schemes to landscape-scale biodiversity cooperatives, to renewable energy cooperatives, to multiactor rural partnerships. There is an evident tension in policy making as to (i) whether it is preferable and more effective to support sustainability transitions by individual households or businesses or by various forms of collective agency sectors and places/territorial units and (ii) whether it is better to focus on territorial units (i.e., distinct geographies of place, including catchments, villages or city regions) or sectors.

Of course, these are not binary choices, but wherever budgets are constrained, selecting effective and efficient policies demands scrutiny of their relative merits. In practice, that choice narrows down to considering the relative merits of place-based and collaborative policies on the one hand and sectoral/individual policies on the other. Further, a question arises as to the presence or absence of cross-scalar and between-policy-type linkages, and whether they might be significant determinants of policy success.

We first review the case for collaborative actions and policy support and then consider the case against, drawing on Scottish and wider experience.

5.1. The Case for

In Scotland, there has been a discernible but still incomplete shift from top-down policy to participatory governance in the development and delivery of sustainability transitions. Participatory governance can range from relatively modest engagement with practice communities to policy support which embeds coproduction into practice and devolves real power to community groups. Scotland has developed a range of distinctive communitarian policies in relation to rural land ownership, community energy and water and biodiversity management and participated actively in European initiatives such as Leader. In particular, the policy support for community asset transfers and community renewables are now well established and with discernible benefits. Successive Scottish governments have supported the expansion of third sector agency through a range of policy instruments and placed local land and development trusts at the centre of efforts to promote local development and sustainability transitions. Although community asset transfers have become a Scotland-wide phenomenon, the early focus was on the remote north and west and particularly on the island communities, and it is here that the most profound sustainability transitions are emerging [73], with multifaceted projects on land management, renewable energy, social housing, etc., providing a foundation for enhanced community resilience.

A key question is whether neo-communitarianism reflects a shift in power from the state to the community or whether existing class-based power structures remain intact. The evidence is ambiguous. In some more remote rural communities, the Community Land Acts in Scotland have challenged the power of large landowners, ceded power to communities and created strong platforms for locally controlled sustainable development. In situations where local development trusts or third sector agency have partially substituted communitarian action for private enterprise, a similar shift of power relations has taken place, but it is not universal. The rent-seeking activities of the agricultural lobby have maintained their control over the dominant funding stream, and although major reform of farm policy is pending, it is most unlikely that this will result in a significant redirection of support towards communitarian initiatives in the wider rural economy.

In other countries, there is also evidence of success with communitarian, place-based policies. The Landcare movement in Australia evolved from a grassroots movement to address deep-seated environmental degradation in rural Australia [48]. In the Netherlands, there have been a range of policies to support collaborative action in landscape and biodiversity management, primarily through environmental cooperatives. In many other parts of Europe, collaborative catchment planning has delivered more integrated water management [74].

The case for communitarian action to support sustainability transitions can be made on multiple grounds. First, communitarian action is often built around collaborative learning and coproduction, meaning that actors are not so much leveraged into sustainability actions by policy coercion as helped to learn how to respond to sustainability challenges. Second, where there is a robust community organisation, it can provide an anchor to multifaceted community action [24,65]. Third, in the case of addressing many biodiversity and water quality issues, a landscape-scale approach which extends beyond the boundaries of individual farms is the natural socio-ecological unit in which to address these problems. Collaborative communitarian action is necessary to address such challenges. More widely, cross-sectoral partnerships such as Leader operate with recognition of the realities of territorial connectedness between the component parts of local economies [75] and seek to strengthen these linkages.

5.2. The Case against

Although communitarian policies are firmly established in rural Scotland, the primary conduit of public policy support to the rural economy remains direct income payments to farms. Community-level and catchment-level policies are in place but remain dwarfed by the scale of agricultural interventions at individual business level. This inevitably weakens the leveraging effect of communitarian policies and may well explain why the most effective sustainability transitions under community-based land reform are found where agriculture is a relatively unimportant part of local economies.

Coproduction is not a panacea. It may be associated with high transaction costs, its applicability may be highly context-specific and, depending on the socio-ecological context, the ability of different actors to work together and create a supportive institutional architecture varies. In a market economy, the notion that delivery of crucial sustainability transitions should depend on third sector initiative is bizarre both in rural areas and more generally. Third sector bodies depend to a large degree on volunteers, and “burn out” and volunteer fatigue is an ever-present concern. As [76] conclude in relation to coproduction “the institutional support and incentives needed as well as the individual competencies and skills are some of the avenues that need to be strengthened, and require more support”. Ref. [77] further illustrate the high costs and nuanced needs of individual communities in developing strategies for enhanced resilience.

Many of the critics of community empowerment point to the absence of a cohesive community in rural areas and the divisive nature of many community-led interventions that are intended to work for the common good. It is ironic that the principal source of wealth creation for third sector groups in Scotland is income or community payments arising from wind energy, which has proven to be a highly divisive issue in many rural areas of the UK. Over and above the sources of income, be they wind energy or grants, how power is exercised in the design of strategies or the disbursement of funds remains a contentious issue. While [24]’s detailed case study suggests that local communitarian action can comprise a cohesive, place-based form of both resistance and empowerment to address adverse structural pressures, others point to the communities that are divided in their values and expectations [78].

Further, the enhanced resources from wind farm ownership or community benefit funds that can be devoted to local resilience building and sustainability activities are not universally available. Areas of high environmental quality may not be permitted to develop wind farms. Further, there may be constrained community capacity to make use of funds. Given that wind energy incomes are the single most important source of funds for supporting community-based action, the uneven geography of both the availability of funds and the local capacity to plan and deliver projects creates a lottery effect of winners and losers.

Where communitarian policies are in place, there is a need for supportive public or quasi-public agency to provide advisory, capacity building and funding support. Such institutions are evident in Scotland, where the government has preferred to support arms-length institutions such as Community Land Scotland or Local Energy Scotland. Leader partnerships are supported at EU- and national levels by advisory and knowledge exchange bodies that enhance networking possibilities and shared learning. The fields of greatest success in communitarian transitions are in community asset transfers, where there are robust cross-scalar support structures, strong community buy-in and strong local leadership.

In the field of communitarian action and policy support, it is not difficult to find examples of exemplary practice, where cross-scalar policy support connects to bottom-up community actions. The best practice examples of Leader projects, catchment management partnerships and community development trusts provide a clear indication that collective, collaborative place-based actions with effective policy support can massively augment the scope of individualistic sustainability actions.

The transition management approach posits a clear link between niche developments and regime- and landscape-level changes, but while communitarian and collaborative action has shown capacity to generate highly positive changes in some places and in relation to some sustainability challenges, including biodiversity enhancement, water management and emissions reductions, driven by local capacity and community development, the upscaling remains a challenge. Instead, there is a patchwork quilt of responses to the sustainability crisis, nuanced by local capacities, interests and issues. Landscape or regime change remains an aspiration rather than a reality, and all too often the exemplary achievements of those places where the sustainability gains are highest are a function of local leadership, capacity and choice rather than a supportive institutional architecture.