Islands Research

Author: Adele Lidderale, PhD Researcher based at the Institute for Northern Studies in Orkney

With context in mind, many policies and plans in relation to island governance, seek to address ‘wicked problems’¹ or problematisations² that remain resistant to policy intervention but exposes to a global, national and regional development agenda “gripped by a paradigm of vulnerability” (Baldacchino, 2016: 88) or more recently resilience. Confounding social and political changes will no doubt increase pressure on the governance of Scottish islands, that now cease to have European structural funding in place to bridge gaps in centralising forces of state funding and a regulatory environment that does little to include ‘place-based’ expertise in . As an islander, I have lived through significant improvements brought about by European funding from farms, to roads, to ferries and education and it appears that the Scottish National Islands Plan (the Plan) and the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 have arrived timeously to support islanders through another transition.

There is little doubt that rural matters have climbed the political agenda, arguably this has not been accidental. As the context on Scottish islands continues to evolve and as communities and their layers of government renegotiate terms of engagement a number of important areas of research have emerged:

1. Will the Plan and its delivery mechanisms be enough to support sustainable development in the islands?
2. Does the Plan adequately address the issues brought forward by the three Scottish island Local Authorities as proposed during the ‘Our Islands, Our Future’ campaign?
3. Have Local Authorities and community groups accepted and integrated the Plan’s strategic objectives?
4. How are the mechanisms of the plan being integrated into local authorities and local communities to result in meaningful outputs?

The Plan has enormous potential to address contemporary development issues in the islands and beyond and provides a scaffold for local decision makers to shape the sustainable trajectory of their communities. I look forward to investigating to how fully this blueprint to decentralising policy can be realised and how different agents in the community and wider deliver networks shape the outputs with the resources that peripheralised regions within the UK have payed into centres. The video below explored the concept and potential of the Scottish Islands and Sustainable Development transition zones.

You can find more details on the National Islands Plan here and the research here.

1. Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169.
2. Bacchi C. (2012b). Why study problematizations? Making politics visible. Open Journal of Political Science, 02(01), 1–8.