Community engagement in rewilding - a roadmap
Our environments and established ways of life are under increasing pressure from climate change and biodiversity loss. It’s tempting to see these pressures as global environmental issues, totally distinct from our day-to-day concerns and local areas. But restoring our own environments not only helps to reduce the strength of these pressures; it also can bring direct local benefits.
Highlands Rewilding exists to demonstrate these links. By restoring natural processes and habitats, we aim to help tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, while also involving local communities in our land management and its benefits. There are huge potential gains here. Scotland has a disproportionate amount of environmental degradation and responsibility for climate change, but also a disproportionate chance to reverse these – especially in our carbon-rich peatlands and highly diverse temperate rainforests. At the same time, we have serious economic and social challenges, many of which can be traced back to our history of dispossession and lack of opportunities to connect with and benefit from our land.
‘Nature-based solutions’ have enormous promise because they can harness natural processes to tackle many of these problems for us. But they can’t do this alone. Healthy peatlands and woodlands can sequester carbon and provide a home for rare species without much help from us, but they might not provide the range of economic, cultural, spiritual and material benefits that people, locally and nationally, need. One of the biggest challenges we face is identifying these benefits and finding ways to deliver as many of them as we can.
Key to overcoming this challenge is involving local people in the management of land they live on or near to. This is a big step in much of the Highlands, where we have a highly concentrated pattern of large-scale private ownership, and commensurately little existing involvement for rural communities. Community ownership of land, where possible, is often the best way of taking this step, allowing land to be managed for local needs within broader societal and policy requirements. But community ownership is not always – or even often – possible, and where it is, managing the array of different objectives for land management is still difficult.
To understand and deliver local aspirations on our own land and, hopefully, elsewhere, we have been working on methods for engaging local communities. These are methods not only of telling people what we’re doing, but of actively involving them in management aims and decisions, and entirely giving control over to them in some cases. This are four main reasons to do this. The first is simply that local people should have meaningful input into land management. The second is that such input tends to improve outcomes for everyone, particularly by ensuring that local knowledge is brought to bear. The third reason is that engagement of this kind can help to build relationships and capacities on both sides, increasing community cohesion and ideally leading towards eventual community ownership. Finally, if we can establish a practical template for engagement of this sort, it is more likely to be widely adopted and to generate these benefits elsewhere.
Although the reasons to do this are clear, ways of doing it are not. Many different communities have legitimate interests in land management, and they differ greatly from place to place. Defining and engaging with these communities requires time and resources on all sides. When it happens, engagement takes many forms, none of which are guaranteed to succeed.
Fortunately, as we work to improve our own engagement, others are also thinking about these issues. We have been consulting widely in recent months, and we’ve reviewed standards and recommendations from the Scottish Government, Scottish Land Commission, Community Land Scotland and others. We’ve also worked with research partners, reviewed academic literature, and consulted with local people on the findings we’ve made.
The result of this is an ‘Engagement Roadmap’ that we’re publishing today, on our new publications page. This roadmap sets out the basic principles and main steps we want to embed in our engagement processes. This is very much a work-in-progress, and we welcome all feedback on it. Please get in touch via info@highlandsrewilding.co.uk. We’ll also be developing it as we continue to engage in practice, making the roadmap more specific as we go. Perhaps most importantly, our programme of monitoring on our estates will be used to check whether we’re really delivering the benefits that local communities want – and what approaches can best realise the many potential benefits from Scotland’s environments.