Place-Based Collaborative Action as a Means of Delivering Goods and Services in Rural Areas of Developed Economies

Abstract

This paper challenges the simplified binary division of suppliers of goods and services into market or state categories and identifies the continued relevance of household, community, and third-sector provision in rural areas. We explain the emergence, survival, and development of place-based and collaborative action using a three-fold typology, reflecting differences in the motivations and rationales for providing goods and services in these ways. In a place-based context, some communities have acted collectively using collaborative agency. Many observers of rural community development have suggested that place-based communitarian action may be unable to break free from class-based controls, but this is contested by some compelling examples. Where supported by effective public policy, place-based communitarianism can offer an alternative mode of provision for a wide range of services. Using Scotland as an example, this paper explores the dynamics of interactions between community and policy actors in land acquisition and management, renewable energy, and social care.

1. Introduction

This paper seeks theoretical explanations from the social sciences for the emergence and persistence of collaborative, place-based actions to produce and deliver a range of goods and services in rural areas of developed countries. There is a constantly evolving ecology of institutions involved in this process, and while a general tendency towards commodification has been noted, it is neither irreversible nor universal, nor is it consistent across space. Our focus is rural, but many of the arguments also apply more generally to “left behind” areas [1]. Beyond the simplistic binary division between private and public goods [2], alternative modes of provision may be well placed to address service closures in remote communities and even existential challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Collaborative approaches are not merely remnants of former ways of organising the production of goods and services, but can comprise novel institutional forms of great and increasing importance. At a local level, these may challenge the dominant hierarchical forms of governance because of conscious decisions to operate outside the normal market “rules of the game”, paralleling Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion [3] that some past societies have made conscious decisions to avoid and even reject such hierarchal forms of governance.

The idea of communities of place as having agency for collective action is often criticised. The assertion of rural communities as collectives of common interest has been widely critiqued because of deep class- and landownership-driven inequalities of power in rural communities, which often result in adverse consequences for certain groups [4,5,6,7]. Bourdieuvian explanations argue that class structures will inevitably drive how power is used to the advantage of specific groups rather than specific places. Even in environmental governance, it is observed that co-production processes are often imbued with inequalities of power [8]. On the other hand, Strathern [9] argues for a less class-based view of power but still recognises that power differences exist. Most of those who point out power asymmetries in rural areas imply that collective and communitarian actions are necessarily mediated by these power relations. However, these accusations lose some of their weight when an observer as authoritative as Healey [10] (p. 196), acutely aware of power as an issue in the context of a small rural town, asserts that “microscale activism focused on where we live thus bears a transformative potential”. Where communities have acquired power as place-based collectives, their agency at times seems to transcend class relations and can provide a form of resistance to market and state. However, it is unlikely that all rural communities have the motivation or capacity to engage in such transformative actions, and expectations that this is the case, and that responsibility for these actions should be local, are demonstrably unfair [11].

Communitarianism and collaborative action are built on recognition of the social nature of individuals [12] and the desire of people to act in groups. They challenge the primacy of both a) the individualist self-interested position and related assumptions of achieving a theoretical economic optimum, which is represented in its extreme form as neoliberalism, and b) state provision They can take many forms, as the institutions responsible for community actions can differ in the formality of their organisation and specificity of their focus [13]. Local community initiative can comprise either “roll-back” or “progressive” localism; that is, it can be a defensive reaction to the neoliberalist retreat from declining places, or an actioning of radical alternatives to austerity and decline.

The idea of communitarianism has widely been taken up by politicians, including Blair and Obama, and this politically driven form has been widely described as neo-communitarianism. Though not without its critics [14], it has been a major feature of Scottish post-devolution politics and is now embedded in Scottish public policy. As a principle, communitarianism connects closely to what has been termed the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE): the complex interactions of third-sector institutions that nurture wellbeing and provide an array of goods and services [15], which are often but not exclusively place-based. Its emergence and expansion can be seen as a direct response to global economic crises and the negative impacts of globalisation on certain places. It is often a place-based response to marginalisation, in which third-sector actors become providers of goods and services, but it can also comprise an assertion of radical alternatives to decline. It experienced a surge of growth after the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, especially in heavily affected countries such as Greece and Portugal. The SSE can operate independently of the state, or in partnership with it: an example of the latter is the state subsidising the SSE as a preferred provider of former public goods, such as social care services.

Similar principles to those found in SSE thinking are found in the concept of the foundational economy, which recognizes an important role for the state (in particular municipalities), the family, and microbusinesses in meeting diverse social needs and overcoming some of the social consequences of neoliberalism [16,17,18].

This paper focuses on the scope for collaborative action to provide goods and services in rural communities of developed economies, using rural Scotland as an example. Third-sector activity engages with a wide variety of goods and services [19]. This paper uses three very different sectors as illustrations: rural land, renewable energy production, and social care. This selection is illustrative of the breadth of activities and reflects the major contribution of these particular examples to community-based development in Scotland. Firstly, we examine the various ways in which goods and services can be provided and how these change over time. Next, we explore the different theoretical propositions behind collective local actions to deliver goods and services, capturing diversity in the motivations and intentions behind these actions using three explanatory categories. These categories are then grounded and explored in more detail within the Scottish context, where policy has promoted community empowerment (most explicitly, within the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act, 2015) [20]. Finally, the paper explains a likely trajectory for place-based collaborative action.

2. Who Might Provide Goods and Services?

A useful starting point for better understanding the space for communitarian actions is a well-established framework within economics (

Table 1. The standard economic classification of types of goods and services. Adapted from a table in [21] (p. 24), itself adapted from [22] (p. 224).

	Excludable	Non-Excludable
Rival	Private goods	Common goods
Non-Rival	Club goods	Public goods

), which shows how goods and services are provided.

The normal assumption is that pure private goods are provided by the market because excludability and rivalry allow suppliers to operate commercially. However, many pure private goods and services are also provided by households, and others by third-sector providers. For example, many households grow food for self-consumption on allotments or on household plots. The family farm comprises both a social entity and an economic entity, and Friedmann [23] has observed how simple commodity production—a kind of self-exploitation of the farm household—can be a successful household survival strategy. More recently, Pinto-Correia et al. [24] (p. 5) note that for small farms in contemporary Europe, “food self-provisioning is neither accidental nor marginal”, and household plots and small farms have made a huge contribution to household wellbeing during post-socialist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe and continue to do so [25]. Further, food insecurity among poor households in the UK and other countries has led to them being supported by charitable foodbanks [26], whose rapid growth has been associated with the disruption of welfare benefits, loss of income, and ill health [27]. Renewable electricity can also be privately produced and consumed by households, or provided by cooperatives or other third-sector bodies as a private good (the norm in the UK), or provided by a public body. In recent decades, the privatisation of mainstream electricity production and supply has taken place, but third-sector supply has found a niche in the new supply ecosystem and new solar technologies (e.g., photovoltaic cells) have made household production possible. Often, these different modes of supply are not separated but are blended in hybrid forms, with great institutional diversity and numerous institutional forms operating outside the normal rules of market-based business. The third case of social care for elderly people in their homes has usually been undertaken by families and charitable organisations, although the most affluent households often buy in carers as a specialised domestic service. The emergence of the welfare state has led the state to become a major provider of domiciliary elderly care in the absence of other providers, but this sector is now provided by a mix of private, public, third-sector, and household provision.

A brief review of these three examples reveals that there is no inevitable trend towards market-led commoditisation. Indeed, the critical services and infrastructures that support everyday life—the foundational economy—are supported by employment largely outside of the private sector [16], while essential care (the core economy) is often not profit-driven and is supplied within communities and on a voluntary basis [17]. There are diverse rationales for provision outside the dualism of market and state. Some cases are aligned with “existential” and “essential” foundational resources [18] (p. 12), which arguably should be supplied by the state and can be under-consumed because they are associated with positive externalities. In other cases, there may be a moral case for supporting poor people without food or the means to live comfortably in old age. Further, because renewable energy produces less global warming than energy produced from fossil fuel sources, it is likely to be underprovided without public subsidy.

Changes in the wider socio-ecological system can lead to greater communitarian activity, or indeed other changes in the supply system. The economic crisis of 2009–2010 induced changes; so too did austerity politics. Arguably, the growing awareness of climate change has prompted communitarian action among communities of practice producing renewable energy supply.

New technologies can shape the nature of the provision of goods and services, as well as the landscape of actors responsible for this [28]. For instance, photovoltaic cells, solar thermal technology, and lithium-ion batteries can operate very effectively at a household level. New digital technologies have many applications in domiciliary care but must take account of the digital divide and user apprehension [29]. That technology and society interact in an evolving socio-technical system is taken as a given. As Jasanoff [30] (p. 14) notes, “science and technology operate, in short, as political agents” and can influence the nature and ownership of provision. This constitutes the original meaning of the (now more widely used) term “co-production”.

Rather than considering the provision of goods and services as a simple choice between the market and state, it is beneficial to look beyond narrow economistic taxonomies and consider four “ideal” types of provision and supply: the household as a self-provider to its potentially extended members (and friends); third-sector collective agency; market providers; and the state. To these we might add hybrids between different types of economic actors or through coalitions of actors at multiple governance levels in local or regional partnerships. All of these institutional forms are, to a greater or lesser extent, given license to operate by the state. Additionally, collective action by sectional or place-based interests can constitute an attempt to influence regulatory outcomes by the state and engage in rent-seeking behaviour as part of a collective [31].

3. Theoretical Positions on the Role of the Third Sector

To better understand the presence of collaborative action as a means of providing goods and services in rural areas, we summarise here a selection of theories and explanatory narratives. Although the idea of civil society is central in collaborative action, there is no consensus on the nature of civil society [32] and not all theories and explanations relate solely to the place-based supply of goods and services. Some are firmly grounded in economic theory, while others comprise alternatives that sit outside the logic of mainstream market-led production. These might even be thought of as examples of a Polanyian double movement [33] and a reaction to late-20th-century neoliberalism and market logic. These explanations can be loosely grouped into three thematic areas of augmenting, challenging, and plugging gaps in the market (Figure 1), though this represents a simplified picture and, in reality, some overlap between these categories is inevitable. Collectively, they posit a place for collaborative activity as a key component of the ecosystem for providing goods and services.

The logic of this classification is that one bundle of theories of collaborative action augments the operation of a competitive market system, but these are fundamentally different from those that challenge the primacy of market logic, which themselves are different (though sometimes only in degree) from theories that explain how goods and services are provided by plugging the gaps when markets and state provision fail. In this paper, each bundle is considered in turn.

4. Augmenting the Market

4.1. Associational Activity Embeddedness and Social Capital

Collective action is an associational activity. Within economics and the wider social sciences, most studies of such association [34,35,36] assert the importance of social capital and local or regional networks for driving the market economy. Even though the majority of the literature refers to between-business networks, observers of community-based economic development have argued that place-based associational activity may also be driven by communitarian action that either substitutes for private- or public-sector activity or replaces it when it has failed [10].

Associational activity functions more effectively where there is trust between actors [35]. Storper [37] (p. 31ff) developed the concept of embeddedness to describe the social and economic relations of economic agents in local or regional economies and argues that “both the bonds between individual economic agents in groups and the bridges between such groups have strong effects on long-term economic development, and it is their interactions that matter the most”.

Putnam’s [35] work asserted the importance of social capital as an indicator of a rich and democratic society, while noting evidence of its decline from a high point in the post-World War II period in the US. Social capital has various forms, but is most simply expressed in two types: bonding (within groups), where kindred spirits come together; and bridging (between groups), reflecting networks to other groups. Slee [38] has argued that bridging capital may be as important as bonding capital in developing collaborative third-sector enterprises, as the effective connection to external supportive agencies may prove an enabling factor in successful project implementation.

4.2. Business Interest Groups

Business-related interest groups or lobbies often seek to gain benefits from public policy. These processes have been highly formalised in some sectors, especially within agriculture, in what has been described as a corporatist relationship where the state chooses to formally deal with particular interest groups [39]. “Free riding” can occur when some economic actors do not join interest groups; additionally, some sub-groups seem to wield more power than others. These groupings can also take a place-based form, but relationships can also operate at multiple governance levels, from a regional level up to an international (EU) scale. The farming sector in Europe has long had well-established corporatist relations through sectoral interest groups, with membership almost always being voluntary: in these instances, voluntary association arises to promote a sectional or spatially defined geographical economic interest. Olson [31] argues that the relatively small size of the farming community in developed countries may enhance its rent-seeking capacity. However, there is no single vision of the direction of farmer-led political rent seeking and in Europe, two distinct strands of agrarianism and industrial agriculture are identified [40].

Place-based interest group action can also drive anti-business interests and can seek to resist developments that would damage the environment or threaten amenities of place or sectoral interests (e.g., local action against road building, wind turbines, or branch plant developments). It is evident that not all forms of collaborative activity and not all sectoral or other interest groups carry equal weight in public policy making. How power is distributed and used can shape outcomes. For some, collaboration has a significant market payoff (e.g., through the drawdown of subsidies), but in the absence of significant sectoral subsidy, limited benefit may be derived from such rent seeking. For others, collective action can seek to influence planning decisions or the drawdown of local public subsidies.

4.3. Regional Innovation Systems

Where local economic actors trust each other and collaborate in knowledge sharing, this can create an innovative milieu [41]. This can be observed more in some economic sectors than others and may be more apparent in relatively concentrated geographical areas where large numbers of SMEs undertake similar economic activities close to each other. The public sector may also engage with local business actors and others to promote local development. Cooke [36] notes the role of regional governments in promoting innovation through the knowledge economy, generating a hierarchical (state-led) regional innovation system, which can be contrasted with the business-led regional innovation systems of North America. The idea of joint public and private leadership is extended by the idea of a triple, quadruple, or quintuple helix as a driver of innovation [42], which suggests that other forms of agency may also be important in nurturing economic activity.

Most of the literature on regional innovation systems sees them as contributing to business competitiveness [36]. Technical knowledge is the key public good in regional innovation systems, with businesses being the key beneficiaries. Coalitions of actors seek to create and share this technical knowledge. However, the literature pays minimal attention to the ways in which regions might become competitive in the multi-agent provisioning of goods and services to their residents, or how public-sector management and community empowerment can contribute to increased local wellbeing.

4.4. Symbiotic Action and Partnership

There may be scope for collaborative engagement by means of what Wright [43] terms symbiotic action. This term relates to a form of governance [44] in which the public sector collaborates with other actors from the business and voluntary sectors to form a development strategy and their partnership (usually) acts as a distribution hub for public funds. In rural areas of Europe, this thinking has manifested in the general principles of the EU’s LEADER initiative, wherein relatively small-scale territorial partnerships would co-design and deliver a local development strategy. This partnership working aims to attune development actions to locally defined possibilities, collectively agreed upon by a broad range of interested actors. LEADER partnerships have evolved from early examples with a high degree of independence from local authorities to entities now operating more closely under the management control of the local state.

Local partnerships can foster neo-endogenous rural development—broadly, enhancing the value of place-based development through supportive linkages to extra-local expertise [45] (p. 431)—which has replaced the earlier top-down hierarchical forms of policy making. However, the real extent of local empowerment may be questioned, as can the extent to which partnerships represent a real sharing of power and empowerment with non-state, non-business actors. Partnerships within LEADER have attracted some negative reviews: Edwards et al. [44] (p. 308) conclude that “the capacity of partnerships to redistribute power away from the state is illusory”, and the authors of [46,47] observe inequalities within partnerships and excessive municipal control in both Poland and Scotland.

5. Plugging the Gaps

In Envisioning Real Utopias, Wright [42] identifies interstitial provision, or the delivery of a good or service due to market or government failure, as a key area where collective action can arise. In some cases, the withdrawal of a private service such as the only shop in a village stimulates a community response: for example, rural Shetland has many community-owned retail businesses, and facilities such as pubs often become community-owned multi-purpose hubs dispensing healthcare and other local services, alongside their food and drink functions. In other cases, state-subsidised services such as public transport and care have declined or failed, leading to their replacement by community and third-sector initiatives.

The principal logic of collective delivery is that without a necessity for profit or the bureaucratic burden of the state, a third-sector entity can be more responsive to needs and funding opportunities, and more cost-effective than the two mainstream modes of service delivery. While this type of delivery is often seen as an interim arrangement, this is by no means always the case.

5.1. Charitable Foundations

The earliest charitable foundations were often religious organisations, providing help for the elderly or infirm from the Middle Ages onwards. Subsequently, wealthy individuals formed charitable trusts or foundations, often focusing their funds on place- or people-based needs; the latter would often include specific causes such as education for gifted but poor children or those with challenged health. Charity has tended to work where private or public provision is non-existent.

Contemporary charitable organisations are typically founded by an individual, a group, or a body to provide specified services. Some charities are endowed with land and buildings that may generate income for their charitable purposes; others depend on returns from financial investments; others rely on donations. The range of services provided by charities is very wide, including education, recreation, care, and protecting heritage assets. Normally, charity law defines the boundaries of action and excludes business interest groups, although at times these boundaries are unclear. In this paper, our interest is in place-based charities.

Over time, many charitable institutions have become more entrepreneurial in their actions, and social enterprise has been increasingly investigated as a dynamic institutional form. Defourny and Nyssens [48] show that there are great variations in the institutional architecture and public support policy from one country to another, which shapes the palette of possibilities for charitable action. In general, the deeper the penetration of public goods and services by the welfare state, the lesser the tendency for charitable activity. What is undeniable is that in large swathes of contemporary life, third-sector bodies, often operating in quite entrepreneurial modes, have become major providers of goods and services.

In more authoritarian regimes, third-sector agency, civil society groups, and charitable activities are often seen as threats to central authority and may be repressed. In more open societies, charitable foundations are regarded as an expression of the diversity of interests among different groups, and their ability to provide goods and services complements and sometimes substitutes for the delivery of goods and services by public or private agency [32].

5.2. Common-Pool Resources and Polycentric Governance

In mainstream economic theory, non-excludable but rivalrous goods are situated between pure private and pure public goods, and their provision can be explained from an institutional economics perspective [49]. For example, public forests have many non-excludable features: people can visit them, gather food from them, and appreciate their wildlife, but several of these consumption elements are rivalrous in character. Ostrom [49] suggests that the overuse of common-pool resources is not inevitable, and that collective management (polycentric governance) can be an efficient solution that challenges the primacy of individualistic ownership. Polycentric governance arises where resource use rules are unclear and negotiation among actors seeks to enhance outcomes.

It is not immediately clear whether polycentric governance is an observation or a theory. McGinnis [50] asserts the latter but notes that its origins resulted from exploring effective municipal management in metropolitan areas of the United States. Polycentric governance implies the existence of multiple actors collaborating at many scales to deliver enhanced outcomes. These forms of governance emerge as organic linkages between actors that might vary over time and space. Ostrom (2010) [49] further developed this concept in her exploration of common-pool natural resource management, arguing that collaborative community-level management can consistently be more effective at sustaining natural resources than either private- or public-sector management.

Although good governance is often interpreted as requiring hierarchical structures, in the case of a natural resource where multiple users bring different demands, an organic participatory approach that includes the engagement of government actors and is built around polycentric governance has the potential to deliver positive outcomes. This manifests itself in forest management in both developing and developed countries. For example, in Scotland, policies have been established to enable the transfer of forests and other rural land into community ownership.

5.3. Community Wealth Building and Less-Leaky Buckets

The idea of community wealth building has been translated into a European context by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, based in Manchester and piloted as a civic development strategy in Preston, England. The Preston project aroused substantial interest, not least by the Scottish Government, who have connected its core ideas to their communitarian policies. The idea is grounded in the principle of reshaping local economies “so that wealth is broadly held and generative of income, opportunity, dignity and wellbeing for local people” [51] (p. 6) and seeks to support local provision that enhances income and employment multipliers in the locale. It provides an actionable response to the challenge laid out by the New Economics Foundation to “leaky bucket” economies, where spending leaks rapidly out of some communities but is retained and recirculated in others [52]. It is grounded in five principles: plural ownership of the economy; making financial power work for local places; fair employment and just labour markets; progressive procurement of goods and services; and socially productive usage of land and property [53]. It is not exclusively a communitarian strategy, but it is framed as seeking social and economic renewal through the flexible application of these five principles, and explicitly recognises the role of social enterprise. Community enterprise is a key part of plural ownership. There are multiple fields with which social enterprise in various institutional forms can engage [16], including local food and community energy [54].

The early feedback on the Preston model has mostly been positive, with Prinos and Manley [55] (p. 639) reporting that the Preston Model “has tapped onto forgotten elements of social relationships and human nature; a yearning for socio-economic change built on a more ethical, equitable foundation of social cohesion and based on a guiding principle of democracy and cooperation”. However, one Scottish case study [7] indicates that the level of engagement by civil society bodies is very weak, and the vision of local authorities is effectively imposed on the beneficiary communities. This may be indicative of the reflection that, among progressive development approaches (of which community wealth building is an example), “transformative intentions do not necessarily equate to transformative practices on the ground” [51] (p. 16).

5.4. Club Goods

The theory of club goods—those which are non-rival but excludable—is firmly grounded in economics, but the providers of club goods are not classic market businesses. Club goods lie between pure private goods and pure public goods. Sandler and Tschirhart [56] (p. 1482) define a club as “a voluntary group deriving mutual benefit from sharing one or more of the following: production costs, the members’ characteristics, or a good characterized by excludable benefits”. Sometimes described as local public goods, club goods will be provided either by municipalities or by voluntary groups. From a communitarian perspective, the existence of a huge number of voluntary and self-managed sports clubs provides an obvious example.

Club goods have aroused much esoteric debate. On one level, their existence lets public-sector providers out of the responsibility of provision. However, it presumes the capacity to self-organize, which may be lacking, particularly among poorer citizens, which may lead to increased inequalities of access to services. Well-run clubs may be highly dependent on the skills of key volunteers whose demise or departure from the group can threaten the club’s existence.

6. Challenging the Market

6.1. The Social and Solidarity Economy

The Social and Solidarity Economy both challenges the state and market but may also collaborate with the state. For example, Quebec identifies parts of the SSE as a preferred provider of social services [57]. According to the UN task force [58] (p. iv), the SSE comprises “the production of goods and services by a broad range of organizations and enterprises that have explicit social and often environmental objectives, … guided by principles and practices of cooperation, solidarity, ethics and democratic self-management”. The term is widely used, especially in French- and Spanish-speaking countries, to describe a wide range of social enterprises, cooperatives, and other not-for-profit entities that make up the economically active part of the third sector. Its emergence and development trajectory are a response to the specific conditions and impacts of capitalistic development. Early cooperatives were a form of resistance to local supply monopolies. More recently, the Social Solidarity Economy has proven to be adept at addressing negative externalities and growing inequality, which can both be seen as direct consequences of market capitalism. It is seen as particularly useful in meeting the needs of social-care service provision, and in cultural services where it is seen as better able to engage in the co-design of services than private- or public-sector providers, better at overcoming information asymmetries, and (in a sector not characterised by high rates of return) better able to operate with low margins [59].

6.2. Cooperatives

Cooperatives emerged as a form of countervailing power to support the interests of those who suffer as a result of monopolistic and/or oligopolistic tendencies among buyers or suppliers. To that extent, they challenge an imperfect market. Given the strong evidence that monopoly or monopsony reduce economic efficiency, the state has often been supportive of the formation of cooperatives. The first applications of cooperative principles can be found from the late 18th century and cooperative movements have developed widely but unevenly over space and economic sectors throughout the world. So-called new-generation cooperatives have emerged in the last three decades in North America, which seek to increase the producers’ share of spending on food products [60]. Initially operating primarily in and along the food chain, cooperatives now extend to other areas such as housing, environmental management, and renewable energy production.

6.3. Peer Production

Peer production is the antithesis of individualistic entrepreneurship, being based on unrewarded collaborative activity that improves knowledge. Benkler et al. [61] (p. 2) define peer production as “a form of open creation and sharing performed by groups online that: set and execute goals in a decentralized manner; harness a diverse range of participant motivations, particularly non-monetary motivations; and separate governance and management relations from exclusive forms of property and relational contracts”. According to [61], peer production of software and online knowledge emerged because of a networked society operating within a distinct socio-technical system, and was contingent on the developments that have occurred in IT. Benkler et al. [61] further argue that the achievements of people working freely and without reward together in a network can frequently outperform the achievements of hierarchically controlled, market-driven software businesses. Unlike many forms of collaborative activity, peer production is not geographically constrained.

Peer production has been positioned as a response to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. Birkinbine [62] asks (p. 3) “whether this emergent value system has the potential to bring about a post-capitalist future, in which the values of care, trust, mutual aid, and conviviality are prioritized rather than capital accumulation” and concludes that these values may indeed have the power to become more important over time. Peer production is subversive of capitalism because it exposes its inefficiencies and shows how an alternative set of values can drive the information economy. It has conceptual similarities to philanthropically motivated crowd funding [63] using online platforms, which seeks either active investors who anticipate making a profit or funders for projects with no financial return on offer.

Several research questions emerge in relation to these activities. Is the networked peer production of software a special case? Can place-based groups of actors who are not financially motivated also engage in the peer production of (for example) renewable energy? What else motivates social enterprise, where no profits are returned to shareholders? The emergence of new institutional forms like community benefit societies (bencoms) suggests that the desire to support a community (which is, in the case of energy or local retail, normally a geographical community) is a wider concern for community sustainability and wellbeing, not a self-interested motivation. The online community can still help these other modes of provision through network support.

6.4. The Management/Co-Production of Landscape-Scale Socio-Ecological Systems

Socio-ecological systems rarely comprise single proprietary units of management or business activity. The actions of one economic actor often spill over and impact other actors. More widespread adverse impacts such as diffuse pollution comprise a public bad. A key challenge is “establishing relevant institutions that act at appropriate scales to modify and moderate demand for ecosystem services and the resulting exploitation of ecosystems” [64] (p. 1139). This type of collective response is common in catchment and biodiversity management in specific geographical areas. There is a tendency for local-scale solutions to work best as “manipulations that have been successful in complex adaptive systems have often been modest in size and have worked within the system’s grassroots capacity for adaptation and learning” [64] (p. 1141).

Separately, there is a compelling argument that the collective self-management of negative externalities is a form of quasi-public good, with Ayer [65] (p. 9) concluding that “grass roots collective actions of farmers can be a promising alternative to other options to improve welfare” and be preferable to hierarchical rule-based controls. Examples of uptake of this logic include catchment management programmes and integrated pest management; Australian Landcare groups also demonstrate how this type of action has mitigated negative externalities from agricultural practices [66]. That social and environmental learning are encouraged by collaborative activity is evidenced in the work of [67]. Agri-environmental cooperatives have also worked to deliver landscape-scale outcomes in the Netherlands. Distributing grants to groups of farmers to deliver landscape-scale solutions has been a strand of EU policy since 2013, covering activities in many countries including cultural landscape management, water quality enhancement, and biodiversity enhancement [68].

The idea of co-production (in natural resource management) is built around interactions between those managing policies and those delivering them. Although sometimes assumed to refer only to knowledge production [8], it is clear that co-production is often about action as well. In Landcare, catchment management and other partnerships, interactions between public institutions, groups of farmers or other land managers and stakeholders—shape the new practices, with further delivery of these being supported by the co-learning embedded within the partnership’s action.

There is growing evidence that place-based or sector-based interest groups of economic actors may actually derive value from opportunities to acquire new knowledge through social learning, leading to a sense of citizenship, involvement and belonging. Ideas of adaptive management, co-production (in the Chambers et al. [69], rather than the original Jasanoffian sense) and public participation are widespread in the environmental management literature, much of which looks at how participation can enhance outcomes through sharing good practice and encouraging social learning [70]. Conversely, other authors, e.g., Turnhout et al. [8], point to concerns regarding power inequalities in co-production processes and practices. Surprisingly little attention is given to how participants value the processes with which they engage, although the authors of [71] point to multiple discourses framing how different participants perceive satisfaction from diverse participatory processes.

In situations of multiple ownership, and users with diverse and contested rights, does this advocacy of landscape-scale co-management imply some rejection of hierarchical approaches to the regulation of such systems? Up to a point, it does, especially where regulation needs to be adapted to specific contexts and where local adaptation is best undertaken by coalitions of actors. Such landscape-scale management can also be created where higher-level institutions loosen the reins of hierarchical management and give local actors more freedom in resource decision-making and social learning practices, although the system remains quasi-hierarchical.

6.5. Intentional Communities and Anti-Capitalistic Movements

Intentional communities are defined as “close-knit, small-scale communities formed around secular or religious ideas as to how one ought to live. They typically have a shared lifestyle (e.g., common spaces and communal meals), shared cultural elements (e.g., beliefs and commitment to cooperation), and a common purpose (e.g., ecofriendly life or worshipping a god)” [72] (p. 206). These communities are usually thought of as geographically defined, but many replicate themselves in different locations. They explicitly challenge capitalism, often because of its impacts on the environment, although sometimes due to religious or ethical values.

Additionally, there are examples of communities engaged in specific projects such as producing and consuming renewable energy [73]. Such “prosumer” communities are not necessarily place-based. There are also groups that operate outside the normal rules of the market, for example community-supported agriculture businesses linking normal food supply chains in novel ways; these often pursue environmentally benign forms of production and work within distinct ethical guidelines. Where groups are ethically informed, they may well prefigure future desired states by making explicit consumption choices [74] and provide an exploratory template for future action.

In summary, market institutions and the supportive apparatus of the state are challenged by explicitly anti-capitalist groups, who argue that neoliberal economics comprises an existential threat to the environment and planet. Groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion act to expose the threats posed by the climate crisis and challenge the compliance and support of the state. Practice communities often seek to enact these principles in diverse ways.

7. The Scottish Case Study

7.1. Introduction

Since the decision was made to set up a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1998, the Scottish Government (formerly the Scottish Executive) has supported community empowerment through a variety of policy means, which could be described as neo-communitarian [75]. It is uncertain what communitarian action might have been achieved without the Scottish state’s support. Equally, the precise circumstances under which endogenous action started the policy process and journey towards community empowerment and community wealth building are unclear. What is certain is that in Scotland, bottom-up action and top-down policy have combined, creating a dynamic environment of community engagement which is well developed in some fields of economic activity and less developed in others. The UK’s engagement with communitarianism began with Blairite “Third Way” politics, alongside the devolution process. Scotland already had a long history of communitarianism, being the founding place of cooperatives, including the Tannahill Weavers (mid-18th century), Owenism (19th century), and the common management of land in the crofting areas in the north and west Highlands (from the late 19th century). Since its initiation, the Scottish Parliament has shown great interest in promoting the third and community sectors, and neo-communitarianism is found in an advanced form in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK. Invoking communities as active agents in policy delivery has also become a means of distancing Scottish policy and practice from what is seen as more strident individualism in UK policy.

Changes in Scottish charity law have created a range of institutional forms, from Community Interest Companies (CICs) to Community Benefit Societies to Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisations (SCIOs). Place-based development trusts (normally SCIOs) tend to act as anchor organisations [76,77] and can spin out a range of satellite subsidiary activities and provide the key building blocks for community wealth building.

The Scottish examples have all been previously investigated in an EU project (SIMRA) as examples of social innovation or as part of wider research undertaken for the Scottish Government and in evaluating LEADER projects. They draw on refereed papers produced by the authors. They are selected as indicative of the power of communitarian action in different fields.

7.2. Community Land

At a time when much of Central and Eastern Europe was privatising state and collective farms, Scotland was introducing community-based land reform [78]. This was conceived as a communitarian response to address the highly imbalanced structure of land ownership in Scotland and to energise culturally informed, natural resource-based development. Land reform in Scotland is “simultaneously top down (state authorized and assisted) and bottom-up (privileging communities)” [78] (p. 32), forming a classic representation of neo-communitarianism. The Scottish Parliament introduced land reform legislation in 2003 and 2016 [79,80], and addressed the community acquisition of land and buildings in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015 [15]. A further land reform bill is being proposed at the time of writing this paper.

This community-based land reform project grew out of communitarian action, which was instigated by communities offended by the behaviour of certain landowners that tended to ignore the interests of resident communities. On islands such as Gigha and Eigg and in the mainland community of Assynt, community buyouts of controversially managed large private landholdings provided a bottom-up template for subsequent state-led action. The first Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003 [79] established the community right to buy in crofting counties, even in the absence of a landowner’s willingness to sell. A Scottish Land Fund was established to support communities in these buyouts. The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015 [15] modified the 2003 Act and created ground rules for community asset transfers and a stronger basis for community planning. The 2016 Act extended the right to buy for community bodies to “further sustainable development” (Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016: Introductory Text) [80].

It is perhaps still too early to comment on the success of this legislation, but it is argued that considerable population growth has followed some community buyouts [81]. In communities in the Western Isles, multifaceted rural development projects, including wind energy, community centres, work spaces, and social housing projects, have become almost standard development measures in communities that have acquired substantial land holdings. Outside the historic crofting areas, the impacts of community-based land reform have been rather less, but not without significance for the communities concerned. Later legislation has made it easier for communities outside of the northern and western Highlands to obtain land and buildings. Urban and rural communities have acquired assets via the community right to buy, and these assets, usually managed by development trusts, have become catalytic elements in local development.

7.3. Community Energy

Community renewable energy developments in Scotland emerged neither because of any explicit intention in public policy [82] nor from autonomous developments but because the neoliberalisation of electricity markets opened cracks in the institutional architecture, which were then exploited by community groups. Community-based energy developments were also supported by the actions of an offshoot of a certain regional development agency: the Highlands and Islands Community Energy Company (HICEC), whose initial support actions were primarily directed to off-grid communities and community buildings. HICEC evolved into Community Energy Scotland (CES) and for a time operated as the manager for the Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES), which offered a mix of grants and loans to community organisations. The contract to manage the Scottish Government’s core policy suite for community renewables was later transferred to a consortium called Renewable Energy Scotland, with CES surviving as an innovative third-sector force in community energy.

Scottish policy has evolved, and partly in the wake of UK-wide policy changes that slowed down the development of both onshore wind and smaller-scale hydropower, as Feed-in-Tariffs and other subsidies have declined. It is much harder to establish community ownership or shares in offshore wind developments, which have been the dominant element of many recent renewable developments. However, in 2023, the UK Government signalled a greater willingness to consider onshore wind. Prior to this, the Scottish Government had issued policy guidance that 50% of commercial onshore wind developments should offer a community shareholding. In part, this can be seen as a “sweetener” to overcome local resistance, although the government had already instituted non-statutory commitments from most developers to pay into community funds of up to GBP 5000 per annum per MW of installed capacity, which might also be seen as an attempt to acquire community buy-in. Such funds have been widely used to support third-sector projects in the impacted areas.

Regrettably, the Scottish Government never saw community renewables as part of a regional development strategy [83], unlike the situation when state-owned energy production was used explicitly to support rural development in the 1950s and 1960s, where major hydropower developments occurred in northern Scotland [84].

Scotland has achieved much higher levels of community shareholding in renewable developments than other parts of the UK, with public policy support almost certainly being a positive factor. The ownership entities vary from wholly owned subsidiaries of development trusts to bencoms and cooperatives. For many communities that have significant renewable developments, community benefit schemes and/or the co- or sole ownership of renewable facilities have been transformational, creating income streams for third-sector developments that massively exceed any public-sector inputs to many remote communities. It is often those communities that own land that have led the way in such developments.

While supporting community-based organisations to develop renewable energy production, the Scottish institutional architecture remains dominated by large commercial players with only a relatively tokenistic element of community involvement. The community component has never been seen by these players (and perhaps the government) as a threat, but rather is viewed by them as a merely minor strand in energy production. Planning policy could have been changed to favour community ownership because of the unambiguously beneficial local development outcomes arising from community ownership [85], but such a policy change has not occurred. Further, the owners of the grid have created enormous challenges for smaller-scale developers in relation to grid connection. Scottish leadership of community renewable policy has faltered somewhat after early promise.

In other parts of Europe, different institutional arrangements have enabled very different forms of community engagement with renewable energy. In mainland Europe, the idea of “presumption” has taken root and is a significant driver of community renewable energy action [74]. Prosumption more directly challenges the market-driven ethos of the commercial energy market than Scottish community renewable energy production does, where the dominant motive appears to be income generation to support community projects rather than nurturing moves towards more sustainable development outcomes. These prosuming energy communities are not necessarily place-based, but do comprise communities of interest. In some countries, community-based renewable heat systems have been widely developed, especially in Germany and Austria. These are, necessarily, communities of place because of the need for localised infrastructure developments.

7.4. Domiciliary Social Care

Social care provision has always had significant third-sector involvement. Many local charities—formed centuries ago—have dispensed care to elderly people by supporting almshouses. From being provided by a mixture of family and public-sector institutions, domiciliary social care can now be provided by municipalities, by the private sector, by families, or by third-sector bodies. Since the formation of the UK National Health Service in the 1940s, social care has always been part of the package of public support, but it has been described as the poorly resourced “Cinderella” of the National Health Service. Now, domiciliary social care provision is seen as a sector of economic activity especially suited to third-sector provision [59]. Various national commissions have spelled out the problems, most especially the UK Dilnot report, which described the current system of social care as “inadequate, unfair and unsustainable” [86]; yet, recognising the very significant public costs of an effective care system, recent governments have kicked the can down the road and failed to deliver on commission recommendations.

Whether or not the face-to-face care is provided directly by the third sector, it is often actively involved in local Health and Social Care Partnerships, which are statutory bodies that bring together local social care and primary health services in Scotland. One area in which both public- and private-sector provision has been compromised is care for elderly residents in remote communities. Although individuals are entitled by legislation to choose a carer from the various providers [87], the options in remote communities may be very limited and the general quality of service poor. Furthermore, some local authorities have resisted the entry of social enterprises even though there is evidence that they can add value to care services. Both public and commercial providers have tried to deliver care on reduced budgets, and remote communities have lost significant amounts of private provision of both care homes and at-home services. In several cases, third-sector bodies have filled the vacated niche, recognising that a trained local workforce can provide such services and that a not-for-profit approach can be sustainable where the more profit-oriented private provider, or the bureaucratically encumbered state provider, is unable to deliver effective services [88].

8. Discussion

Self-evidently, there are multiple drivers of communitarian actions to deliver goods and services. In this paper, we have sought increased theoretical clarity by summarising the motivations for providing goods and services in place-based and collaborative ways within a three-fold classification and illustrated the practical drivers of these modes of delivery in Scotland.

In the case of community land ownership, the land reform process in north and west Highland communities—a significant land area—has created transformational possibilities. The early entrants drove this social innovation without any public policy. Their motives were primarily to seek to shape local development and release communities from the shackles of neglectful and often absentee owners whose emphasis was often the recreational uses of their estates rather than community-based local development. The process of land transfer to the third sector has now become highly regulated. It requires administrative compliance and crossing challenging regulatory hurdles. It is by no means an endogenous community response, but is now much more a response to the opportunities created by framework legislation. The bottom-up pioneers created the space, which public policy then chose to support. The consequences can be far-reaching, especially where the community body can generate significant income streams, the most important source of which has been renewable energy. Not all communities have the human and social capital to develop such facilities and not all places have the biophysical characteristics needed to exploit renewable opportunities.

In the case of renewable electricity production, the motive in Scotland has been primarily income generation for the community that contains the facility, which can then drive further third-sector developments. In certain places, these injections of money have proved transformational. However, moves towards hybrid community–commercial models have been pursued recently to accelerate uptake, more to meet climate targets than to support local development. The early entrants to community renewables were cooperatives who realised that in the newly privatised market for electricity production, there was scope for alternative business models. Later, community development trusts, especially those with land assets, were able to exploit opportunities, but regulatory control and tighter margins have subsequently reduced these opportunities and led to a greater focus on co-ownership with commercial providers as the institutional model.

In the case of domiciliary social care of the elderly, the single biggest driver has been the failure of private and public providers, notably in remoter communities. This is a form of interstitial community-led development. Care provided by family members has declined in the UK with greater household mobility, although it remains important and indeed is dominant in parts of Southern Europe. Third-sector provision by local care initiatives is now established—albeit by no means widespread—in remoter rural Scotland. It has the capacity to outperform other modes of provision as part of a Social Solidarity Economy primarily because of its not-for-profit character, but remains regulated by public authority.

A worrying aspect of the rhetoric of empowerment is the burden placed on civil society to self-organise where the state and the market are in retreat. Small islands are an extreme example of this. Without an income stream sufficient to hire professional community development managers, many communities rely on high levels of volunteering from a small subset of the population. Burn-out, fatigue, and exhaustion are rife amongst such volunteers, who even in the presence of employed professionals must still act as trust directors of the community-run enterprises that keep their communities afloat [89].

In some places and among some policy actors and action researchers, there have been attempts to build alternative models of the contemporary economy, in which social and distributional justice and environmental wellbeing occupy a more central position. Different manifestations arise with nuanced differences in the Social Solidarity Economy, community wealth building, and the foundational economy. These visions and conceptions are more than flights of fancy and have been actively pursued by the Quebec, Scottish, and Welsh Governments and by municipalities such as Preston and Barcelona. In all of these alternative models of a post-neoliberal economy, third-sector activity occupies a prominent niche.

Policy can both enable and constrain communitarian developments. Early in its development as a leading European policy instrument, supporting partnership-based, locally grounded, and cross-sectoral development, LEADER had a degree of independence from municipal control. As a result of the mainstreaming of LEADER with Rural Development Programmes, Dax et al. [90] suggested a threat to the previous place-based and bottom-up ethos of the scheme. However, under the wider umbrella of community-led local development (CLLD), many local collaborative place-building initiatives have been successfully implemented. These include community facilities, eco- and cultural museums, and a wide range of forms of social provision.

We cannot claim to be comprehensive in our coverage of theories that explain communitarian actions. The trawling of theory in this paper has been assisted by one author’s involvement in a large EU-funded project and the wide and multidisciplinary networks that the SIMRA project created. We have updated that body of knowledge with more recent work in the geography of development and planning. Central to our claim regarding collaborative place-based action is the growing acknowledgement among authoritative voices, such as Patsy Healey [10], of the idea that place has agency that transcends normal class-based relations.

9. Conclusions

In developed economies, the rationales for the community-based provision of goods and services are highly varied. Some collaborative models are primarily economic, such as the desire to create an innovative milieu and a regional innovation system. Other rationales include countervailing power amongst small firms to compete with oligopsonist buyers, which has provided the dominant factor for farmer cooperatives. Some rationales are primarily redistributive, such as enabling remote and often disadvantaged communities to benefit from the renewable energy revolution. In other cases, especially among prosumer groups, renewable energy communities are motivated by concerns regarding the climate. All reflect a degree of dissatisfaction with the extant modes of provision and a belief that there are better modes of delivery through third-sector agency. “Better” can be assessed in relation to economic, social, and environmental performance.

It seems most unlikely that community ownership to provide goods and services will decline. It is much more than an anachronism or a form of Polanyian civil society kickback to neoliberalism. It has emerged in response to very diverse drivers. It is almost certainly becoming more important in remote rural communities where the consequences of neoliberal logic have caused market-led provision to decline; and those same neoliberal tendencies favouring market-led solutions have created austerity for the local and national state, thereby creating growing interstitial areas now unserved by the market or the public sector. This is a fertile environment for social innovation and community-driven provision of goods and services. The expansion of third-sector and community enterprises is particularly evident in places where the state and the market have failed to satisfy human needs.

Social innovation in community-based provision is likely to occupy an expanding role in such areas, to the extent that large components of societal needs previously captured by the market will fall outside it, from social housing to mobility to energy production. In small island communities, many retail establishments are now community-owned. These cover more than just minor elements of life: over half of the Western Isles, by area, is community-owned [91] (p. 12). More broadly, there is value in supporting the provision of goods and services through communitarian approaches in places where public and private delivery models are not viable: the maintenance of foundational activities and social infrastructure could play a role in improving place-based development approaches for “left-behind” places [92].

There has been considerable scepticism about the power of community agency to better the lives of rural inhabitants. Community-based provision can comprise a strategic choice by the public sector with potentially negative consequences for voluntary organisations locked into uncertain public funding regimes [75]. Moreover, wrapped up in explanatory schema built around social class, the idea of the territorial community as an actant in development has been heavily critiqued. However, some notable observers such as Healey [10] have observed the power of community action to make a big difference to community wellbeing. Her case study [10] concerns Northern England, but in Scotland, renewable energy communities and land-owning communities bear this same capacity to make a difference. Communities as collectives have agency and can deliver profound positive impacts on wellbeing.

Many of the Scottish examples of community enterprise in remote communities have arisen because of the failure of other modes of provision, but public policy has also evolved to offer better support. Hybrid top-down–bottom-up coalitions are now deepening community enterprise [93]. What Wright [42] terms a symbiotic approach to realising sustainability gains is gaining a foothold. This approach is often more regulated and more bureaucratic than the wholly endogenous response, but both depend on social capital, and both expose the limitations of the market. Further, they offer alternative visions of how to organise the provision of goods and services in ways that are potentially profoundly redistributive and ways that may be more sustainable than the market- or state-led alternatives.

It is deeply erroneous to simplify the provision of goods and services into a dualistic framing of private vs. state. Wright [42] shows how hybrid institutional forms involving community agency can be involved in transformational change within a capitalist society. Observers such as Wright [43] and Healey [10] suggest that there is scope for non-class-based intermediating community bodies to impact positively on place-based development. There is now a much richer and more diverse ecology of provision, which is culturally and politically shaped, impacted by economic forces, and includes actions by households as well as collective action. The social and environmental tensions caused by neoliberalism and the expanding interstices left by retreating state and private action may be enlarging the space for communitarian responses and creating a greater scope for community wealth building. In these communitarian field laboratories, improved ways of meeting the grand societal challenges of mitigating growing social and economic inequalities, reversing damaging anthropogenic climate change, and avoiding catastrophic environmental damage and biodiversity loss may potentially be found.