The challenge of population balance: mapping Scotland's institutional and intervention landscape

A report by the independent Expert Advisory Group on Migration and Population exploring Scotland's institutional and policy landscape with regards to population.


Introduction

This report was commissioned in April 2024. Its ambition was to provide “…an overview of the population and demography policy landscape in Scotland within an international context.”

Its objective is to: “Map the national policy landscape relating to population and demography, paying particular attention to intervention logic, coherence, and highlighting its specificities in comparison with similar European and English speaking contexts.”

The challenge of population balance

The backdrop to this commission is the Scottish Government’s 2021 Population Strategy document, A Scotland for the future: The opportunities and challenges of Scotland’s changing population. For conciseness, we will refer to this as ‘the Population Strategy’.

The Population Strategy is structured around 3 “challenges”, which relate to:

  • overall population size,
  • age structure,
  • “balance”.

The strategy document explores macro-level (national) responses to address the first two of these challenges in three chapters on pro-family, ageing and migration policies. These macro-level policies open up a very broad range of activity, with responsibility mostly taken by the Scottish Government[1]. These three ‘macro-policy’ chapters of the Strategy document are followed by one which focuses upon ways to pursue the goal of “balanced population”. Here the cast of institutions is much wider. Local government, the third sector and community organisations are very much involved.

Our analysis and institutional mapping will, for this reason, take the third challenge (balance), as a starting point, venturing into (closely related) issues of total population size and ageing only where these are tackled by local government, the third sector, or community organisations. The concept of population balance is explored in detail in Chapter 3. However, it will be helpful to provide a summary at this point. The notion is essentially spatial – it is about balance between places. It is relative rather than absolute, It is not about equalisation, achieving stasis, or restoring or maintaining historic levels of population. Rather, it is concerned with moderating extreme or rapid change, either positive or negative. It is also underpinned by the inclusion and wellbeing objectives of the National Performance Framework.

Population change is an interwoven issue, driven by many social and economic processes, and, in turn, affecting the outcomes of almost every policy activity. In consequence, the ‘landscape’ of interventions and the associated institutional map are particularly complex. Understanding and describing this complex system is challenging and interesting. However, apart from this intrinsic value, this exercise is intended to help identify potential synergies and conflicts between different elements, and hence opportunities to increase coherence. This is a big ambition for a relatively brief report, although we hope to at least demonstrate the potential of the approach and signpost opportunities for further analysis.

Where to draw the line?

In the context of this report an inclusive concept of population policy is appropriate, incorporating responses to both population growth and shrinking, through both mitigation (seeking to alter the trend) and adaptation (accepting the trend and adjusting to it).

Figure 1: Two axes for assessing the relevance of policies for this report.
A diagram showing two axes for assessing the relevance of policies used for this report. The X axis shows high to low impact, the Y axis shows explicit to implicit.

It is helpful to be clear and explicit about the criteria for inclusion in our policy overview. One way to discriminate is to require an explicit reference to population goals and/or impacts in policy documentation. Other interventions or policies may have unintended impacts, and where these are significant, they should be noted.

However, minor collateral effects do not justify inclusion in the main analysis of the report. In Figure 1, interventions falling within quadrants A, B or C, are included, those in quadrant D may be referred to, but not studied in detail.

What do we mean by ‘policy’?

It is important, as far as possible, to disambiguate the terminology used in this report:

  • ‘Interventions’ or ‘actions’ are basic building blocks of policies or strategies, each directed to a discreet client group, and aiming to deliver (in Theory of Change terminology) a particular kind of ‘intermediate outcome’. Pilots and projects - which are characteristically temporary, experimental or exploratory - are perhaps best considered as a sub-category of interventions.

Interventions may be grouped and coordinated in action plans, such as the Scottish Government’s Addressing Depopulation Action Plan. This describes the orchestration of practical interventions at a range of governance levels and spatial scales, in pursuit of one of the goals (addressing depopulation) set out in the overarching Population Strategy document (see below)[2].

  • Conventionally a ‘policy[3]’ consists of one or more ‘interventions’ which are initiated and managed by a public body, or a partnership, and which have a dedicated budget. They are often time-limited or updated on a rolling programme basis. Such adjustments may be based upon monitoring and evaluation in relation to their ‘goal(s)’.
  • ‘Strategies’ may coordinate several ‘policies’, or be constituted from individual interventions, (including pilots or projects). Their defining characteristic is their emphasis upon longer-term goals, intervention logic, and policy coherence. They do not necessarily have their own funding (except perhaps to cover administrative costs). Strategies are usually embodied in documents, and/or in web pages. The publication of population strategies which bring together a range of existing interventions is characteristic of a number of European countries (Dax and Copus 2022).

What institutions are involved?

The above definitions probably give the impression that this report will rely heavily upon Scottish Government policy documents, describing interventions directly initiated by Holyrood. However, due to the specifics of Scottish governance, there are some responses to population trends which are not devolved, being reserved to the UK Government. Probably more important, in this context, is the fact that Scottish Government policy aspirations are also operationalised locally either by the

32 councils, or by agencies (NHS Scotland, the regional development agencies, the Land Commission etc). In this context statutory guidance documents, and/or contractual relationships play a vital role as ‘levers’, ensuring that outcomes are aligned with both Scottish Government population objectives, and, ideally, with perceived local needs.

In the context of service delivery, particularly at a local level, the third sector, (voluntary or community groups) become important actors.

Report structure

Following this introduction, the report is organised in four chapters, the first three representing three distinct perspectives on the landscape – rather like the thematic layers (separately showing relief, drainage systems, communications, settlement patterns etc.) of a GIS system (Figure 2):

Chapter 1: Policy[4] landscape. This chapter will aim to identify interventions and policies which aim to have some influence upon the spatial balance of population change in Scotland. The discussion will be ordered on the basis of a simple threefold classification of policies (infrastructure, economy, and service provision).

Figure 2: Thematic layers within the policy landscape
A diagram showing three thematic layers within the policy landscape. These are policy, governance, and intervention logic.

Chapter 2: Institutional map and evolving governance. Taking the policies identified in Chapter 1 as a starting point, the next chapter will map out the key institutional actors, - national (UK and Scottish), regional and local, public, private and third sector, - and the nature of the relationships between them.

Chapter 3: Intervention Logics and Theories of Change (ToC). The third chapter explores the concepts underlying the policies identified in Chapter 1. Each of the building blocks of policy (interventions, projects, pilots) has population-related objectives, and seeks specific “intermediate outcomes” – even if these are implicit, and even if different institutions perceive these differently. In practice, a limited number of typical ToCs coexist within the policy landscape, and, in terms of their assumptions, and the way in which they tackle the issue of population balance, these can be further grouped into two broad classes. Understanding how these intervention logics are distributed across the institutional map and the policy landscape, and how they evolve over time, is fundamental to improving coherence.

Chapter 4: Implications for policy coherence and effectiveness. The institutional maps and policy landscape are complex – In this concluding section we reflect upon the strengths and weaknesses associated with the system and make practical suggestions which could improve coherence and effectiveness.[5]

In a European context Scotland is in some ways an outlier in terms of its governance arrangements, the aim is to present the report with the clarity and in a style accessible to a reader from outside Scotland, or indeed, outside the UK. Thus, the specificities of the devolved governance arrangements, and the ways in which the UK differs from Euro-typical governance and welfare regimes will be articulated, where helpful.

Contact

Email: population@gov.scot

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