Scottish Rural Communities Policy Review: Stage 4 Final Report

Executive Summary

This report

This is the final report from the Scottish Rural Communities Policy Review, following on from a number of already published reports including on the evidence collected, international case studies, theories of change, and the policy context.

This report focuses on synthesising the evidence collected to set out clear delivery and strategic recommendations for the future system of support for rural communities in Scotland.

Overall findings

The Scottish Rural Communities Policy Review was commissioned by the Scottish Government to inform future arrangements for supporting rural communities in Scotland. The review focused on exploring the roles and impacts of three core elements of rural community support in Scotland:

• Scottish Rural Network (SRN) since 2021-22
• Scottish Rural Action (SRA) since 2020-21
• Community Led Local Development (CLLD) since 2021-22

We found strong and consistent evidence that Scottish Rural Network, Scottish Rural Action and Community Led Local Development delivered widely recognised value to rural and island communities across Scotland. Collectively they supported community empowerment, social capital and innovation, and provided vital connections between rural knowledge and expertise and national policy making.

Community Led Local Development, in particular, was regarded as an effective mechanism for enabling locally-driven development through flexible funding and local decision-making. The programme’s unique strength lies in its bottom-up approach, enabling communities to set priorities, make funding decisions, and design locally tailored solutions. Its flexibility, particularly the combination of revenue funding and strong partnership working, allowed it to build long-term community capacity while delivering strategic policy outcomes through projects. Scottish Rural Action’s work for Scottish Government played a distinctive role in articulating rural lived experiences and building a national rural movement, with participants very supportive of events (notably the Rural and Islands Parliament) and emerging good practice on rural proofing in policy creation. Scottish Rural Network contributed important networking, information-sharing and co-ordination functions, supporting the circulation of knowledge and policy insights across government and wider stakeholders.

The review also identified a number of systemic challenges constraining the potential of these elements. Short-term and uncertain funding arrangements, particularly for Community Led Local Development and Scottish Rural Action, limited long-term planning, reduced capacity-building opportunities, and undermined strategic delivery and the overall benefits of the initiatives. There was emerging evidence of good practice in applied rural proofing, but rural policy making was limited by a lack of clarity in roles and governance, and weak horizontal co-ordination across government.

Overall, the findings suggest that while the individual components of rural support were effective, their collective potential was not fully realised. A more coherent and integrated system, improved policy alignment, and stronger mechanisms are required to ensure that rural voices meaningfully shape decisions through these initiatives. The evidence points to the importance of viewing Scottish Rural Network, Scottish Rural Action and Community Led Local Development not as separate initiatives but as interdependent components of a wider rural community support system.

Delivery recommendations

The review sets out a comprehensive set of delivery-level recommendations aimed at strengthening the effectiveness, clarity, and operational performance of Scottish Rural Network, Scottish Rural Action and Community Led Local Development. The recommendations should not be read as a set which have to be adopted as a group, but rather as a set of proposals from which to choose. A central priority is improving the transparency, communication and governance of each element. We recommend that Scottish Rural Network should evolve into a more proactive and strategic actor, with an enhanced role in information exchange, policy support, and co-ordination across government and stakeholders. For Scottish Rural Action, the key delivery challenge relates to capacity, with a recommendation for a strategic multi-year funding commitment from Scottish Government to enable longer-term planning, strengthen its role in policy engagement, and support the continued development of the rural movement.

For Community Led Local Development, the most significant delivery issue was the current annualised and uncertain funding model, which restricted strategic planning, weakened partnership development, and reduced overall programme impact. The review recommendations emphasise the need to move towards more predictable funding arrangements, with a recommendation for multi-year funding, with other recommendations aimed at improving funding predictability generally. Other recommendations focus on enhancing flexibility in capital and revenue funding, improving transparency in fund distribution and strengthening Local Action Group governance and inclusivity. There was also strong support for expanding and embedding Youth Local Action Groups as a key component of future delivery.

Across all three elements, there is a need to improve data collection and monitoring and evaluation systems to better capture outcomes, learning and long-term impacts. This includes adopting more proportionate, flexible and participatory evaluation approaches that reflect the realities of community-led development. Strengthening data and evaluation systems is seen as essential not only for accountability and transparency but also for informing policy design and demonstrating the broader value of rural community interventions.

Strategic recommendations

At a strategic level, the review calls for a fundamental shift towards a more coherent, integrated and enabling system of rural support. Central to this is the recognition of Scottish Rural Network, Scottish Rural Action and Community Led Local Development as an integrated rural community support system with complementary roles: Scottish Rural Network as a policy and networking hub, Scottish Rural Action as the voice and mobiliser of rural communities, and Community Led Local Development as a primary mechanism for local delivery and empowerment in rural communities. A key recommendation is the development of a shared Theory of Change and joint work programme to clarify these roles, reduce duplication, and maximise collective impact.

The review also highlights the need for a clear vision for rural Scotland, developed in partnership with communities and stakeholders and supported by an actionable implementation framework. This vision should guide policy priorities, improve alignment across government, and underpin a more proactive and outcomes-focused approach to rural proofing. Strengthening rural proofing processes by moving beyond procedural compliance to genuine early-stage engagement and co-design, is identified as critical to ensuring that rural perspectives are meaningfully embedded across all policy areas. There may be potential learning from rural proofing innovation for other policy assessments.

The review considers Community Led Local Development funding within wider empowerment and community funding contexts. It recommends opportunities to simplify and align the wider landscape of community funding, develop a more coherent place-based policy framework, and strengthen the role of community-led approaches in delivering national priorities, learning from the flexibility of Community Led Local Development.

Finally, as part of our strategic recommendations we suggest transformational proposals. While we acknowledge the current challenging financial situation, which is likely to mean difficult implementation decisions may need to be made in order to remain fiscally responsible, we believe that it is part of the role of this independent research to suggest evidence-based transformative options to inspire new thinking and innovation in the support infrastructure for rural communities. The transformational recommendations focus on creating a deliberative public forum for the collaborative co-creation and implementation of rural policy, and enhancing accountable oversight on rural policy within Scottish Government. Specifically, we suggest a time-limited Rural Communities Taskforce, and an independent, individual Rural Commissioner with cross-cutting government oversight. These institutional enhancements are aimed at increasing robustness in the interactions between policy makers, communities and stakeholders in an uncertain wider context. They build in policy making resilience and depth to help develop future interventions which will deliver greater policy coherence, collaboration and cross-fertilisation, and reduce silo working, regardless of financial circumstances. We again note the potential financial implications of these recommendations, and offer other recommendations on these topics which would still deliver notable change. Taken together, these recommendations set out a pathway towards a more integrated, participatory, and future-focused rural policy system supporting resilient and thriving communities across Scotland.