Annex: Overview and common opportunities and challenges

There is a growing recognition that empowering communities is an essential component in achieving sustainable development. Where communities are given the opportunity and have the capacity, they are usually best placed to define and lead on their own development. This view has been embedded through the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015). Community benefits are resources for communities, therefore it can be beneficial for their design and delivery to be community-led. They can also support an asset-based approach to community development.

Renewable developments typically have lifetimes of at least 20 to 25 years, providing a long-term, predictable source of support for local priorities. This is in contrast to many other funding sources, which have commitment periods of perhaps three years or less. Community benefits can bring about impact over even longer time periods through investing in endowment funds, purchasing income generating assets, or repowering opportunities.

Community benefits can be adapted to meet the specific needs and opportunities identified by a local community, and can respond more readily to these as and when required. They are not constrained by national policies, priorities, timescales, or dependencies. Communities can often innovate and take risks with this support in ways that may not be acceptable to public sector or other funders.

Urban communities usually attract greater levels of government funding, particularly funds targeting areas of deprivation (as defined by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation). Rural areas face specific issues – including dispersed or hidden deprivation, some higher costs and connectivity issues – which can be obscured by apparent prosperity. Renewable developments predominantly take place in rural areas, providing resources for often overlooked communities to develop solutions that specifically meet rural needs or build on rural assets.

In some instances communities may benefit from one-off additional investment or support from the developer or owner of the renewables project such as: shared ownership options; in-kind support; direct sponsorship of local groups or events; a one-off ‘compensatory payment’ relating to construction activity, or; strategic investments towards, for example, higher education provision, apprenticeship schemes, or local energy discount schemes.

At the outset, a key challenge is in defining the area or community that will benefit from the package of benefits in question. Most community benefits are established with a geographical catchment; for administrative ease community council boundaries are often seen as an appropriate starting point in defining this. However, tight geographical targeting doesn’t always recognise that people and businesses interact at a range of spatial scales. People in rural communities often rely heavily on amenities, services and businesses in neighbouring settlements which may be excluded from the area that the package of benefits is targeted at. A strategic, inclusive and flexible approach may therefore generate greater impact and sustainability of the wider area.

All communities have strengths, but their capacity and confidence to deliver community-led packages varies. Support organisations and specialist professionals can add to capacity where required, if this is adequately resourced. Moreover, to have legitimacy within a community, decision makers should represent a wide range of interests within the community and related processes must be transparent, for example in the recruitment of decision makers and in decision making.

Because the objectives, arrangements and procedures of these benefits can be entirely formed by a local agenda, they can be out of alignment with other local and national initiatives and can operate independently of other funders or commissioners. As a result, synergies and opportunities for working with others to produce wider, strategic impact may be missed.

Area-based initiatives with a wide range of potential outcomes are difficult to evaluate, particularly when it comes to the assessment of impacts. As a result, evidence on what works in what context and how to maximise opportunities can be limited. However, learning and sharing of good practice is starting to take place across Scotland.