73: Carbon Offsetting For Communities 4 -Empowerment, Enrichment & Impact
What actions could usefully be taken to ensure these projects empower and enrich communities?
In the fourth and final episode of our Carbon Offsetting for Communities mini-series, we explore how projects associated with nature-based carbon offsetting positively and negatively impact communities.
Episode Transcript:
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Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero. I am your host, Professor Matt Hannon, and this episode forms the fourth and final instalment in a mini-series all about community carbon offsetting. So if you haven’t listened to the mini-series already, I’d strongly recommend listening to the first three episodes as this is a bit of a deep dive and you’ll find them in the podcast feed. So back in March 2023, we held a workshop at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on carbon offsetting for communities and this was part of a project funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute and Strathclyde Centre for Sustainability. The event focused on Scotland’s fast-growing, nature-based carbon offsetting market and what the potential implications might be for local communities. It also considered the potential role communities could play in shaping and governing this emergent carbon-offsetting market. Before we go any further, what exactly do we mean by nature-based carbon offsetting? Well, here, landowners choose to invest in natural forms of carbon sequestration such as afforestation or peatland restoration to generate carbon credits for sale on the open market. These credits are bought up by organisations wanting to offset their own carbon emissions by funding reductions or avoidance elsewhere instead of cutting their own emissions. In the first episode of this mini-series, we heard from Alastair McIntosh about the meaning of community and what role communities could potentially play in this fast-growing offset market. The second episode was a panel debate all about how we frame, evaluate and facilitate community benefit from nature-based offsets. The third episode explored the state of the nature-based offset market today. Specifically, we discussed how these offset projects are financed, owned and governed as well as how wider market and policy structures shape the form these projects take. So in this fourth and final episode, we explore the positive and negative impacts associated with nature-based offsetting for communities as well as what actions could usually be taken to ensure these offset projects both empower and enrich communities. Finally, we considered different ways that project developers might facilitate community participation in this marketplace. So just before we get into the pod, a reminder that if you haven’t already subscribed to Local Zero, then please take two seconds to hit that follow button and don’t worry, it won’t just be my voice today you’ll hear but from a wide variety of experts who were at the event. So let’s get stuck in.
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Now we covered in some detail in episode one about what we mean by community. However, as we talk so extensively in this episode about community benefits and community wealth-building, it is worth just reminding ourselves about what community actually means. As with most complex terms, this is a highly subjective and often contested term. It is often and occasionally lazily used to refer to a group of people inhabiting the same local place; often termed a community of place. This can, of course, be applied correctly but when we start to disaggregate that community of place, we might also find communities of practice or interest, i.e. a group of people who share a common interest, value or concern. It may also be that these communities of practice or interest transcend a specific local place but still form a coherent and tight-knit community. We’re going to hear a little more on this from Alastair McIntosh, the writer, academic and activist, who has written so extensively about this term.
Alastair: There are two main types of community. There are communities of interest; for example, a local shooting club, a bird-watching group, landowners and venture capitalists who have a common interest in what can happen in a given place. There is then a much wider overarching community of place such as a community council or a community land trust where these things are democratically accountable to the principal stakeholders as the people who live in or around about that area. Community takes us very deep into what it means to be a human being. We talk of soil, soul and society. Soil; our relationship with nature. Soul; our relationship with what it means to be most deeply human. Society; our relationship with one another. The community is not just another word for society. Community is about an integrated approach to living such as we see well-expressed in the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which form part of Scotland’s National Performance Framework. We’re kind of partly there. We’re theoretically there in terms of policy dynamics and to me, the importance of this two-day conference is to carry us further and the fundamental question is do communities have control. Do they have agency in what is happening on the land in which they live and for which they have historic and current-day responsibilities?
Matt: Why is this important? Well, because depending on the demographic, geographical and historical context of that community, they will not only have a different perspective on what constitutes a benefit but might also be in a stronger or weaker position to take advantage of that benefit given the economic, environmental and social capital at their disposal. This will also have a bearing on the appetite the community has to capture that benefit or, indeed, avoid the disbenefit, i.e. how hungry they are to improve their community’s welfare. Okay, so we’ve reflected on what one might mean by community but what about community benefit specifically in the context of voluntary, nature-based carbon offsetting? Now at the workshop, we heard from Professor Tavis Potts from the University of Aberdeen who unpacked the logical connection between natural capital stocks, flows and societal benefits. Before we hear from him, let’s just pause and unpack these terms too. Natural capital stocks relate to the elements of nature that provide the foundations for life on Earth and by extension, a fully-functioning economy and society. These include, for example, natural habitats, species and associated processes such as carbon sequestration, nutrient and water cycling and the primary production base for food chains. So ecosystem services are derived from these natural capital stocks and relate to the functions and processes that can be turned into societal benefits with varying degrees of human input. Examples of these ecosystem services include climate regulation, water supply and waste breakdown. Finally, societal benefits are the changes in human welfare derived from the consumption of goods or services that are derived from these ecosystem services. For example, this might include food, fertilisers for agriculture, medicines, prevention of coastal erosion, tourism and finally, and difficult to measure, cultural or spiritual well-being. So let’s hear a little bit more from Tavis now.
Tavis: I had the pretty uninspiring title in the agenda of ‘Different Framings of Community Benefits, Examples, Etcetera.’ I probably should have been a little bit more on top of that, so apologies. Developing a voluntary carbon offsetting scheme is an intervention in a very dynamic social and ecological system. It’s just one intervention amongst many that can be made. So, for example, restoring peatlands and increasing broadleaf forestry to capture carbon. It’s an intervention in the system and this system, one way of expressing our relationships of human, ecological and social relationships, is via the lens of natural capital. It’s not the only way to do it. It also doesn’t override, for many of us and myself included, the deep cultural and spiritual connection to nature, to land and the benefits I get. It’s one way of abstracting it. Natural capital, i.e. the trees, the environment and the ecology, provides services, i.e. carbon sequestration, that gives people, via complementary capital, labour, finance and communities, a range of different types of benefits. A healthy climate is a benefit that we can draw upon from nature. Communities of place and of interest get lots of different types of good things from nature. We get climate, we get food, we get recreation, we get cultural connections and a sense of place. Any intervention in this system can actually start to alter these relationships. It can cause different trade-offs. We have to be explicit about what these trade-offs are. It can cause different impacts. It can also change not only these relationships between people and place or people and nature, the benefits, it can also importantly change the relationships between those who benefit from those services. The benefits, for example, might accrue to a community and those benefits might then accrue to international financiers. The nature of those benefits can change if we intervene in this complex system, so we have to be clear about that. A natural capital approach recognises these multiple and conflicting processes, layers, interconnections and their different ways of expressing value. It’s not just about removing carbon. It’s about a social and ecological system that creates different benefits for people and expresses different relationships.
Matt: So taking the example of participatory community benefit mapping that Tavis had undertaken for the Deben Estuary in Suffolk in the Southeast of England, he also spotlights how a change from a salt marsh to a mudflat in this area begins to transform the benefits that the community expected it would derive. This is especially relevant to nature-based carbon offsetting as the marine environment, which he refers to, is a growing focus for offsetting projects. Back to Tavis again.
Tavis: Over 40 different types of benefits were identified by three different groups of stakeholders. What I want to draw you to is that the idea of benefits is highly diverse. We’re not just talking about carbon. We’re talking about fishing, wildfowling, food, river protection and golf as a benefit. For some people, it’s important. There’s storm protection and a whole diverse range of benefits that exist from a local environment and a community within that environment. We’ve now identified the features and the benefits of a system and in the second workshop, we start to explore scenarios of how that can change. For example, in this Deben Estuary case, we’re moving from a salt marsh-dominated system and with sea level rise, that will likely convert that into a mudflat-dominated system. There could be an equivalent in the Highlands moving from an agricultural system to a forested system or restoring a peatland system. There is a major change in ecology in that place. As a result, if we’ve got a salt marsh here and mudflats here on the top row, we are seeing a change in the different types of benefits in that system as we move from salt marsh to mudflats. If you look at the right-hand side on the top, we have different benefits that we get from a salt marsh. We know these benefits because we’ve done the work on actually scoring and mapping what the levels of benefits are for particular habitats. You can see how there is a decrease from, say, aesthetic benefits, tourism, nature watching and sea defence. Those benefits shrink as you move to a mudflat-dominated system. As you change the ecology, you change the human benefits and they shift. This is all done by working with local knowledge, local nature providers and local interests.
Matt: So reflecting on Tavis’ insights and other experts at the workshop, we can point to a number of important characteristics of community benefits derived from natural capital. The first is that these benefits are subjective. What one community may view as a benefit, another may not. Why? Well, every community is different with its own set of resources, values and priorities. Second, benefits are time-sensitive. Something that the community perceives to be a benefit today may not necessarily be seen as a benefit tomorrow. This is because communities, the landscape they inhabit and the wider society and economy they form part of are evolving all the time. Now someone who made this point eloquently at the event was Dr Jill Robbie from the University of Glasgow who discussed the subjective and time-sensitive nature of these benefits relating to nature-based offsetting and later referred to the example of deer fencing to protect newly planted trees.
Jill: One nut that I cannot crack in any way that I think about it is that it’s extremely challenging to factor in community impacts over the type of timeframes that we’re talking about. The communities can be consulted, for example, before the project is registered. That will not be the same community in 30 or 50 years. There may be community needs such as requirements for extra housing capacity, additional community facilities or other land use conflicts that arise in the future due to our changing ecosystems or agriculture because of climate change that we won’t be able to build in at the very beginning and design of the projects. So this balance between the permanency of the project and the need for flexibility is just a very challenging problem to solve. Imagine we have widespread woodland creation. We’re not going to shoot all the deer in Scotland and so we need to put up a lot of deer fences. Deer fences are very high and that might interact with our Right to Roam legislation and our ability to have recreational access over land. We may only realise that once we’ve put up the fencing and people start complaining about the fact that we can no longer have freedom to go over these moors because we have woodland creation.
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Matt: There are also two other important considerations associated with natural capital community benefits. The third is that benefits are not necessarily accessible to everyone everywhere. There are asymmetries in who is able to access these benefits and what they might require in order to do so. The fourth is that benefits aren’t neutral. There are winners and losers. The creation of one benefit might be at the detriment of another. These are trade-offs. This is because we’re dealing with a complex, interlinked system where impacts in one area may have unintended implications elsewhere. As such, a myopic focus on carbon capture may erode ecosystem services elsewhere all things being equal. We hear again from Tavis on this point.
Tavis: Often in the research and the analysis, benefits are just benefits. We actually don’t look at who has access to those benefits and how that changes. We look at the importance of the system of natural capital and providing benefits. We can also look at the reliance of different groups in society on different aspects of natural capital. Now this is meant to be totally chaotic. You’re not meant to understand it. Absolutely what it shows intrinsically is that we have deep, complex and many-layered relationships with nature. For example, we could have reed beds in salt marshes. We have the benefits they can provide, i.e. prevention of coastal erosion or aesthetics, and we have different users of those benefits like the Environment Agency in England or recreational water users. We can plot, through our workshops in the discussions and scoring that we’re doing, that reed beds are really important in providing prevention of coastal erosion. Who is that important to? Well, it’s important to the Environment Agency because they have a regulatory remit around that but it’s also important to boatyards and boat builders where their operations are sited. Going back the other way, for recreational water users, people canoeing and coastal rowing, for example, aesthetic benefits are really important to them. It’s important to have a beautiful place and a healthy ecosystem. Those benefits are provided in part, importantly, by certain habitats like salt marshes. We can go back and forward in these relationships. What our work is trying to do is demonstrate the importance of place-based approaches and stakeholder-centred approaches, to look at this diversity and intrinsic connections of nature and the relationships between nature, benefits and people. With our work on participatory mapping, we’ve found that actually, it’s the process that’s important and not the outputs. It’s actually that we develop a common language and a common understanding of a place in depth with local communities and local interest groups. It builds in different ways of knowing natural capital and this does ultimately reflect the interlinkages between people and place. It can support communities taking charge of environmental assets on their terms and on the benefits that are important to them. These are complex systems. They’re complex and they’re dynamic. When we’re actually talking about voluntary carbon offsets, we’re just really trying to manage here for one particular benefit and perhaps we should be considering the complexity and interrelationship of all the different benefits in the system because maximising carbon removal will change other types of benefits. We should be very upfront and aware of that before we go into communities proposing these significant large-scale schemes. Benefits are not neutral. There are actual justice implications. This connects very strongly to, for example, the just transition agenda of who can actually access and use benefits, how we can engage different community members’ capabilities to engage in these schemes and to engage in accessing the benefits from natural capital. My final point is understanding this dynamic system, as complex as it is, should be a part of designing and implementing natural capital interventions, i.e. nature-based solutions. We need to have something like this or similar first before we go in proposing large-scale changes to social and ecological relationships in places.
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Matt: So moving forward, Tavis explains there’s a useful three-step approach when looking to undertake participatory mapping of community benefits from natural capital with communities. First, identifying natural capital in a place and identifying the benefits it provides; pour over maps together with local stakeholders and communities to identify features of interest. The second is then you explore scenarios and trade-offs. What happens when you intervene and restore or remove certain habitats? How do these natural systems change and which ecosystem services are strengthened or weakened as a result? Thirdly and finally, logic chain development; looking at the relationships between the benefits and the beneficiaries and to which groups these benefits flow. Central to deriving community benefits from nature-based offset projects is not just how land use changes but also how it influences land ownership and governance. In a bid to ensure that offsets contribute positively rather than negatively to empowering and enriching communities on the path to net zero, we heard from Miriam Brett from the think tank Future Economy Scotland. She spoke about the concept of community wealth-building in the context of natural capital offsetting. So let’s begin with what we mean by community wealth-building and the context within which this has emerged in Scotland, i.e. where land ownership and markets in Scotland are not necessarily supportive of delivering long-term community benefit and control and how, if we are not careful, the nature-based offset market could erode rather than enrich community benefit.
Miriam: The ownership and governance of land today have obviously been shaped by a number of distinct features that are intertwined with its politics, history, culture, geography and language but Scotland has some pretty distinct land features. It has a very large rural land area. Around 98% of Scotland’s land mass is classified as remote rural - that’s not my choice of phrasing. I would never say remote as a Shetlander – or accessible rural. Despite waves of land reform legislation producing progress, it still has a highly concentrated land ownership structure. We still have a largely unregulated land market. Anyone in the world can buy land with relatively little scrutiny and actually, that’s quite rare if we look at international examples. Rural landowners benefit from a number of tax exemptions and reliefs and can also have access to a range of subsidies. There are quite distinct land features here. These features have contributed to a strong investor demand in Scottish rural land and although there remains significant uncertainty surrounding the prices in the voluntary carbon market, there is a broad consensus that prices will continue to rise over the coming decades. It’s likely that this also puts upward pressure on land prices as well. That’s expected and also in the context of looking up, for example, the potential of new natural capital markets and payments for the ecosystem services that will create opportunities to monetise and on the current trajectory, that will push up land prices further. This is all happening in a context of very vast inequalities in wealth, income, power imbalances and a very acute rural housing crisis as well. It’s important to acknowledge that as this is the backdrop when we’re looking at and exploring the implications of the rise of carbon offsetting. So where does community wealth-building sit in all of this and firstly, what is it? Community wealth-building is a relatively new approach to local economic development. It seeks to redirect wealth back into the local community and place control and benefits in the hands of local people. It sets a direct challenge to an extractive model of economic governance, ownership and management. In place of an extractive and unequal approach to economic development through which we can see the outcomes, the inequalities in power, class, race and gender as well as regional imbalances and the ways in which an extractive model has exacerbated that. Community wealth-building seeks to build a community-centred approach through the physical and financial transfer of assets into the hands of local economies and into the hands of local communities.
Matt: In short, community wealth-building is a people-centred approach to local economic development that puts wealth, control and benefits back in the hands of local people. Breaking this down further, what are some of the core objectives for achieving this? Let’s hear from Miriam again.
Miriam: This is centred on five key pillars and these were set out by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. The first, and most important for this, is the socially just use of land and property. Land is a key expression of economic power and concentrated ownership of land and property continues to be a key driver of inequality. If stewarded through more equitable forms of ownership and management, land can become a source of local wealth generation centred on climate and environmental stewardship and social justice. Second is that of plural ownership of the economy and scaling regenerative businesses like cooperatives, worker-owned firms and community-owned initiatives in which wealth is shared much more broadly between owners, between workers and between consumers allowing wealth to flow through to local people and places and back to them rather than being extracted. Third is making financial power work for local places; a focus on increasing flows of investment within local economies by harnessing and recirculating the wealth that exists as opposed to attracting external capital necessarily. The fourth is that of fair employment and just labour markets and increasing employment opportunities as well as noticeably improving the quality, pay and conditions of jobs in local areas. Community wealth-building also necessitates anchor institutions. These are place-based often large-scale employers. Anchor institutions can take measures like the promotion of inclusive employment practices and delivering a real living wage. Fifth is the progressive procurement of goods and services. That shift in the cost is a dominant factor when considering who gets a contract to critical considerations like workers’ rights, pay and conditions, climate considerations and social value. The aim here is to develop a dense ecosystem of local supply chains to support local employment and maintain wealth locally. Community wealth-building was first rolled out in Cleveland, Ohio where there was a vast post-industrial decline with chronic levels of underinvestment and population decline as well. It was developed with the specific aim of localising and retaining city spending in anchor institutions through scaling local cooperative-owned business models with a real focus on racial and economic justice. As we’ll see from the examples I’ll go on to talk about, it can be centred and tailored towards the needs of those communities.
Matt: Miriam then went on to point to some key indicators of success for community wealth-building in the context of offsetting which included firstly local, broad-based ownership, minimising absent ownership and encouraging community ownership. Second, large local multipliers prioritise the recirculation of profits where profits are reinvested rather than extracted from a local area. Third, collaborative decision-making with an emphasis on democratic governance and finally, fourth, inclusive, well-paid jobs for the local community that underpin economic security and living standards. This offers a clear set of principles that can be directly applied to nature-based offset projects to help evaluate whether they are designed to support community wealth-building or not.
Taking the first point regarding local, broad-based ownership, it is far from a given that nature-based carbon offsetting will be a positive force in driving community wealth-building. As outlined in episodes two and three, the current concentration of land ownership across a very small number of landlords in Scotland means only a small minority of people will capture the majority of the revenue and benefits derived from these projects. This minority will also weald the majority control over how these projects evolve and who they benefit. A variety of land reform changes were identified as necessary such as public interest tests for large land purchases, stronger community right-to-buy powers and richer finance for community land buyers to access. For more on this, it’s worth listening to episode three. Turning to the second indicator of success, large local multipliers with the aim of retaining as much revenue as possible locally and ensuring local control of these funds. Naturally, community-owned and run projects would likely see the highest proportion of funds recirculated locally but this assumes investors are from within the local community which is not always necessarily the case with a significant proportion of shares often bought from investors far beyond the community of place. The alternative model here is to establish a community benefit fund. As we covered in episode three, the common model for nature-based offset schemes at present being led by the private sector is for the establishment of an arms-length Special Purpose Vehicle, i.e. a separate legal entity that owns the project. A proportion of the profits are then channelled into a community development trust which is responsible for distributing these across the local community to support local recirculation of revenue and community benefit. This model has been borrowed from the renewable power industry with some commentators pointing to how this can offer private sector developers a social licence to operate within local communities. This is achieved by giving the community an annual dividend from the project and providing them with control of where, when and how this money is spent. You’ll now hear from Ailsa Raeburn, Chair of Community Land Scotland, who speaks about some of the advantages of the community ownership model versus private ownership with an associated community benefit fund.
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Ailsa: We’ve seen in places like Eigg, Gigha and Galson, when you own that natural capital and that resource, it’s up to you what you do with it and it’s up to the community what they want to do with it. Any wealth that’s generated from that is immediately reinvested back into the community. So I think we’ve got a fantastic model already and there’s always a desire, it seems, to invent something new. We’ve got a product that works perfectly for Scotland’s rural communities in particular but I think if we’re looking at community benefits themselves, there are some good models in the community benefit world. The renewable sector had a scheme where £5,000 per megawatt generated would go to a local community benefit fund. As a concept, that was really good. It’s been discredited because of the value and £5,000 is far too low given the value that’s generated from those renewables schemes and it wasn’t compulsory. I think we could build on a scheme like that, particularly for carbon credits, in terms of a site that is going to generate X thousand tons of carbon over a period of time. What’s the right percentage of that to go back to the community? It needs to be made compulsory that you can’t register your carbon credits on the Woodland or Peatland Code until you’ve got that deal in place. I don’t think it’s beyond the wit of us to actually design something based on what we’ve already got and the principles that we already have. It’s actually just about tweaking those. I know there are always going to be individuals, businesses and estates that say, ‘Oh, this scheme won’t possibly work if we have to give the community 15%.’ Yet we know from the renewable sector and from other development sectors, through Section 75 agreements, that you can. It does work.
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Matt: So how do community benefit funds work in practice? Grant Moir from the Cairngorms National Park Authority outlines the community benefit model they are hoping to implement with private sector partners in restoring peatland across the Cairngorms National Park as part of the Revere programme. Here, 10% of future revenues are channelled into the Cairngorms Trust for community redistribution.
Grant: How was 10% chosen? It was what we think worked for the model that we were looking at in terms of how much was likely to come through but it’s trying to work out something that would work between the landowner, ourselves and others to make sure that we had different proportions that seemed to work for different people. It’s not that 10% is what should be applied to everything. It’s for that project at that time and there’s nothing to be negotiated. I think there’s always a question around that. Again, there’s trust in a community company that delivers all the local-led community benefits within the national park and has lots of little people on it. There’s a little bit of structuring and what we’ve said is that it should be spent on the things that will also help to benefit the climate and biodiversity but we haven’t specified specifically what it is. I suppose we’re still working on that in terms of what that looks like because the reality is that the first payments into any community fund are a number of years off, so we’ve got a bit of time to really try and nail down exactly what that looks like. I think what we want to try and do is to tie it back to making sure that the funding is spent on things that are still going to address the twin emergency because it’s the key thing that is driving the park plan and a lot of the stuff that’s happening in the park.
Matt: Reflecting on Grant’s insights as well as hearing about other examples of community benefit funds from nature-based carbon offsetting schemes such as from Trees For Life and also the Flow Country Green Finance Initiative, the following discussions emerged. The first was what is an ethical share of profit or revenue that should be channelled to the community to support community wealth-building. Also, how is this decided and by whom? As we heard from Grant, these funds ought to be cognisant of what level of profit sacrifice or revenue sacrifice landowners and investors are willing to forgo. The other question is how much funding a given community needs to drive forward meaningful community wealth-building. The second discussion related to what caveats or strings should be attached to these funds to ensure they are channelled into projects that are not only in synergy with the principles of mitigating climate change but also raise the level of social justice. Is it appropriate to dictate to communities in this way because, by extension, it is eroding their agency and potentially undermining procedural justice, i.e. fairer distribution of decision-making powers? But without these cheques and balances, might we see these community benefit funds supporting projects that are anathema to net zero and a just transition? Third, who exactly decides what projects are supported by these funds and how democratic are these processes? Is it the will of the community as a whole or a select few trustees who decide? To what extent is there any third-party quality assurance around this or best practice insight into how these funds are designed to operate more fairly and democratically? Fourth and finally, should these funds focus on investing purely in projects within the local area or should a portion of these funds be awarded at a regional or national scale which could still generate some wider benefits for the community in question? Also, is it fair that only the communities neighbouring these projects should receive financial compensation whilst others go without? Ultimately, the answer probably lies with what the community wants to do with these funds as long as they are made aware of the broader advantages of aggregating up smaller pots of money to deliver projects at a much larger scale that can benefit multiple communities. The third indicator of success for community wealth-building identified was collaborative decision-making. We’ve already discussed the importance of community ownership in supporting other community wealth-building aims but it’s also essential to collaborative decision-making, especially where we see community-owned and led organisations operate legal structures such as cooperatives or community benefit societies. Now these are built on democratic governance arrangements such as one shareholder one vote versus one share one vote. But moving beyond models of ownership and governance, another critical consideration is the approaches that private and public sector organisations looking to lead on nature-based offset projects engage with the communities and facilitate their participation. Now there are various different definitions of what these terms of community engagement and community participation mean but we hear from Dr Caitlin Hafferty of the University of Oxford who helps differentiate between these two terms and who also explains why community participation is so important in this decision-making process.
Caitlin: What is engagement and participation and why is it important? How can we clarify exactly what we mean? Because there are lots of different understandings not only between different disciplines and different areas. We do engagement and participation in healthcare in the planning sector with digital innovation and tech. There are so many different meanings and definitions between different areas, between different areas of practice, within different organisations and between different area teams even, so it can get incredibly confusing to actually really define what is meant. This is not the only way of understanding participation, certainly not, but I tend to see it and when I talk about it, I tend to clarify from participation and democratic theory which can be a bridging and nesting understanding for these concepts of any ways of ethically involving people in processes, structures, stations, and decisions that really impact their lives and working with them to achieve those kinds of equitable and more sustainable outcomes, really importantly, on their own terms. Public and stakeholder engagement, however, is often framed as a more formal process that could be carried out by an organisation. Organisations are often tasked with doing that public engagement process and that, by its very nature, is closing down those decision-making structures and the extent to which people can actually really be involved in decisions just by the fact that it’s being led by an organisation. So really, what I tend to explore is what the barriers are around that and how the decision-making process can be opened up or closed down depending on the structures in which they’re enacted. These are really rooted in, as I said, deliberative democracy and social justice issues and really focused on and critiquing the parameters around equity, trust, power and various other dynamics. There are often three main reasons that organisations will do engagement and why it’s important for an environmental organisation be that in the public, private or third sector. People morally have a right to be involved in decisions that affect their lives. Engagement can also help to make much better decisions. I think, often, evidence and knowledge within environmental organisations are framed in one particular way as scientific knowledge or as ecological knowledge maybe but actually, local knowledge is evidence that should be incorporated. So actually, bringing in those different perspectives and different knowledge types can really help us to understand very complicated challenges that have lots of multiple facets and different perspectives involved. So it can really help enhance that evidence base if the organisation is evidence-focused and evidence-led and that’s a really important consideration. It also can help build more trustworthy and legitimate decisions or legitimate decisions that are perceived as more legitimate. Particularly in the public sector, maybe that’s quite important or from my experience working with public sector organisations in England.
Matt: Moving more into the realm of deliberative participation in decision-making, Hafferty explained how communities need sufficient levels of capability, capacity and confidence in order to do this. So first, capability refers to the skills, knowledge and experience that communities have at their disposal to participate in a given marketplace. The second relates to capacity and this is the opportunity that communities have to be able to apply these capabilities or bandwidth as it’s often referred to. Consequently, they may have the means to participate but not necessarily the opportunity due to limitations around time, finances, etcetera. The third category was confidence. Confidence-building is necessary to overcome a community’s nervousness about participating in such projects. Ensuring they have faith in themselves that they can and should participate is crucial. Guidance and clarity about what role the community is expected to play is a very important precursor here too. What we heard was that communities often lack one or more of these three Cs and, thus, struggle to participate. On capacity and capability-building, we heard about the importance of community development plans. These were considered important because if a community already has a development plan in place, it is in a much stronger position to understand how offsetting fits within its vision for the future. However, communities are often constrained in their ability to formulate such plans due to limitations in capabilities such as skills or capacity such as time and people. Communities are, therefore, in need of targeted training and resourcing; for example, the provision of funded experienced community development officers. From a confidence perspective, a critical first step here is transparency and helping communities to understand the often alien or complex information regarding these projects like market rules and legislative requirements. Communities also need to be made aware of what is at stake both in terms of what could be lost but also what could be gained from participating in these natural capital projects. Neatly capturing many of these points is Zoe Laird, the Regional Head of Communities from the Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
Zoe: I think one of the key things that underpins all of this is a community having a plan. I think that one of the bits that is perhaps missing from the landscape at the moment is more support for communities to develop plans to start those discussions that are really valuable and that bring them to a place where they’re able to say, ‘This is actually what we, as a community, want and this is how we want to articulate it. Now we’re going to be able to have a conversation with the local landowner about what’s important to us here. It’s a way of, I suppose, maybe moderating the discussion to something that’s much more forward-looking and hopefully practical. We want this and you want that. Where’s the way we navigate through that? I think that if we modified the steps approach and tools associated with it, we could add in things around governance and constitution, undertaking needs analysis, what that asset needs to be managed and to support the growth and understanding of communities that want to engage in that work. When you build that together with your community empowerment rights, you suddenly find that we do actually have a relatively powerful toolkit but what we don’t have yet are communities who feel or see the need to engage in that, especially in relation to natural capital. I think it’s so new that the conversation has been quite neat and quite small but it needs to be shared more widely now to open up people’s ideas to not just the challenges that we’ve highlighted this morning but I think also the opportunities that Miriam and Trees For Life are demonstrating. It does take it back to exactly what those communities need which is housing, schools, services, jobs, etcetera. For me, it’s a routeway to that potentially and that’s what I’d like to see happen.
Matt: This view was also echoed by Dr Jen Roberts, a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde and a frequent Local Zero contributor.
Jen: One of the things that’s become quite clear but hasn’t necessarily been a focus of the conversation so far is about how much of a distribution in terms of community resource there is across different communities in Scotland. A lot of the talk has been around natural capital and natural resources like the availability of the sorts of environments that we’re looking to restore as part of carbon offsetting activities but we’ve heard about communities, for example, in the Cairngorms National Park where there are 22 communities all of which have got community project officers and yet there are other communities that don’t have these people at all. So when you’re talking about communities leading on things, let alone how organisations engage with communities, if you have this big mismatch or inequality across different areas of Scotland about what the community capacity is, then everyone is starting on an uneven playing field and that has been quite concerning to hear about today. I think how you engage or how communities can lead on these projects will probably be based on which communities have that resource.
Matt: Crucially, putting in place these three Cs of capability, capacity and confidence to support community engagement and participation cuts both ways too. It’s not just from a community’s perspective and their ability and willingness to participate in an externally-led project but also that of the company or organisation leading the project. Both parties must have all of these in place to effectively collaborate with one another. We could also add a fourth C; cultural calibration. Here, we refer to the need for these external parties, for example, those leading an offset project, to first immerse themselves in the community they wish to connect with. We began to hear about this in episode two and the importance of informal, long-term engagement and ensuring that we are also targeting place-based outcomes that are sensitive to that community in that place at that time. Going one step further, it is important to understand the idiosyncrasies of local communities. Different communities may harbour different cultural norms, values and ways of working. These all have an important bearing on which approaches might work best in terms of community engagement, conflict resolution and legitimacy-building. In short, they may not only have different priorities and needs but also different ways of working in order to meet these ends. For example, in Alastair McIntosh’s book, Soul and Soul, he reflects on the longstanding tradition amongst some Hebridean communities of Scotland about how islanders are judged on their track record of serving their community before they are given the time and space to contribute to proceedings on community issues. These types of soft institutions, i.e. the norms and practices that characterise one community from another, must be understood before they can be meaningfully engaged with. Like any relationship, we must get to know one another first before working together towards a shared goal. We’ll hear again from Professor Tavis Potts who explores the need to learn and calibrate as well as some potential ways forward.
Tavis: I had a really healthy scepticism of professional facilitators [laughter]. When we were negotiating, for example, marine-protected areas in the Western Isles in Barra and Oban, I saw how professional facilitators destroyed the policy agenda by not understanding fishing communities and fishing cultures. I think a process of ethnographic engagement with communities before the process begins and reflection within that process is one way of knowing different ways of knowing. Taking the time to understand, explore and connect before you facilitate is really important. Don’t rush it. Go in there with good intentions.
Matt: We’ve almost reached the end of our carbon offsetting for communities mini-series but before we conclude, I wanted to share with you a view from beyond the British Isles and across the Atlantic in the United States of America. Whilst this mini-series has flagged a wide range of key issues that urgently need to be addressed to ensure that voluntary, nature-based carbon offsetting doesn’t undermine the welfare of rural communities in Scotland, it’s clear that here in Scotland, we’ve already made some important progress and are hopefully in a stronger position to make the urgent changes we need going forward to support community wealth-building. Making this point is Professor John Lovett from the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
John: I’ve been coming to Scotland for years because I’m interested in Scottish land reform and I currently serve on the Land and Human Rights Advisory Panel for the Scottish Land Commission. My first big takeaway from this conference is that, in one sense, Scotland is a wonderful place because these conversations are happening at a very high level in a very open and transparent way. Scotland is already starting from a place that, to me, seems very advanced in terms of thinking about community wealth-building, taking net zero seriously and thinking about just transitions very seriously, so I’m enormously impressed. There are some advantages that Scotland has that I’m struck by. Everyone knows each other. It’s very easy to pull people together. Although there are certainly ideological or political divisions about whether one should rely on communities or private markets and those are the kinds of debates we have in the US, there’s a kind of commonality of interest that is really striking. Just to contrast that with the States, one of the big things that we would be talking about, if we were having this conference in the US today, would be the role of race and how the organisation of race in the United States has skewed people’s access to wealth, access to energy and access to safe environments. It’s incredibly striking to be here and not have that word come up at all once. The fact that Scotland conceives of itself as a community that’s very inclusive and that’s not divided by race or divided in tribal terms, I think is a great advantage that people maybe don’t realise. That’s one thing that is a big takeaway. The second thing is I think because of Scotland’s politics right now, you’re much closer to being able to enact some of these very progressive ideas than we are in the United States like the fact that you have a community benefit bill that’s currently being proposed by the Scottish Government is remarkable. An individual congressperson might be able to introduce a bill like that in the US Congress but it would never get anywhere. Because you are a smaller community and because these ideas are already so well-entrenched in the political discourse, you have a huge advantage. That’s why I’m going to keep coming back.
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Matt: And there concludes our four-part adventure into the complex and fast-changing world of voluntary, nature-based carbon offsetting and what it might mean for communities. Thanks to all those who featured in these four episodes and also thanks to the project team members for making it all happen. You’ve been listening to Local Zero and if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues and you can tweet us @LocalZeroPod or toot us at Mastodon using #LocalZeroPod. If you have any longer questions or comments, you can also email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. Finally, please remember to check out our website, LocalZeroPod.com, where you can listen to the full back catalogue and search for episodes by keywords or topics. You will also find the other episodes that are part of this mini-series on carbon offsetting for communities. So thanks again for listening to this mini-series and bye for now.
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