Of the three legs of the sustainable development tripod, I believe that Community is the most important.  It is through Community that development addresses local needs, empowers local people and is made truly sustainable.  Integrate has undertaken a number of studies which place Community at the heart of the research, whether in terms of local knowledges, local land ownership or local culture products such as language, music, food, etc.

One of the key reasons for this focus is Integrate’s ethical position which stipulates that it is the people on the ground, those we interview, who are the true experts in their own local development.  Researchers come into communities, plumb that local expertise and repackage it as academic or policy reports.  It follows, therefore, that Integrate will, wherever it can, act for communities, whether in advocating policy changes or in actively supporting them to achieve their desired outcomes. 

For Rural Development to be sustainable, all parties who meet to plan development must contribute.  Communities have important assets which they can contribute towards a development process.  They bring their social capital and ways of working together; local knowledges of the land, of history and of community; and, increasingly in a neo-liberal development model, they are the keys which unlock development funding which external actors can access.  

It is this working with communities which has prompted me to develop a model of Asset-based Rural Community Development which can be used across the spectrum of Community Development fields, and this has underpinned most of the research which I have subsequently undertaken.  Projects undertaken since then have included contracts which contain a Community Assets focus including the use of Place-based Education in the “Highland Perthshire Initiative” (2006), “Forestry for People Social Benefits” (2008), and “An Audit of the Provision of Support for Scots Language” in 2008/9.  

Key to all these projects is the fact that Communities have large amounts of Intangible Assets which they can bring to their own ‘development’ in order to achieve their own goals and outcomes, and which are, in fact, essential to making such development successful and sustainable.

You can explore some of these projects and outputs from the menu to the right.