Social innovation in community energy in Scotland: Institutional form and sustainability outcomes

Abstract

Both the policy context and institutional architectures for community engagement have changed rapidly in Scotland over last decade. After 2003, the early engagement of communities with renewables was almost exclusively through development trusts, acting alone or collaboratively. More recently, cooperatives and benefit societies have become more common. Informed by ideas from social innovation, this paper explores the evolution of the support ecosystem for community renewables and examines the influence of institutional structures on social, economic and environmental outcomes. Recent changes in UK policy have made social innovation in community energy much more challenging, although shared ownership/shared revenue models remain an opportunity to be more deeply explored. Three main models of ownership are explored: the community development trust; the cooperative or community benefit society and the shared ownership model, where the community entity is normally a development trust. While the small number of cases examined limits the scope for generalisation, the community development trust appears to offer the greatest range and scale of local beneficial outcomes for sustainable rural development, but the level of impact on emissions reduction varies and the primary motive has most often been income generation for local development.