Nine-Goal Roadmap for Community Engagement in Rewilding Launched

Highlands Rewilding, an NFCA member collaborating on their Community Benefits Standard workstream, aims to deliver nature recovery and community prosperity through rewilding taken to scale in Scotland, and then beyond.

The mass-owned company has produced a nine-goal roadmap for its relationship with the communities where its teams work.

These methods and goals for engaging local communities go well beyond only telling people what they are doing.

They entail the creation of agency in the communities via, for example, selling land at cost for community homebuilding, and creating estate management boards dominated by community members that hold considerable soft power in decision making on the nature-recovery projects on the estate.

There are four main reasons for doing this:

• The first is simply that local people should have meaningful input into land management.
• The second is that such input tends to improve outcomes for everyone, particularly by ensuring that local knowledge is brought to bear.
• The third reason is that engagement of this kind can help to build relationships and capacities on both sides, increasing community cohesion and ideally leading towards eventual community ownership.
• Finally, if they can establish a practical template for engagement of this sort, it is more likely to be widely adopted and to generate these benefits elsewhere.

This roadmap sets out the basic principles that are embedded in this engagement process and is very much a working document. They welcome all feed back on it. Please get in touch via info@highlandsrewilding.co.uk.

Tayvallich is the exemplar for the Highlands Rewilding Model, which the Scottish Land Commission recently cited and used as a case study for ‘Collaboration for community ownership and agency’ in their guidance on Delivering Community Benefits from Land.

You can read more about this model on the Highlands Rewilding website or in a recent Scotsman article on the sale of half of the Tayvallich estate to a charitable trust, which willensurenature restoration and community benefit from this land in perpetuity.