Common Sense Community? The Climate Challenge Fund's Official and Tacit Community Construction

Abstract

The Climate Challenge Fund (CCF) is the Scottish Government's flagship initiative addressing the twenty-first century's core concern: environmental challenges. The CCF seeks to reduce carbon emissions explicitly through community. Building on community's long and strong social science heritage, this paper outlines the CCF's tacit and unspoken community assumptions. Through these assumptions, this policy (re)produces, prefigures and performs a particular form of community, this being community's elision with locality, and synonym for place, rurality or neighbourhood. Taking on these tacit assumptions is demonstrative of their belief in the effectiveness of such community. After exploring the CCF, its source and structure, the paper delves into empirical work situated at all levels of the CCF's funding chain. It then teases out how the assumptions around – and the need to demonstrate – community help determine the projects selected, and subsequently the vision of community chosen, enacted and mobilised. The CCF (re)produces a particular vision of community with implications for who receives funding, how environmental action is framed and also for the future of community in Scotland.

Key Words:

• low-carbon community
• environmental governance
• carbon deviance
• Scotland
• governmentality
• transition towns

Acknowledgements

Many people have engaged with this work and made it stronger: Harriet Bulkeley and Joe Painter supervised (and found funding for) the thesis out of which this paper emerges. Jeff Jones and Ian ‘Basher’ MacPherson provided early encouragement to write for this journal. Carson Aiken, Dan Stern and Amanda Taylor Aiken all read over parts and provided insightful comments. Tamlynn Fleetwood in particular gave an early draft a thorough going over which saved it from being lost at the peer-review stage. Thank you. The faults remaining, of course, belong to me. This paper was presented at David and Karla's session at the RGS-IBG 2012. I want to thank them for the effort they put in organising that session and curating this special edition out of that. Their engagement along with the anonymous reviewers has made this paper stronger and I appreciate it. The Durham Geography Department's postgraduate conference fund supported my participation there. My colleague at Durham, Paul Johnson, was also due to speak in this same session but tragically could not. My thoughts go to his family and all who struggle similarly.

Notes

1 All participant quotations in this section are from volunteers or paid employees for the funded community projects unless otherwise stated.