The impact of COVID-19 on the resilience of rural and island Scotland: implications for transitioning to a resilient rural and island future

ABSTRACT

Negligible attention has been given to how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted upon social and economic attributes of rural and island (R&I) places. The paper considers impacts of COVID-19 on the resilience of Scottish R&I communities during the crisis or emergency stage of the pandemic and then after its shift to what may be described as an everyday disruption, suggesting ways that communities could transition to a resilient future in a post-COVID world. The paper’s longitudinal, qualitative, Scotland-wide, and holistic assessment of community change and responses represents a novel approach to exploring the impacts of the pandemic on resilience between 2020 and 2022. It allows greater understanding to be gained about both the pandemic’s impacts on socio-economic aspects of Scottish R&I communities and the implications for transitioning to a more resilient post COVID-19 rural world. The paper reports that, when those who participated in the research discussed transitioning to a new future for R&I places, their thoughts about how it should change altered over time. Specifically, by addressing dual discourses of emergency and everyday resilience, the paper identifies how the impacts of COVID-19 affected resilience during different stages of the pandemic and what might be learned about ongoing resilience in R&I communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural
• COVID-19
• resilience
• qualitative
• longitudinal
• recovery

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the other researchers who collected data and participated in Round One including Annie McKee, Jayne Glass, Rob Mc Morran, Marcus Craigie, Carly Maynard, Annabel Pinker and Elliot Meador. We also want to thank James Gurd for identifying some of the literature we used in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When the Scottish Government began to ease COVID-19 restrictions across Scotland, it implemented a five tier alert system of regulations. This allowed the Government to impose appropriate restrictions targeted to local authorities most affected by the virus. Areas with low levels of COVID-19 cases faced fewer restrictions than those local authority areas with higher cases of the virus.

2 Interviews were conducted via video-conferencing software (Web-ex or Microsoft Teams). Participants with given the option to be interviewed over the telephone but no one opted for this. opted for it.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the Scottish Government’s Strategic Research Programme 2016–22 and 2022–27 and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme DESIRA project under grant agreement No 818194; Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division.