RAPPID: Rural Assets: Policy and Practice Insights from the Devolved Nations

Rural communities face long-standing challenges, such as out-migration of young people and geographic isolation, that affect local socioeconomic development and threaten community resilience and wellbeing. These issues are potentially exacerbated by contemporary events such as Brexit, COVID and climate change, making rural communities more vulnerable to spatial injustices and inequalities. Across all jurisdictions of the UK, the acquisition of local assets, such as land and buildings, is promoted at a policy and public authority level as a valued means of strengthening local networks and the sense of community empowerment that contributes to resilience and wellbeing. While research has established that community assets can enhance wellbeing in rural contexts, less is known about the conditions under which processes of asset acquisition lead to increased empowerment, wellbeing, and resilience. Our novel comparative study draws upon co-produced knowledge of policy, processes and implementation of asset acquisition. Through a comprehensive policy and administrative analysis, the collection of primary data from rural community case studies, and an approach that co-produces outcomes with communities, we seek to identify the people, systems, and structures involved, highlighting barriers and the facilitators emerging in the narrative accounts of potential pathways to acquisition across the different UK jurisdictions. Taking an Action Research approach, the research seeks to facilitate knowledge exchange across policy, practice and community levels, and across the four UK nations, to better enable processes of asset acquisition that achieve greater resilience, empowerment and wellbeing of rural communities.