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Article published In:
Meaning Making in the Periphery
Edited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 50–71

Negotiating sustainability across scales

Community organising in the Outer Hebrides

| Cardiff University, Wales
| Cardiff University, Wales

This paper represents voices of community organizers on Barra, a small island in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Although, arguably Barra is geographically and socio-politically located in the peripheries of Scotland, Britain and Europe, the island has been a center of North Atlantic maritime trade networks for centuries. In the current phase of Europeanization and devolution of powers within the United Kingdom, the community finds itself in the position of having to attend to multiple scales: the European Union, the United Kingdom, Scotland and the island itself with its various interest groups. We draw on ethnographic interviews with community organizers that were elicited for the research project Sustainability on the Edge to illustrate some political challenges and possibilities of such scalar realities. We show that community organizers construct a voice that emphasises a historical quality of what it means to live on Barra while inflecting this quality with worldly knowledge that enables access to resources from outside the island. Our findings remind us that centers and peripheries are neither fixed categories that could simply be mapped on geographical visualisations nor notions independent of discursive practice.

Keywords: scales, multilevel governance, islands, voice, community organizing, devolution
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Scales, indexicality and voice
  • Scale uncertainty in times of devolution
  • Recognising scales
  • Upscaling communication
  • The complexity of informal organization
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00003.sin
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