ReRIC Social Exclusion Challenges
Social exclusion and marginalisation in rural and island Scotland: ReRIC persistent challenge 3
In the ReRIC project, we are aiming to generate new understandings of three persistent challenges that have impacted on rural and island residents for many years, and in some cases many decades. The final challenge we are exploring is social exclusion and marginalisation in rural and island areas.
Social exclusion and marginalisation in rural and island communities take many forms. This goes beyond financial considerations, which are challenging enough in themselves, to include a range of interconnected factors which contribute to exclusion. These include low take up of social and welfare benefits due to distance and travel cost, absence of affordable and accessible child care provision, lack of leisure and recreation facilities for teenagers, limited local services, and poor and high cost local transport provision and high costs of running private transport.
These factors are often interconnected, with one household or individual experiencing multiple aspects of social exclusion and marginalisation. They are also experienced differently across the population - for instance young people may be limited in their ability to engage fully in society as they cannot access job opportunities advertised through "word of mouth" networks whilst older people may be limited because of personal mobility and a lack of accessible public transport.
In addition to this complexity, social exclusion and marginalisation in the rural context is often under-reported and under-studied.
Our ReRIC project sets out to build a holistic understanding of the many shapes and forms that marginalisation takes in rural areas to understand the range of factors which contribute to it and its multiple layers of impact.
Author: Ana Vuin and Jane Atterton
Funded by the Scottish Government Strategic Research Programme 2022-2027. SRUC-E2-2: Reimagined Policy Futures: Shaping Sustainable, Inclusive and Just Rural and Island Communities in Scotland (ReRIC)
You can read the report using the download link below or you can find the report using the DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24057555
