This website has been set up to highlight recent research on rural futures – topics related to rural communities and rural development - undertaken at the James Hutton Institute. Researchers in the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences Department are currently leading two research projects in the 2022-27 Strategic Research Programme, funded by the Scottish Government.
Informing a socially and spatially just future for the Scottish rural economy: pinpointing opportunities, assets and support needs [our ‘Rural Economy project’]
Realising change: working with communities to inform a resilient recovery process in remote, rural and island (RR&I) communities [our ‘Rural Communities project’]
Within these projects, researchers from multiple disciplines (geography, sociology, economics) are working with modellers and analysts from the Information and Computational Sciences Department. Applying diverse methods, and often using a longitudinal perspective, we aim to understand processes of change in rural areas and their impacts on people and places.
The main tasks of our Rural Economy project
The main tasks of our Rural Communities project
On this website, we have included a summary of our openly available outputs and publications from this research, and a description of some of our related research projects. Our longer-term research with rural communities in ‘living labs’ aims to support the activities and capacity of these communities to deliver positive changes, and the emerging impact from this research is also captured in this website.
We are happy to hear your views, comments or questions on our work:
Jonathan Hopkins (jonathan.hopkins@hutton.ac.uk) [Rural Economy project]
Margaret Currie (margaret.currie@hutton.ac.uk) [Rural Communities project]