Reflecting and Evolving
improving and scaling our approach. Influencing national planning policy. Inspired by indigenous practice.A Change of Direction
In May 2018, the Community Chartering Network (CCN) co-directors took part in a three-day workshop on the Isle of Bute with representatives of the Misak people of Colombia, originators of the Plan de Vida approach (see box, right). The experience precipitated a radical new direction for our thinking and practice.
Retreat and Critical Reflection
Following the workshop, we secured £5,000 seed funding to pilot an adaptation of Plan de Vida within a Scottish context. Through two remote rural retreats in the Lake District and Scottish Borders, the founding CCN team came together from Devon and Scotland to engage in deep collective reflection on our journey to date—both organisational and personal—and on the Misak’s process. This work evolved into CCN’s five core principles and the approach that has underpinned all of our subsequent projects.
Rural Retreats for Deep Reflective Practice
A key insight was that an the UK context, most “communities” saw their work as complete once agreement was reached and captured in a document. Conversely, for the Misak, agreement marks the point at which the real work begins: an ongoing process of collaborative sense-making and cultural renewal through which the community adapts to changing needs and circumstances. Documents, when used at all, are incidental markers—waypoints, never endpoints.
Put differently, people often speak of “community engagement” as if a ready-made community already exists and simply needs to be engaged. But from a living-process perspective—especially in our isolating and fractured times—this is rarely the case. It is the engagement itself that brings community into being, healing divides and generating something new that did not previously exist.
The discipline of rigorous reflective practice has since become central to everything CCN does, most recently renewed during our 2025 retreat at the remote Stoer Lighthouse. We are our own toughest critics, and only what withstands this scrutiny and is validated by the communities we work with, moves forward.
Our dialogue with Indigenous practice was also re-initiated during 2025, building on, and sharing our learnings from, applying it in a Western context.
The first Community Life Plans (CLPs)
Following the 2018 retreats, CCN — in partnership with the Stathard Community Council and a grassroots resident working group — commenced the first self-funded pilot of CCN’s new principles-led approach with a small rural village, Kinlochard, within the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park.
The coherence and richness of the first CLP, and the level of participation—with 75% of all residents, young and old, directly contributing and consenting—attracted interest and support from the local planning authority, and neighbouring communities. The benefits were evident to the Community Council, as the CLP gave them a consensual democratic mandate to represent, easing their statutory planning duties and allying local criticism of non-representativeness.
Between 2018 and 2020, the project expanded to develop resident-led CLPs across all four wards in the Strathard community council area. The fourth required adaptation due to COVID-19 restrictions. Together, these plans form a truly resident-led place plan for the entire Community Council area—capturing common and distinct priorities across its diverse sub-communities—and constituting the first adaptation of the Plan de Vida to a Western context.
Ripple effects on planning and policy, local and national
In 2020–21, the CLPs became a foundational enabler of the Strathard Framework. Led by the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park, the Framework is a collaboration between local communities, planning authorities, landowners and agencies to shape sustainable rural development in Strathard until 2040. The holistic canvas and shared mandate for place provided by the CLPs made it possible to integrate planning, land-use and community action within a single, consensual framework. By this, it enabled a partnership and opportunity that would might otherwise have been unlikely or inconceivable.
In parallel, broader interest in the first CLPs was growing. With the CLPs as the leading exemplar, workshops organised by Planning Democracy, helped articulate the importance of an open-ended, community-led approach to local planning. With further input from the Scottish Community Alliance, and through a process facilitated by CCN, this work evolved into Local Place Plans: A Declaration by Scottish Communities, a collective statement setting out the conditions communities agreed were needed for Local Plans to matter.
In early 2020, word about the Declaration spread rapidly, with over 50 community councils from across Scotland adopting it between February to March, before the COVID-19 pandemic abruply stalled momentum.
Despite this, the Declaration went on to become a material consideration for the Scottish Government during the national public consultation on new Local Place Plan regulations the following year.
The essential conditions advocated by communities were subsequently incorporated into policy.
Most notable, was the enshrining of community leadership, autonomy and flexibility in the coproduction, rather than specifying predetermined approaches and outcomes.
The Strathard CLPs provided a concrete, real-world precedent and exemplar of what an open-ended, resident-led process looks like in practice.
Indigenous Inspirations:
Since 2018, the Community Chartering Network’s approach has been shaped by learning from Indigenous peoples of Latin America. We hold deep respect for their struggles for autonomy, their ways of understanding life and community, and the powerful insights these provide for community regeneration everywhere.
These encounters reaffirmed our belief that true community regeneration begins with the collective right to define what life means and to act on that understanding, while offering external perspectives that expose blind spots, surface truths, and reveal practical insights that might otherwise remain hidden.
We recognise that the circumstances and risks these peoples face far outweigh our own, yet we also believe our communities share the same essential struggle — to remain viable in the face of external forces that threaten self-determination and, at times, existence — and that there is value in continuing this dialogue and exchange.
The Misak and the Plan De Vida
The Misak created their “Plan of Life” in response to an existential crisis brought about by loss of territory, social fragmentation, and imposed models of “development” that undermined their culture and systems of self-governance.
Confronting inequality, division and environmental decline, they recognised that survival as a people required redefining development entirely on their own terms.
The Plan de Vida is not a conventional development plan but a living political and spiritual framework for renewal — a means to reclaim autonomy, restore harmony with Nature and secure the continuity of life as a people. It begins from the belief that development must arise from within: from collective history, memory and conscience. Exercising “the right to live” therefore includes protecting the life of the planet.
The Plan de Vida has since been adopted widely by Indigenous peoples across Latin America as a proven route to strengthening self-determination and autonomy. It has profoundly influenced CCN’s thinking, directly inspiring our Community Life Plans — the first adaptations of the Plan de Vida approach to a Western context.
Wampis and Munduruku Territories
In 2025, during another period of deep reflective practice, CCN co-directors had the opportunity to meet and speak with warriors from two Amazonian Indigenous nations — the Wampis of Peru and the Munduruku of Brazil — who were visiting Scotland to share their struggles and achievements, and to connect with Scottish communities. Engaging in dialogue about their sophisticated approaches to community self-determination was an invaluable experience.
In 2015, while continuing as Peruvian citizens, the Wampis Nation established the country’s first Indigenous autonomous territorial government. This was the culmination of decades of organisation in response to escalating threats to their people and the environment on which they depend — driven by extraction, pollution and violence.
Their government is grounded in the principle of free, prior and informed consent over any activity affecting their lands, and stands as a remarkable achievement in autonomy and self-governance, founded on enduring shared stewardship of the rivers, ecosystems and cultures that sustain their people.
The Munduruku’s seventeen-year campaign to secure legal recognition of their ancestral lands in the Tapajós River Basin culminated in a historic victory in 2024, responding to ongoing logging, mining and dam projects that have caused widespread devastation and pollution.
When official processes stalled, the Munduruku undertook the self-demarcation of their territory and initiated a programme of rights-based self-determination, including active environmental protection — a courageous act of collective autonomy that is inspiring Indigenous movements across Brazil.
Coming Full Circle, and Beyond
In 2023, the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park formally certified the Strathard CLPs as the area’s Local Place Plan. They commended the work as an exemplar—particularly its holistic perspective. Quarterly progress-update meetings, built on the foundations laid by the CLPs, continue to this day between agency and community stakeholders as part of the Strathard Framework.
In this sense, the work came full circle (or “spiral”, under the Misak conception). What had begun as a radical process ultimately fitted into the policy environment it had both preceded and helped to shape, allowing it to be adopted unchanged as the area’s statutory Local Place Plan.
Since establishing our principles-led resident-led approach, our projects have grown in ever-increasing scale, depth and complexity of scope. Detailed further under Our Services, these have included CLPs for towns and villages; and a regional citizens’ climate assembly involving 5 diverse communities —including the area’s two largest towns— to agree a regional net zero strategy with local government, with input from national experts. Most recently, we facilitated a two-year deep-dive engagement with three towns facing steep economic decline, to develop community-led models of just transition and feed back strategic systems learnings to Nescan Hub and the Scottish Government.
These projects have proven the power of the Plan de Vida to build broad consensus across very diverse contexts, and continue to sharpen CCN’s understanding of deeper systemic barriers—political, economic, cultural, and environmental—that continue to obstruct change, and strategies for negotiating them.
Process
Each Community Life Plan (CLP) is shaped to the specific needs of its Place. Commonly, the local Community Council invites CCN to facilitate the process alongside a resident workgroup who reflect the community’s diversity. Our guiding principle—“Unity-in-Diversity”—is that any resident, on seeing the workgroup’s makeup, would feel confident that their perspective and experience -geographic and demographic—is included and that the work is not being carried out by “the usual suspects”.
The workgroup helps design an engagement strategy that reaches every resident multiple times—e.g. through doorstep conversations, maildrops, social media and local networks. The purpose is to maximise participation in the community co-planning sessions, and the aim is to directly involve upwards of 50% of the total population. These sessions always include parallel work with young people, whose draft plan usually opens the first community meeting, embedding the next generation in the heart of the process.
Each meeting is followed by an outcomes document prepared by CCN, which all participants can amend or challenge. Online questionnaires enable those who cannot attend to record their views, test consent levels and add new contributions. Only what is agreed by consensus is included in the final Plan.
The dialogue and Life Plan follows the Misak “tree” metaphor. It begins with the “roots” : a shared exploration of the history and heritage of their Place, to understand how current conditions have emerged. Next, residents maps and inventory Important Things—the qualities and assets which define their community. From these precedents, emerge Core Principles, the stable “trunk” that determines and guides local decisionmaking and development to ensure the Important Things are protected and enhanced.
From these consensual foundations emerge the Themes for Action, a description of areas where change, protection or renewal are needed. These themes naturally develop into practical projects and priorities for local regeneration and sustainability, often taken forward by resident action groups.
Once this structure stabilises, CCN produces a holistic Life Plan document that captures the community’s shared understanding and intentions at that moment in time, and how the aspects of systemically interrelated and interdependent. Crucially, however, a CLP is understood as a living process. Communities revisit and refresh their Plan as conditions, pressures and priorities evolve — ensuring that the Plan continues to reflect the life of the Place rather than becoming a static record of a moment that has passed.