Just Transition Communities Project (Aberdeenshire)
Facilitating a community-led engine for pragmatic whole-systems modelling, policy learning and regenerative pilot design.
In 2022, the Scottish Government commissioned Nescan Hub to carry out the Just Transition Communities Project. The goal was to explore what a climate adaptation strategy “where no one is left behind”, looks like from the perspective of communities in the North East of Scotland. In 2023, CCN was appointed to lead the Aberdeenshire component, testing whether a genuinely ground-up, consensus-driven process could surface the systemic realities of transition in three rural towns facing steep economic decline — Huntly, Banff and Macduff — and generate interventions capable of informing national policy.
Over two years, more than 1,000 residents, young people and local organisations participated in an open, principles-led process prioritising lived experience over predetermined frameworks. Through deep, margins-in engagement, residents developed shared conceptions of place that revealed how rural communities are unravelling, why existing policy tools struggle to arrest decline, and where transformative, testable interventions lie.
By project end, residents had clearly articulated that due to market forces and public service cuts, a local just transition could only be achieved through promoting self-sufficiency under community leadership. They specified five core prerequisites for this: robust civic infrastructure; accessible community spaces; support for locally led wealth-building; a locally grounded curriculum; and a holistic, consensual plan for place regeneration. Building on this, they identified four interdependent systemic interventions essential for shifting their towns from decline to regeneration: community income generation; support-system reform; locally centred capacity-building; and adaptive, place-anchored policy and whole-system piloting.
These insights, grounded in lived experience and supported by causal loop diagrams, made clear where decline is being entrenched and where intervention could turn vicious cycles into virtuous ones. From this analysis, residents co-generated pilot proposals for regenerative projects including a new development trust, a whole-community funding model, a regenerative food and farming system, a rural Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG) model and two childcare pilots using existing regulatory flexibilities. Each was envisaged as a whole-system intervention aligned with national Just Transition outcomes.
Insights were fed back throughout to key strategic decision-makers including Aberdeenshire Council, the Just Transition Minister, the Just Transition Commission, the MIG team and the Early Years and Childcare Directorate. In each setting, the work reframed problems, clarified real systems of interest and offered pragmatic ideas for community-mandated, politically-actionable solutions.
The project has helped demonstrated the value of devolved, place-anchored system learning. It has highlighted that policies designed through a partial or mechanistic lens—however well-intentioned—risk magnifying the harms they aim to solve, particularly in rural systems where the economy, childcare, transport, land use, skills and support pressures are tightly interconnected. It has shown that with facilitation support, communities can provide the accurate whole-system models government and agencies need for effective adaptation but cannot generate centrally. These models are essential for navigating complexity, avoiding unintended consequences, identifying partnership opportunities, and testing simple systemic interventions with major implications for strategic policy and rural resilience, and at a time when the stakes for many communities are increasingly existential.
For the participating towns and authorities alike, the pilot regenerative projects which have emerged offer clear, grounded, and locally-specific justification for what needs to change, why it matters and how policy levers and flexibilities can be used to enable rather than constrain regeneration. Their momentum has continued under community leadership beyond the project’s end in June 2025.
Honestly, I can’t thank you enough for all your efforts. This really puts into context what are striving and working towards. There is no way that we would have got any way near to this, so to have CCN as brilliant partners is fantastic and we are so fortunate with the timings. Honestly THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart – look at what can happen when people and partnerships align. I am blown away!
Thank you, so very very much for being a part of the JTCP and part of the interesting, stimulating, challenging, insightful, impactful collaborative learning partnership.
The work that you have undertaken across Aberdeenshire has been truly impactful and meaningful and of great quality.
CCN’s personal approach to engaging communities in Huntly “from the margins in”, with regular updates and opportunities to input, has identified strategic levers for change within our communities. This has given us refreshed evidence for the changes we (as a town) know are needed, and that we (as an organisation and local residents) want to support and realise, being invested in the future of this town.
It is heartening to learn that much of what has been identified through this process stacks and aligns across diverse communities – and existing strategy work – again strengthening our voice as a town. I imagine other organisations will also be working to develop projects and programmes addressing the outcomes of the Just Transition Communities Project (JTCP), like we are. A multifaceted and collaborative approach to tackling the Just Transition challenges we are experiencing as a community can only be a stronger one – what a testament to the JTCP’s success so far!
It’s clear that the opportunity to realise transformational change, on the ground, and led by the communities here is ‘new practice’. This is enhanced by the potential for this to happen in tandem with / in communication with policy level change through projects like this, and anchor organisations’ wide-reaching networks. I hope we can continue to develop an approach where these go hand-in-hand, in a feedback loop, as we experiment and iterate Just Transition initiatives, and I’m so looking forward to seeing how the impacts develop from here.
Process
1. Start-Up & Scoping (October 2023). Early exploratory work focused on identifying the Aberdeenshire towns most suited to a full community-led Just Transition process. CCN conducted scoping visits and conversations with a shortlist of five places, mapping existing initiatives, civic structures, capacity and readiness. Following this diagnostic phase, Huntly, Banff and Macduff were selected, representing two contrasting geographies and Local Authority areas.
In 2024, CCN supported NESCAN Hub Community Development Officers—two of whom had shadowed a year of CCN’s work in the three towns—to facilitate the approach in Kemnay, bringing a fourth town, and a third council area and team, into the process. The underlying theory was that any commonality in themes, priorities and interventions emerging across such diverse places would strengthen external validity, improve generalisability, and provide cross-team visibility capable of catalysing more joined-up strateg
2. Local Authority & Stakeholder Engagement (October–November 2023). In the initial stages, we spent time meeting the people and groups who hold knowledge, responsibility or influence in each town. These early conversations helped build trust, ensure visibility and establish the relationships needed for a safe and respectful process. They also provided a grounded sense of where to begin the deep engagement — understanding local dynamics, existing pressures and where care was needed to avoid treading on toes or duplicating effort. While the discussions offered orientation, the core aim was simply to arrive well: to understand who needed to know, who needed to be included early, and how to proceed in a way that was aligned, supportive and “margins-in” from the outset.
3. Deep Community Engagement & Place Sense-Making (October 2023 – June 2025). Over 400 fieldwork engagements were carried out across the three towns, involving more than 1,000 residents in building a holistic, experiential and faithful description of place — one that was, as far as possible, complete, evidenceable and grounded in lived reality. This phase centred on in-depth, unstructured one-to-one conversations with a diverse cross-section of residents; exploration of local histories, assets, pressures and everyday experiences; and continuous cross-validation of emerging themes, priorities and dynamics with participants.
In parallel, JTCP partners Aberdeen for a Fairer World, supported by A Place in Childhood, facilitated deep youth engagement with local primary and secondary schools, whose perspectives directly shaped the evolving picture. The open-ended research continued throughout the project, with new conversations added whenever residents identified “seldom-heard” gaps. These included focused engagement with the farmers and regenerative producers, people involved in local forestry, the travelling community, churches, parents and young people from minority backgrounds, and pupils from the learning and support hub who could speak to additional support needs and the roots of local antisocial behaviour.
4. Community Assemblies & Deliberation (December 2023 – June 2025): Findings from Phase 3 were taken back into a structured series of community assemblies. These typically brought together general residents, young people, local organisations, anchor bodies, support stakeholders and minority-background residents. The assemblies provided a space for testing, refining and validating the emerging whole-systems picture, identifying gaps, pressures, enablers and early ideas for practical interventions. Where deeper exploration was needed, sub-assemblies were convened with residents whose lived knowledge was directly relevant to the issues under discussion, for example, in relation to local support issues, or the needs and experiences of young people or minority groups.
5. Cross-Town Synthesis & Shared Learning (September 2024 – June 2025): We facilitated a synthesis process to validate common themes, priorities and dynamics emerging across the three towns. A summary of the key systems barriers and enablers was shared with Nescan Hub, and presented at a regional Just Transition Commission meeting hosted by them in Tillydrone. This phase produced and crystallised a coherent shared framework outlining foundational conditions and systemic interventions required for a resident-led Just Transition in the participating communities.
6. Mobilising for Implementation & Handover (February – June 2025): In the final phase, focus shifted from strategic considerations and deliberation to ensuring a practical, smooth and supportive handover to the three towns. Activities included refining plans and pilot proposals in line with local needs, brokering relationships between community groups and system partners, supporting towns to establish development structures, and preparing handovers to residents, local authority teams and NESCAN Hub. Throughout, CCN worked to preserve process integrity, ensuring that next steps honoured the consensus, principles and lived-experience foundations of earlier stages, and that communities and partners had everything they needed to maintain the collaborative momentum established during the project.
In Summary: Across 24 months, the project combined rigorous fieldwork, deliberative assembly practice and whole-systems synthesis. The process created space for residents to describe their towns as they truly function, build shared understanding, and co-design grounded regenerative pathways. This methodological fidelity — grounded in inclusivity, consensus, motivation and continuity — in turn enabled communities to articulate transition in terms that are credible, detailed, and directly usable by policymakers.