There are two things that I particularly love about working with islands and islanders. The first is the fact that I get to meet islanders from all over the world and, when I do, we always have something to chat about. I have spent many a happy hour swapping island stories and sharing jokes and anecdotes about island life. As my fellow islander from Denmark, Jens Westerskov Andersen, recently commented: “Us islanders are a minority in our own country but we are part of the largest club in the world.”
The second is that, despite these common themes and this shared understanding of ‘islandness’, every island is different. There is so much variety to understand and explore, even within my own country. I love hearing the stories of different islands and learning what makes a place tick. As an islands geek I love this diversity, but it can be difficult to ensure that it is reflected well within the type of research and policy making that affects every day life.
There are, of course, already a number of classifications designed to help us understand Scotland’s landscape and the communities who live within it. However, these are often based on boundaries such as local authority areas, or single factors such as travel time to urban centres or population density.
These are useful, but they often do little to reflect the differences in daily life on the ground in these places. Many of them rely on a scale where ‘islands’ are grouped to together as one. Even where island sub-groups are used, smaller islands are often grouped with their larger neighbours meaning their voices can be drowned out.
I recently took a couple of months out from my PhD for an internship with the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services team to work on a new classification system for Scotland’s islands which might tackle these issues. The aim was to create a typology which reflects the diversity found in our islands in a way that could help those working in, with, and for island communities.
Luckily, I had already completed a chunk of work on Gow’s Typology of Scotland’s Islands. I was able to use this approach – looking at population, local services, and connections to mainland Scotland – as the basis to develop and extend the typology of official use.
My internship has now come to an end, but not before we managed to publish the Scottish Islands Typology (2024) and the underlying island-level data. This includes the 89 inhabited islands covered by the Islands (Scotland) Act, as well as 72 Previously Inhabited Islands recognised with the Scottish Island Regions (2023) geography. Importantly, the new typology is not a scale or a hierarchy, but a way to help map differences and similarities between Scotland’s islands, from Unst to Arran.
There are, of course, many ways to understand islands – including by talking to islanders – and his typology covers a specific set of factors which affect daily life. However, it has been designed so anyone can use the individual factors or add in more variables to extend the typology or apply it in different settings. In doing so it adds to the toolbox that researchers and policy makers can use to understand the amazing diversity of our islands.
There are many potential uses for the new typology – including ones I won’t have thought of myself! For example it could offer a new way for those in Scotland carrying out Island Communities Impact Assessments understand our islands, or it could assist those wishing to roll out services or replicate projects in island settings. More widely, the framework used to develop the typology can be applied in other contexts – it might be used to create a similar categorisation of islands in other nations, for example, or applied to rural areas to better understand life ‘on the ground’.
Just like Scotland’s islands, the typology should be viewed as a living thing which will naturally change and grow over time. I’m looking forward to seeing the ways in which folk use, develop and improve it!
Islands Researcher 