What living on an island with 44 people teaches us about democracy.

Decision making in a small community

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we make decisions here on a small scottish island and am trying to articulate my thoughts.

The original version of this essay was short, to the point and needed work, it also assumed knowledge of our particular island situation. I’ve tried to make this version more readable while still emphasising my points about democracy and accountability in a micro-community making some very big decisions.

How do we make decisions democratically and what democracy means in a tiny community?

What problems do we encounter along the way?

How do we overcome them?

Our micro island community owns assets and land: houses, crofts, a village hall, roads, a water supply, a bunkhouse, and more – through a community buy out/ asset transfer that took place sixteen years ago.

We do this through an asset-owning organisation, it’s a Scottish charitable company governed by a board of directors. The board includes elected members from the resident community, along with others who are co-opted or nominated for the specific skills they can bring. The current board has a well-balanced mix of expertise and experience, representing various stakeholder groups, local enterprise, and the wider community.

The role of the company is to manage and safeguard our land, assets, housing, environment and educational for current and future generations. Our main source of income is residential rents. We have 15 houses, 12 of which are let at affordable rents, and three vacant properties that require significant renovation. We also have a trading company that manages our non-charitable activities – things like running our 20-bed bunkhouse and campsite and managing moorings.

It sounds straightforward, but in reality, it has been a huge undertaking. A group of people who had spent years campaigning to become landowners, suddenly found themselves responsible for managing land, assets, and services, without necessarily having the skills or experience to do so (I am writing a whole book that is covered by this one sentence). Overnight we became landlords, employers, fundraisers, leaders, mitigators and more. Acquiring the skills to manage this took time and a whole lot of patience. We still struggle with comprehending the company accounts every year and learn more financial jargon as time goes by. We have gained more than our fair share of organisational and logistical skills and have become fairly adept at community consultation and communication – although, if you ask everyone, that last point is up for debate. Not everyone agrees, and that is the challenge in a small community: what happens when there are disagreements between so few people? That is what this essay is about.

So how does it work?

For day-to-day asset management and operational decisions, the company board makes the decisions and an employee carries out administrative tasks. This is the relatively straightforward but time-consuming part: organising mandatory maintenance on 12 houses, paying bills, ensuring legal returns are done on time, coordinating contractors and supplies, managing payroll and staff, and dealing with tenant issues. Then there are the bigger challenges: fundraising for major projects, such as our new community hub, road resurfacing and long-term business planning and strategy. At this stage, we involve the wider community for input, as these decisions affect us all and progressing them is a collective responsibility. It is the commitment we made when we voted to become community landowners and one that we hope newcomers to the island will want to share.

Tenants, and that includes me, individuals and families who are all ordinarily resident on the island and on the electoral register can become members of the company. As individual members we don’t own any part of the land or assets, but as a group, collectively, we are substantial landowners. This brings with it not only a responsibility to manage effectively, to be accountable, conscientious, and reliable, but also a level of self-determination. We get to decide what happens on our land, which is a joyous and liberating thing for any group of people, but also a hell of a lot of hard work. As we have discovered, not everyone has the same idea of what the most beneficial way forward looks like. Sometimes what is best for now, for some people, may not be what is best everyone in the long term. The community company must try to balance these two aspects carefully: to do what is best for the current resident population without compromising opportunities for future populations.

Any member can be nominated to be director on the board – nominations take place at the AGM. In effect there are never any actual elections because our articles say we can have upto 8 elected directors from the membership - the most we have ever mustered is 6. Most long term residents have at some point been a director, the term of office is two years, and you are expected to do two terms if possible. We try to stagger resignations and nominations so there is always a level of expertise and to aid continuity. Often probably because there are so few directors, some find it too much pressure and resign early – this is understandable but also increases the pressure on those remaining on the board. A few years ago, almost the whole board resigned leaving a new raft of directors to pick up the threads - it took a long time to do this and we will try to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

How do differences in opinion show up in a very small community?

What effect can these differences have?

How do we reconcile this with an adult population of 30?

Differences show up in a manner of ways depending on how vocal individuals are. Issues can come to light very quickly, and if not articulated to the board, can fester, sometimes for years. On occasion, opinion has the ability to become a factual narrative - like an urban myth. With an adult population of just 30 people, when a handful of people disagree with the rest, the minority can feel not listened to. And although this happens across the whole political spectrum, in a small community it can look and feel particularly divisive and cause greater levels of stress and anxiety for everyone.

We have learned, like many small communities have, that listening to people is key. But more than that, people need to feel that their voice has been heard and considered, even when the final decision is not what they hoped for. The process must be transparent, and people need to understand how and why decisions are made. Sometimes this is accepted, but problems can arise when a transparent process is later reframed as something negative simply because the result was not favourable. A common example is when someone disagrees with the result of a consultation and concludes that they weren’t consulted at all, or the process was corrupt. We have had both situations. Community companies can only do their best, keep accurate records, learn from mistakes. However, this does not protect it from rogue players who choose not to engage with the process, ignore any unwritten social contract and continue to push their own agenda – this happens nationwide, we can probably all name a few people like this, small communities are not immune.

Some decisions, though, are deemed too big to be made by just the board. So, how do we decide where this threshold is?

Oftentimes it is obvious. The governing documents dictate which reserved matters / decisions require full membership approval, like the sale of land or property, or making changes to the governing documents. But for other issues it is less clear - issues that affect everyone, are clearly controversial but do not directly concern community land and assets. An example of this kind of decision is the local fish farm company requesting to expand their operation off the coast here. They like to have the support of the local communities near to their farms and set up business agreements which outline benefits of working with them and agreeing to the siting of a fish farm.

What the board does here is defer (not defer but ask) to the resident’s association to carry out a discussion and a vote. The resident’s association has a lower threshold for membership and therefore includes more people, but is also a simple constituted association, with no enforceable claim over the result of its vote. These kinds of controversial decisions aren’t specifically reserved but are passed on by the board because they feel it’s a decision to be made by the wider community. We don’t have a mechanism for measuring this. In practice, the board decides what counts as ‘the board’s to decide’ and what counts as ‘too big for us to decide alone’ - which means the same body who is trying to be accountable is also the one drawing the line of accountability.

Another challenge that can crop up with votes like this is where it can be felt by longer term residents that some views of shorter-term residents are less valid because they perhaps don’t take in the bigger picture, or because it is felt some newer residents have less of an actual ‘stake’ in living here. These are asymmetric stakes and are very real but can be difficult to tell apart from gatekeeping - deciding some people’s opinion is worth less than yours. I think most people are guilty of at least one of these things. Asymmetric stakes and gatekeeping can be hard to tell apart and are not something that can be managed or even should be? However, through discussion and listening to each other more, we can try to dissolve these issues.

So, everyone in the resident’s association over 16 who has lived here at least a year gets a vote in these kind of big decisions.

In my example, we did actually delay a vote for two newer residents to pass the one-year threshold to give them a vote, though the result would have been the same. The result was decisively to take forward discussions with the fish farm about community benefit. It was an initial nod of approval.

We have used this approach and it has been generally acceptable - people mostly feel that this is democratic and abide by the result - but when we have used this method, the results have been clear. If there were not a well-defined result, the vote being close, a majority, but only just, would it be as acceptable then?

It could be made more robust - for a consensus to be properly durable it could probably do with more than just a basic democratic majority. Mechanisms such as a supermajority for irreversible decisions could be introduced - whereby a higher threshold is set for more important decisions to reach consensus rather than a simple majority. Or having a two-vote system with a time delay / cooling off period in between, could be beneficial and help to dissolve gate keeping issues.

It’s worth noting that the two-vote system could help - not as something the board imposes when it dislikes a result, but as a fixed feature of the process for this type of decision by the resident’s association, agreed in advance and applied the same way regardless of outcome. An initial vote may be based on insufficient information, moved by short-term pressure, or made before the long-term implications have been properly considered - which a cooling-off period and a second, confirming vote can help remedy. This isn’t the board getting a veto dressed up as deliberation; it’s a structural pause built into the process itself, which then makes the second result final and binding.

Again, when we use my example – we could have suggested a two-vote system, the initial vote to take discussions with the fish farm forward, and a second to definitively vote on the result- was the community benefit sufficient to vote in favour of the fish farm?

It is also possible for the view of the board to differ from a resident’s association vote. Remembering that, as a director, the role is to do what is best for the whole community for the long term, it may differ from what you think (or vote) personally - most people would find it difficult to separate the two but the role of a good director is to do just that. I have found myself in this situation on more than one occasion, but collective responsibility has to rule – what is decided or accepted by the board has to be accepted and abided by all individual directors – otherwise it becomes divisive and shows poor leadership, which in turn can feel threatening to the whole community whose very existence depends on an effective board of directors. This has also happened and we try to give new directors adequate training so they understand their responsibilities properly.

To conclude - what’s underneath all this is what we are learning about democracy on a small scale. Democracy as a procedure is a moving target, it always has been. It has meant different things over time and excluded many people. What we now call democracy relies on an administrative procedure that the actual voters don’t get to decide upon. One person, one vote, majority rules has become a stand in for the meaningful engagement which is physically difficult with millions of people - a scale constraint that we don’t have. So, here, and in small communities, democracy can be meaningful and deliberative than a simple head count. The vote counting becomes secondary to the discussion, deliberation and listening that comes first.

No one wants their views to be steamrollered away and in a community this size it’s important that we try to make sure it doesn’t happen.

The suggested mechanisms such as a supermajority or two votes with a cooling off period aren’t meant to be opponents to democracy to make it bend to a will but just the opposite: to get people to listen to each other before a vote closes the question.

In a community this small where the electorate are a few people who share a shop and each other’s lives, a decision made by just bare voting without adequate deliberation first doesn’t feel like any kind of democracy at all. We are trying to make it better.

This essay is fluid, like democracy – I could sit here looking every week and continue to change it based on current island events. I will write more about particular aspects when I feel the need.

I’m happy to chat about this if anyone is interested in community governance.

This stone is said to have been placed here by the community of Rùm in the 1820s before they were forcibly cleared from the land