Gow’s Typology of Scotland’s Islands: Technical notes

While classifications of Scotland’s islands already exist, these are often based on geographical location or local authority boundaries, which fails to acknowledge key differences between islands in close geographical proximity and overlooks commonalities between geographically dispersed islands. Measures of population size and travel time to larger population centres are routinely used in domestic and international examples of such classifications. However, these do not capture island-specific factors affecting those who live and work in islands, which are key considerations for research and policy making. Gow’s Typology of Scotland’s Islands was developed as part of a doctoral research project exploring island connections and return migration in order to address these issues and tackle some of the difficulties associated with ensuring the anonymity of research participants and the communities they live in when working with islands with small populations. The typology is framed by two concepts, capacity and reliance, and classifies inhabited islands that met the inclusion criteria set for the research project. Specifically, the typology examines: (i) the capacity an island has to meet the day-to-day needs of its inhabitants, and (ii) the island’s reliance, by which we mean the extent to which it must rely on external actors to meet these needs, and the ease or difficulty island residents might experience in doing so. The concepts, factors and associated dimensions are described in section 5 and have been used to create the classes, or ‘types’ outlined in section 6. Gow’s Typology of Scottish Islands necessarily indicates aspects of capacity and reliance in Scotland’s islands at a specific point in time. However, it has been developed in a way that allows it to be updated and also has the potential to be extended for wider use, both by adding additional factors to complement the conceptual framework, and/or by adding dimensions to existing factors. Further, it is possible that a similar approach could be adopted for other global island groupings.