My PhD focuses on governance and administration of community benefit funds (CBFs) and the alignment they have with the justice tenets. Currently there is very little academic research into community benefit funds and as they become more prominent, especially within the renewable energy sector, a greater understanding of their governance and impacts is needed.

Ensuring CBF governance and administration align with the four justice tenets; procedural, distribution, recognition and restorative, will facilitate community empowerment and capacity building. In turn, this will promote community wealth building, key in the sustainable growth of communities, redirecting wealth back into the local economy.

My research works closely with Foundation Scotland, a charitable organisation who work across Scotland, governing, administering and advising on CBFs alongside community groups and developers. Having completed stakeholder interviews, workshops, consultation feedback and mini case study building, I am currently building an in depth portfolio of the different governance structures of CBF arrangements, how intermediaries such as Foundation Scotland can support the process and the variances in justices across different CBF arrangements.

Following my undergraduate degree in Biological Science, I completed an MSc Sustainability and Renewables at the University of Dundee. My dissertation was on the re-use of decommissioned offshore infrastructure for renewable projects such as wind turbines, covering the policies of offshore marine environments, the benefits and burdens of potential developments and who would these factors concern.

During my Masters, Professor Raphael Heffron and I became deeply motivated to do further research on the just transition and energy justice, covering the energy justice tenets and the ‘success’ of the financial promises made worldwide.

My PhD brings together three important and interlinked issues; community and local energy, community benefits and the energy justice tenets. The supervisory team includes Dr Jennifer Roberts (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Professor Matthew Hannon (Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship). I am also a student with the Strathclyde Institute for Sustainable Communities. 

My research interests are primarily focused on community involvement and a fair distribution of outcomes and inclusion within energy developments. I am curious to understand and explore how community energy developments can have both direct and indirect impacts on the local community and wider society, and the sustainability of the developments in terms of their wider social impacts and innovations.

I have completed research as part of a team in the University of Strathclyde for Foundation Scotland; a charity organisation with over 20 years of experience in community benefit funds governance and administration. This research focused on best practice within the field, in order to develop Foundation Scotland's work. I completed a literature review based on Foundation Scotland, their structure and work they deliver, followed by a set of interviews with Foundation Scotland staff and community organisations who work with them. This provided an insight of what works well and what does not within their organisation and provided recommendations of improvement.

Expanding upon the internal examination for Foundation Scotland, I conducted stakeholder workshops, in order to understand wider sectoral CBF governance and adminstration arrangements. This allowed for the development of Good Practice Principles of CBF governance which provided a response to the Scottish Government Good Practcie Principles for Community Benefit Consultation. This consultation comes six years after the previous update of the principles, and as CBFs are becoming more proliferent within the renewable energy sector, submitting a response based of direct workshops with community organisations, intermediaires and developers will hopefully provide good guidance to the updates to the policy.