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The empowerment and resilience of communities in rural contexts is often seen to be linked to their capacities – for example, organisational, infrastructural and personal capacity – and the types of capital – e.g., social, physical, human and financial – that the community can access. While the ‘community capital’ and ‘capacities’ perspectives overlap, they define community characteristics in slightly different ways, with different analytical categories at their disposal. Here, we loosely draw on the capacities perspective and supplement it in a grounded manner with aspects from the community capital literature, to analyse the development of a small rural, dispersed community in Scotland over the course of two years. Our analysis is based on two sets of qualitative interviews with residents of the community and other relevant actors, conducted around an interval of two years, combined with observation of community events in the interim period. While at the beginning of the study, the community appeared a place where people were cautiously hopeful, with an asset transfer planned that was intended to support empowerment and resilience, the case unfolded – at least temporarily – as an ‘unsuccess story’, due to the failure of the asset transfer. Our analysis elucidates how organisational, infrastructural and personal capacities of the community interacted, and leads to three major findings. First, interactions between capitals and capacities are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of a community's situation, but tend to be understudied. Second, capacities can not only be ‘low’, they can also be negative (thus not only neutral but outright destructive), and extremely hard to overcome through standard approaches to capacity building. And third, in our study case, ‘social capacities’ that emerged from people's experiences of social interactions acted as powerful microstructures that constrained individuals' abilities to engage in community action. To conclude, we discuss these findings in terms of their implications for community empowerment and resilience more broadly.

Privately-owned estates dominate Scotland's uplands, and their owners' decisions greatly influence rural communities. The research reported here, involving in-depth case studies of six upland, private estates, aimed to investigate the dynamic relationships between landowners and rural communities, considering the influence of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. The research questions were explored through interviews with key actors (in the local community and in estate management) and participant observation. Evaluation of current and potential landowner/estate-community partnership-working illustrates the opportunities for mutual benefits, and the need for greater community empowerment to ensure partnership success. These findings are interpreted from a Habermasian perspective, reiterating the apparently insurmountable challenge of power inequalities in the public sphere. Nonetheless, in order to pursue a democratic discourse, private landowners and ‘estate communities’ are recommended to adopt principles of Communicative Action (where mutual understanding is supported through the creation of an ‘ideal speech situation’), to contribute positively to ‘estate community’ sustainability, and subsequently, to private estate sustainability and public legitimacy. This research is highly policy relevant in Scotland during a period of review of land reform legislation. The conclusions have international significance in terms of understanding power relations in rural contexts and identifying opportunities for community empowerment. Finally, outcomes for the practice of communication in the context of Scottish private estates are considered, as well as wider theoretical applications in the era of ‘post-participation’, not least the importance of maintaining the ‘public sphere’, seeking to reduce inequalities and maximise trust.