Recognising community-managed water institutions: Justice, governance and resilience in rural and island Scotland

Scholarship on water security and just transitions recognise that “decentralised” and community-managed water supplies are governed through everyday labour, coordination, and place-based knowledge; yet policy and regulation still treat these systems as technical units subject to risk and compliance monitoring. While research on socio-technical water infrastructures, small-systems governance, and water justice is well developed, it has rarely been brought together to explore the relationship between misrecognition and current governance processes and why this matters for equity and climate resilience in global north rural settings. This article fills that gap by reconceptualising Scotland's rural and island private water supplies as community-managed institutions whose collective governance work is currently systematically rendered administratively illegible. The mechanism of such marginalisation is a form of institutional misrecognition: A failure of nested governance to grant them standing, with material consequences for justice and resilience. Drawing on extensive field research across rural and island Scotland, we present two illustrative cases (fictionalised but grounded in real-world data) alongside document and policy analysis of regulatory reporting and guidance to examine how responsibilities, burdens, and vulnerabilities are distributed. We argue that misrecognition is not simply symbolic neglect: It is a classificatory and organisational condition that obscures institutional labour and reallocates accountability and adaptation demand onto communities, producing patterned injustice that intensifies under climate-driven hydrological disruption. This matters because private water supplies underpin everyday life for tens of thousands of people and will face escalating climate stress. As such, achieving climate-resilient and just water governance will require not only technical interventions or institutional reform, but new interfaces, expectations, and resourcing pathways that enable nested governance to support institutional diversity without forcing premature standardisation.