Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper presents qualitative data from two projects on policing and local partnership working in rural Scotland, with fieldwork carried out in 2021-2.

We understand this through an interdisciplinary synthesis of theoretical concepts - ontological security from sociology and the ‘rural idyll’ from geography. We address an under-discussed and under-theorised aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic – its impacts on risk and ontological security in rural areas in the context of increasingly ‘abstract’ policing and public services and longstanding patterns of rural inequality, deprivation and 'poverty of access', including digital poverty. We consider the implications of this for trust in policing and other public institutions, through the framework of ontological (in)security (Giddens, 1991).

In rural geography, the 'rural idyll' (Cloke, 2003) refers to a hegemonic social construction of 'the countryside' as the verdant locus of a simpler and more wholesome way of life, untouched by 'urban' problems - a pervasive cultural narrative often used to promote life and leisure in rural settings. Although unrealistic, the notion of the 'idyll' still shaped constructions of rurality for rural people and communities, with the encroachment of 'urban' problems and historic neglect by (urban) central government highlighted as threats to the idyll and to rural ways of life, even as the pandemic created specific challenges for rural policing and public services.

In this context, concerns about rural tourism - amid a questionable but pervasive narrative of a boom in domestic holidays - appeared as one focal point for various constructions of risks to the rural idyll. Our findings extend the understanding of the impacts of Covid-19 in rurality and for institutions of order maintenance, highlighting the need for increasingly ‘abstract’ policing and public service to attend to local contexts, particularly amid rurally-contingent inequalities