DON’T ask me why but Al Jazeera has just produced a documentary about the Outer Hebrides. It is called “Saving Paradise – the Scottish islanders trying to preserve their vanishing population” and it’s very good. It is on YouTube where 22,000 have watched it.

The Qatari-owned station has done what, to my knowledge, no Scottish broadcaster has attempted in decades. It has looked at the big picture, listened to people and then implicitly posed an obvious question. Why does this place of great beauty and so much potential face continuing population decline?

It is asked through the voices of those who live there and can see the reasons all around them. None involves rocket science. They are about work, housing, transport, land. They are about people who would stay if they could but can’t because the necessary preconditions do not exist.

The problem is not peculiar to the islands. Many rural areas are looking down the barrel of a future where there are not enough people of working age to maintain services on which an ageing population depends. State it like that and it sounds like a generic, international trend that governments can express regret about, tick a few boxes and leave events to take their course.

But put each case study under the microscope and there will always be localised solutions if only the means existed to implement them. As this film articulates, the people best placed to understand both the nature of the problem and the means of addressing it are those who live with the symptoms and can see potential cures – which is the exact opposite of how the system works.

Nobody can complain that the islands do not receive media coverage. The ferries alone have generated enough comment to fill several libraries. But they are reported on largely as an issue in themselves – which they certainly are – rather than as a contributory factor to a much wider challenge of economic and social viability.

It’s the same with staff shortages which affect both public and private sectors. The immediate story might be about the impact of Brexit but the unspoken question is more fundamental. Why should it need Bulgarians and Romanians to crew Hebridean fishing boats or provide care for the elderly? The answer lies in the attrition of working age population.

The islands cry out for decentralised decision-making which starts from the premise that Scotland-wide or UK-wide policies simply do not fit the realities. Yet it is difficult to think of a single policy area where recognition of this self-evident fact is the starting point for any approach to the factors which drive depopulation.

Let me run through a few examples and where better to start than with land, of which there is plenty. Historically, crofting tenure was the best means of retaining population in places that otherwise would be as empty as the cleared Highland glens. But it is a system of tenure which requires regulation and enforcement, to protect it from market forces.

Whether through policy or inadvertence, it is now collapsing under the weight of neglect administered by a distant bureaucracy. Crofts are traded at prices far beyond local reach. Whole villages are being taken over by holiday homes. It is inconceivable that this precious, uniquely Scottish system of tenure would have reached its current degraded state if its administration had been decentralised (as the Shucksmith Report in 2008 recommended).

Or try energy. The Western Isles has the highest rate of fuel poverty in Scotland at more than 40 per cent, partly because there is no mains gas outside the Stornoway area, and that’s before the price hikes kick in. Yet all insulation work has ground to a halt because of new regulations which are entirely inappropriate to housing stock in rural parts of the islands.

The Green minister, Patrick Harvie, visited supposedly in search of a solution and then nothing happened. So the not-for-profit insulation company paid off its 14 staff and all work has stopped. Is it conceivable that if the money had been devolved to the islands and regulations adapted to the conditions that a worse outcome could have been achieved?

Ferries offer the most obvious example of how communities at the sharp end of decision-making are excluded from participation in that process. Throughout the CMAL/CalMac debacle, there was not a single islander on the board of either organisation. But it not the only one. Even the Western Isles NHS Board, through the Scottish Government’s public appointments system, is now peppered with directors who have barely set foot in the place.

The list of examples could be much longer (and may soon include the National Care Service, which everyone seems to agree is heading for another centralised disaster). But the whole is greater than even the sum of the parts. It is simply that the challenge of depopulation is being exacerbated rather than addressed through centralisation and a silo-based application of national policies to local circumstances.

Devolution was never meant to be like this but the danger always existed of power and resources being drawn to the centre and then redistributed like alms to the poor. One consequence of Western Isles population decline is that its local authority has suffered the most severe per capita cuts of any Scottish council over the past decade. It’s a classic case of double jeopardy – your population is going down so we’ll give you less money, so the spiral intensifies.

This is not primarily an argument about money, however. It is about the overwhelming case for localism to meet the needs of a distinctive community. If the same money that is spent by Edinburgh in the Western Isles, and on long-distance administration, was sent as a block grant, the results would be transformational. That would doubtless apply to other places faced with similar issues.

The trend is in exactly the opposite direction and for as long as it continues, the population of paradise will continue to decline. It should not take Al Jazeera to draw attention to that reality.

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