Scratchbox has been designed to allow multiple application developers work simultaneously on a single host machine. Each developer has his private user account, and all configuration is developer-specific. For example, toolchains are set up on a per-developer basis, so they don't need to be identical across all accounts.
The following Scratchbox tasks require administrator (root) privileges:
initial installation
network configuration
adding users
uninstalling and upgrading.
Application developers can freely set up their target configuration and modify their sandboxed build environment.