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Lungisile Ntsebeza

Professor Ntsebeza is a Senior Research Scholar, and Emeritus Professor of African Studies and Sociology, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is also a community land scholar-activtist for the Reversing the Gaze Project.

Lilian Joseph Looloitai

Managing Director of CORDS Limited (Community Research and Development Services), in northern Tanzania. Lilian is also a community land scholar-activists for the Reversing the Gaze project.

Lali Naidoo

Dr Lalithalakshmi Naidoo is Director of the East Cape Agricultural Research Project (ECARP), a Makhanda-based, non-profit organisation working in the field of agrarian political economy and supporting and empowering rural communities in South Africa. Lali is also a community land scholar-activists for the Reversing the Gaze project.

Josh Doble

Dr Doble Director of Policy & Advocacy at Community Land Scotland. Josh has also been a community land scholar-activists for the Reversing the Gaze project.

Atenchong Talleh Nkobou

Dr Nkobou is a Senior Lecturer in International Rural Development at the Royal Agricultural University. Atenchong is PI for the Reversing the Gaze Project.

Andrew Ainslie (Chair)

Dr Ainslie is Associate Professor and critical development scholar at the University of Reading, Andrew is founder of the African Livestock Observatory and Co-I for the Reversing the Gaze Project.

Annie Tindley

Annie Tindley is Professor of British and Irish Rural History and since 2020 the Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University. Her research interests include land issues, rural and environmental history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Scottish, Irish, British and imperial contexts. She has published widely on questions of landownership (private, state and community), land reform and land use and management.

Andy Wightman

Andy Wightman is a writer, researcher, analyst, commentator and activist on issues of land, power and governance. Andy is the author of Who Owns Scotland (1996) and The Poor Had No Lawyers (2010) and has undertaken a wide range of work on land tenure, landownership, land reform and, more recently community land rights, governance and the hegemonic dimensions of land relations.

Ryan Dziadowiec

Dr Ryan Dziadowiec is a researcher and heritage practitioner based in Inverness. His research centres around the confluence of people, place and language, particularly in the context of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd. In 2024 he completed his PhD thesis investigating the Gaelic concept dùthchas, after which he worked as an archivist with Community Land Scotland on the 100 Years of Community Ownership project.

Chris Whatley

Chris Whatley is one of Scotland’s most distinguished historians, an emeritus professor of Scottish history at the University of Dundee, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh who was awarded an OBE for his work in disseminating Scottish history in the schools and internationally, in 2015. He has written and edited almost 30 books and published around 150 papers on aspects of Scotland’s history. His most recent book is Harvie’s Dyke: The People, Their Liberty and the Clyde (2025). This has emerged from his work on popular protest, something which he has been investigating for almost 40 years.

Juliette Desportes (Chair)

Juliette Desportes is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Centre for History, UHI. Her research focuses on matters of Highland land management, ownership, and governance in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the history of rural resistance. She previously collaborated with the Galson Estate Trust on the Na Dorsan project.

James Mackessack-Leitch

James leads the Commission’s work around land and human rights, governance, and ownership. This touches upon a range of land reform issues from developing policy and legislative proposals to reform Scotland’s land market, to articulating the nature of carbon rights and what ownership means, to modernising the Common Good property regime, to improving access to land for new entrants to agriculture. He also oversees the Commission’s research strategy and efforts to support research capacity in land reform issues. James hails from a family farming background and brings broad experience from the private, public, and third sectors to his role.

Dani Hutcheon

Dani Hutcheon is a researcher at the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research focuses on community empowerment and resilience, community asset ownership, community wealth building and community-led activity for the health and wellbeing of underserved groups. Most recently, Dani’s research has focused on differing policy and practice for community asset transfer across the devolved nations of the UK. Dani sits on the Scottish Government National Asset Transfer Action Group.

Patrick Kirkham

Patrick Kirkham is Head of Land Reform at the Scottish Government. His teams cover a range of issues including community land ownership, Community Right to Buy legislation and casework, the Scottish Land Fund, the government’s sponsorship of the Scottish Land Commission, the Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement and implementation of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 (which will introduce new policies relating to large landholdings). He has previously worked across climate change, post-18 education and labour market policies in the Scottish, UK and New Zealand governments. Outside of work he is a trustee at Verture, the climate resilience charity.

Carey Doyle

Carey Doyle is a Research Fellow at Scotland's Rural College (SRUC). She has been a researcher and policy contributor in land reform and community empowerment in Scotland since 2020, including leading a major action research project on urban community landownership and collaborating closely with communities, practitioners, and policymakers. Prior to joining SRUC, she worked in the charity sector supporting community groups with land buyouts, and in private practice as a town planner. She has published on community landownership, rural housing, spatial analysis, social division, and inclusive engagement.

Annie McKee (Chair)

Introduction

The paper reproduced here was written 42 years ago. I was then an Aberdeenshire-based freelance journalist and broadcaster specialising in rural and environmental issues. And I’d been invited to become an early trustee of the just-founded John Muir Trust (JMT). There was much discussion among trustees as to what JMT should be about. Safeguarding ‘wilderness’ or, as it would be called today ‘wild land’, was a key priority. I shared that objective. But I thought it could be attained in ways that also helped people living around wild land areas. What I wanted, I guess, was a means of bridging the gulf that had opened up (and remains evident today) between environmentalist aims on one side and, on the other, the aspirations of rural communities in the Highlands and Islands. Hence my 1984 paper.

This paper was sent to me some two years ago by Denis Mollison, one of JMT’s founders, who (unlike me) had kept a copy. Until that point, I’d forgotten about it. This may seem strange. But if (as I’ve done) you’ve written many hundreds of articles and compiled lots of papers for a whole variety of purposes over several decades, you’re inclined (in my case anyway) to find some of them slipping from your memory. And so it was with my 1984 contribution to JMT debates. Many of the ideas I outlined in 1984 were elaborated subsequently – not least in light light of the close contact I’d have, in various capacities, from the mid-1980s onwards, with people on the ground. Here everything’s left as first written – though I’ll afterwards touch on the extent to which the situation I described has, or hasn’t, changed for the better.

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JOHN MUIR TRUST.

WILDERNESS WITH PEOPLE: CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS.

James Hunter, 14 May 1984

“When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer and the sacred tree is dead.”- Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux.

“Lord and Lady Stafford [the future Duke and Duchess of Sutherland] were pleased humanely to order a new arrangement of this Country. That the interior should be possessed by Cheviot Shepherds [meaning sheep farmers] and the people brought down to the coast and placed there in lotts [or crofts] under the size of three arable acres, sufficient for the maintenance of an industrious family, but pinched enough to cause them turn their attention to the fishing. I presume to say that the proprietors humanely ordered this arrangement, because it surely was a most benevolent action to put these barbarous hordes into a position where they could better associate together, apply to industry, educate their children, and advance in civilisation.” - Patrick Sellar, Sutherland, 24 May 1815.

“On the third evening, when returning to Inverie, the factor came upon a small boathouse erected on the shore at Doune, which they [the evicting party] had overlooked. In this the ejected families had huddled at night for two nights, not daring to put up any artificial shelter. Fire was immediately applied to the roof and the structure burned down. This completed the work of destruction and eleven families were left absolutely without shelter, for unfortunately for them the coast of Knoydart has no caves in which protection from at least the rain might be found.” – Scotsman, 22 October, 1853.

1. Combining conservation with development begins with the realisation that policy-makers operate under legitimate pressures besides those associated with nature conservation; pressures arising, for instance, from economic and social problems so acute as to make their immediate mitigation seem more important than the long-term safeguarding of the natural environment.

2. A Third World finance minister - confronted with mounting indebtedness, massive poverty and, very possibly, imminent famine - cannot afford the luxury of the longer view. If there is a market for timber from his nation's rainforests, he will sell that timber irrespective of the ecologically damaging consequences of so doing. And the Third World peasant will welcome the resulting employment and income, however insignificant his share of the total proceeds. That is an inevitable human reaction; just as a Highlander - living in a community where jobs are few, wages low and career prospects extremely limited - is unlikely to turn down the chance of comparatively well paid employment in a platform yard or a petrochemical plant just because some visiting conservationist tells him that such a development will detract from the Highlands' wilderness quality.

3. It may be objected that there are alternative strategies available; strategies which will assist both the peasant and the rainforest, both the Highlander and the hills. Indeed there are. And this paper will come to them in due course. But that more positive side of the conservation message has not been presented adequately to the wider public - in the Highlands at least. From the Highland perspective, as a result, conservation is associated almost entirely with obstructionism; with opposition to this dam here, that ski development there, that quarry somewhere else.

4. Such a state of affairs is not peculiar to the Highlands. "Conservation and development", comment the authors of the World Conservation Strategy, "have so seldom been combined that they often appear incompatible. Conservationists themselves have helped ... to foster this misconception. Too often they have allowed themselves to be seen as resisting all development ... The result has been not to stop development, but to persuade many development practitioners ... that conservation is not merely irrelevant, it is harmful and antisocial."

5. The case of the Highlands conforms closely to that position. Here we have a locality fashionably described as “Europe's Last Wilderness"; a place so splendid and so precious, it is sometimes implied, as to justify resisting, circumscribing, perhaps even preventing, all development within its boundaries. But here, too, we have a seriously underprivileged region where socially deprived and depopulated rural communities are also said to require that self-same development in order to promote their material betterment and - especially in the case of the Hebrides - safeguard their distinctive language and culture.

6. Those opposing perspectives are not new. They were evident in the debate surrounding the Highland hydro-electric programme in the 1940s and 1950s, for example. But ever since the public inquiry into a projected platform fabrication yard at Drumbuie in Wester Ross in the early 1970s, hostility between the development and conservation camps has grown steadily - not least as a result of environmentalist opposition to Cairngorm ski development and environmentalist criticism of the EEC-funded Integrated Development Programme (IDP) in the Western Isles. Now, however, the very intensity of these conflicts has produced at least some degree of wider reflection on the part of the participants. In the conservation movement there are indications of an overdue realisation that the animosity engendered by the movement's apparently negative stance with regard to development will serve to discredit the entire environmentalist case in the Highlands. Among those involved in the formulation and execution of development policy, on the other hand, there are clear signs of an opposite anxiety: that all prospect of Highland development will be jeopardised by an ever more influential environmentalist lobby thought to be intent on preventing any significant change in Northern Scotland.

7. In this subtly altered climate of opinion it would be particularly appropriate, I believe, for the John Muir Trust to raise the prospect of another way forward; one that envisages neither the victory nor defeat of one side or the other; but one which attempts instead to evolve a Highland development strategy that satisfies the aspirations of the local population while simultaneously safeguarding one of Europe's more outstanding natural environments.

8. It may seem, to say the least, a little naive to imagine that there can be some sort of mutually beneficial alliance between the conservation movement and those Highland communities with which so many conservation groups have been at loggerheads. But that is not necessarily the case; for there are emerging in the Highlands, as in other parts of rural Europe, pressures for change of a kind that is very much in accord with the conservationist outlook. In Shetland, the Western Isles and elsewhere there is considerable emphasis on the revitalisation of indigenous culture; there are growing demands for development to be locally based, for people to have a greater say in their own affairs, for communities to have more control of their own resources. All this is entirely in line with conservation principle and provides a possible basis for more mutual understanding between Highlanders and the environmentalist movement in the rest of Britain.

9. Such a rapprochement demands, on the conservationist side, a wider appreciation of the fact that the Highland landscape does not exist independently of the people who live in it. To the visiting southerner, an empty glen is simply part of "Europe's Last Wilderness". To the Highlander, the same glen is a perpetual reminder of what has gone before: the dispossessions, the expulsions, the enforced liquidation of community and culture in the manner indicated by the quotations at the start of this paper.

10. Some thirty years ago, that point was well made by Hugh MacLennan, one of Canada's greatest modern novelists. MacLennan, now in his seventies, was born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. His great-grandfather was an early nineteenth-century emigrant from Kintail. His mother was one of Cape Breton's many Gaelic-speakers. And so Hugh MacLennan, on first visiting the Highlands in the 1950s, felt it appropriate to give to the essay which arose from that experience the title Scotchman's Return.

11. Northern Scotland's wide open spaces, MacLennan observed, certainly resemble those of the Canadian Arctic. "But this Highland emptiness," he continued, "only a few hundred miles above the massed population of England, is a far different thing from the emptiness of our own North West Territories. Above the 60th parallel in Canada you feel that nobody but God has ever been there before you. But in a deserted Highland glen you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone."

12. As Black Elk said of other deserted valleys far away, a people's dream died there. And by exulting in the resulting emptiness, the modern conservationist displays a quite astonishing insensitivity; an insensitivity that extends to many other aspects of the Highland situation, present as well as past.

13. The type of approach I have in mind is well illustrated by a 1982 New Scientist article concerned with the threat allegedly posed to island birds by the Western Isles IDP. Taking issue with the Common Market categorisation of the Western Isles as a "less favoured area", that article begins: "For tourists who come to gaze on the rough windswept coasts and feel themselves a million miles from the hassles of the twentieth century, the islands with their wild scenery and mild climate are anything but ill favoured."

14. That may be true. But the Western Isles also have to contend with one of Scotland's highest unemployment rates and some of Scotland's worst housing. As far as islanders themselves are concerned, therefore, the "hassles of the twentieth century" are all too real and pressing. They do not take kindly to external criticism of projects designed to enhance their economic prospects. Nor do they respond favourably to people who appear to set a higher value on island birdlife than on the maintenance of a human culture which is arguably much more endangered.

15. This is difficult territory. If you are, for instance, a Gaelic poet whose language is spoken now by only 80,000 people, how do you convey to someone who is secure in his or her membership of an English-speaking community numbering several hundred million, the terrible sense of desolation and despair engendered by your role as custodian of a culture poised on the very verge of extinction?

16. Let me try to construct an analogy, however imperfect, from the world of conservation. All of us experience occasionally that peculiar sense af oneness with nature which is to be found in places special to ourselves. It may be on a mountainside, on an open coast, in a pine forest or an oak wood. You will know, in your different ways, what I have in mind. Let us suppose, for sake of argument, that it is a piece of natural forest for which you have this affinity; a place where tree has followed tree, generation after generation, since the end of the last Ice Age. Let us further suppose that you encounter someone setting about that wood with chainsaws and bulldozers. How you feel about that assault on those ancient trees is how a minority culture reacts to a threat to its language; except that, in the case of language, the sense of violation is much greater. Trees, after all, are external to ourselves and, for the moment at least, there will be other woods to visit. Language, in contrast, is intrinsic to our personality; it is one of the most basic things about us; and it is quite unique and irreplaceable.

17. Should the corncrake ever vanish from the Western Isles, something precious will have been lost. But should the Gaelic language be extinguished in its last Hebridean strongholds, something else of value will have been abstracted from the earth. And conservationists should be as concerned about the one as about the other. They should, in short, be elaborating a vision of a Highland future in which community and culture are every bit as important as landscape, scenery and wildlife.

18. That would demand, on the environmentalist side, some reassessment of what exactly it is in the Highlands that ought to be conserved. Let us make clear, for a start, that - as the returned Cape Bretoner Hugh MacLennan pointed out - Highland Scotland ought not to be seen in the same light as Arctic Canada or, for that matter, Amazonian Brazil. This is not now the sort of place where nobody but God has been here before us.

19. Two thousand years ago almost all of Northern Scotland was tree covered. The red deer, now a lean and rangy beast of the open moor and hill, was then a forest animal, its numbers held in check by wolves. Eagles and buzzards ranged across great woods that stretched from the Atlantic to the North Sea and out of which the high hills protruded like islands in a dark green ocean. Bears rummaged among the trees. Wild boar churned up the underbrush. And the country's few human inhabitants still went in awe of a natural world which they, unlike their more recent successors, were quite unable to dominate and control. Then the Highlands were indeed a wilderness. Now they are a wasteland; their bare hills and empty glens a consequence of human mismanagement, human greed and human cruelty. Nature can flourish here, as it can flourish on a bomb site or on a motorway embankment. But to describe the Highlands as "unspoiled", as is done by many conservationists, is to abuse both language and history.

20. The Highlands are most certainly replete with lonely places. The landscape is both stark and grand. But that landscape is also the product of a prolonged process of environmental degradation, a good deal of it deliberate. The great forests were removed by man. The treeless moors and hills which resulted, and which are typical of the modern Highland scene, were then subjected to further deterioration and erosion through overgrazing and repeated burning. To appreciate the extent of the ecological damage which has been done it is only necessary to chart the stock-carrying capacity of a given tract of land over the last 200 years. Where that capacity can be assessed, it will be found to have fallen massively. That fall has been paralleled, of course, by a reduction in the human population; a reduction effected, in many instances, by methods whose brutality and ruthlessness is indicated by the quotations at the start of this paper.

21. This, of course, was the essential message of the late Frank Fraser Darling who did so much to ensure that conservation and ecology are among the dominant concerts of our time and whose early career was concerned almost exclusively with North West Scotland. In that neglected masterpiece, West Highland Survey, Fraser Darling's preface, written in 1954, ends with this sentence: "And finally the bald unpalatable fact is emphasized that the Highlands and Islands are largely a devastated terrain and that any policy which ignores this fact cannot hope to achieve rehabilitation."

22. For conservationists concerned with the Highlands in the 1980s, as much as in the 1950s, that is an excellent motto; as is this longer passage from the Survey's section on land use: "The Highlands as a geologic and physiographic region are unable to withstand deforestation and maintain productiveness and fertility. Their history has been one of steadily accelerating deforestation until the great mass of the forests was gone, and thereafter of forms of land usage which prevented regeneration of tree growth and reduced the land to the crude values and expressions of its solid geological composition. In short, the Highlands are a devastated countryside, and that is the plain primary reason why there are now few people and why there is a constant economic problem. Devastation has not quite reached its uttermost lengths, but it is quite certain that present trends in land use will lead to it, and the country will then be rather less productive than Baffin Land. It is possible that the wilderness value of the West Highlands for the jaded townsman will still be sufficient to justify a large subsidy to maintain a sufficient population of people following practices of misuse to prevent any natural healing of the devastation. But if the jaded townsman attains to an ecological knowledge and appreciation he will not necessarily wish his wilderness to be the desolation caused through devastation of land by his own species ... Man-made devastation is no environment for physiological health in a people as a whole."

23. That is an appropriate starting point for a conservationist approach to Highland development; an approach which, in myk opinion, ought to be influenced by that breadth of outlook which ensured that, in Fraser Darling's account of Highland circumstances, the skills of the natural scientist were allied to a strong sense of history and a profound appreciation of the cultural achievment of Scots Gaeldom.

24. Taking as its starting point the wider objectives of the World Conservation Strategy, such a conservationist policy for Highland development would be designed to manage Highland resources in such a way as to ensure that they yield the greatest possible sustainable benefit to present generations while maintaining their potential to meet the needs of future generations.

25. Resources, in this context, would be understood to include land, the farming and forestry potential of that land, together with fisheries and those landscape and other attributes which are the basis of Northern Scotland's value both as a wildlife habitat and a place of leisure and recreation.

26. These resources, as already indicated, have been exploited previously in ways which have benefited neither the Highland environment nor the Highland population. Fish stocks have been depleted. The land has been degraded. Management methods have been both ecologically and economically extractive. The pattern of exploitation has been such as to cause a major deterioration in the natural resource, while simultaneously ensuring that the economic proceeds of resource exploitation have, for the most part, accrued to external interests rather than the locally resident population.

27. The depopulated state of much of the Highland countryside is thus a consequence of the mismanagement of the region's resources. A conservationist strategy for Highland development, therefore, would aim to bring about a substantial measure of repopulation.

28. Such a strategy would seek to achieve that repopulation by fostering the utilisation of locally available resources, by local people, for local purposes; the most stable, most successful and most productive type of rural development being that which is resource-based and both managed and controlled from within local communities.

29. In this context, it is appropriate to quote from a speech made by the Secretary of State for Scotland Mr George Younger at the 1983 annual conference of Rural Forum, an alliance of organisations representing people living in the Scottish countryside. "The overriding objective", said Mr Younger on that occasion, "must be to harness the creative energy and skills of people in local communities so that they will be able to maintain and enhance the life of those communities. What matters most is the encouragement of confidence in individuals and communities in their ability to tackle their own problems in a practical way and to exploit their resources both human and material."

30. A conservationist strategy for Highland development would broadly endorse those views. It is important to stress, however, that such development will not occur of itself. Especially in more deprived and run-down Highland communities, the confidence mentioned by Mr Younger is in short supply. Protracted depopulation - not unconnected with resource mismanagement - has resulted in widespread acceptance of the inevitability of continued decline. Countering the consequent sense of apathy and demoralisation is a necessary prelude to unleashing the skills and energies which Highland people undoubtedly possess. A conservationist approach to Highland development, therefore, would incorporate measures designed to restore individual and collective self-confidence.

31. These measures would be educational and cultural as well as economic. To revitalise a Highland, and more especially a Hebridean, community's faith in its own abilities, it is necessary to restore a proper pride in Gaelic language and culture - policies which contribute to the undermining of that culture being as much to be deplored as policies which result in the degradation of the natural environment. For that reason, a conservationist strategy for Highland development would support and seek to expand those measures already adopted in the Western Isles and elsewhere to regenerate the Gaelic language.

32. Because of its wider emphasis on the need to foster locally based development and promote greater local control of resource management, such a strategy would also advocate a much more decentralised form of administration in the Highland area - with a wide range of decision-making and revenue-raising powers being transferred to island groups and comparably sized mainland localities.

33. As a first step in that direction, a conservationist strategy for Highland development would strongly support Highlands and Islands local authorities and fishermen's organisations in their campaign for a locally run fisheries management structure - with licensing arrangements guaranteeing preferential treatment for local boats.

34. Local control of fisheries ought to be followed by the establishment of similar control with regard to land use - the ultimate aim being community land management on Alpine lines.

35. The present government's disposal of state assets offers an ideal opportunity for local experiment of this kind. The privatisation of Forestry Commission plantations, and the anticipated privatisation of the Department of Agriculture's crofting estates, might be handled in such a way that the ownership of at least some part of the land involved is transferred to communities residing on that land.

36. To reinforce its overall aim of strengthening local communities and local economies, a conservationist strategy for Highland development would re-order the priorities governing grant aid and related aspects of existing development policy. Thus small-scale, resource-based and locally-controlled enterprises would be preferred to large, externally managed plants of the kind which have failed so disastrously in the past.

37. The general need to promote greater local participation in the development process is illustrated by the particular case of fish-farming. Although fish-farming provides an increasing amount of employment in the Highlands, the industry is largely in the hands of major companies. Local communities have consequently been denied valuable entrepreneurial opportunities and the local economy has been deprived of direct access to the badly needed investment capital which the industry will eventually generate.

38. In fish-farming, tourism and every other area of economic activity, therefore, a conservationist strategy for Highland development would discriminate actively in favour of the locality; preferring to assist a community co-operative or a local hotelier rather than a multinational corporation; believing that a business which is locally owned and locally run is likely to prove more beneficial and more durable than one which is the remote outlier of some larger concern.

39. By promoting the local interest in this way, a conservationist strategy for development would also assist the emergence of managerial practices geared to maintaining and sustaining renewable resources. Thus an island community which controlled its own fisheries would have a vested interest in enforcing effective stock conservation policies of the kind now applied in waters around Iceland, Faroe and other places where that type of local control has already been established.

40. Because the land resource has suffered much more degradation than its marine equivalent, it confronts a conservationist strategy for Highland development with particular problems. Revitalising the land would not be easy; and it would require, within the generally applied principle of enhanced local control, a fairly drastic overhaul of the financial and other incentives available to agricultural and forestry interests. These are clearly matters for much detailed debate and discussion. But some basic guidelines can be laid down.

41. Local experiments in community ownership, of the kind mentioned above, should be accompanied by a much wider degree of community involvement in decision-making regarding land use.

42. A land use code - incorporating measures designed to enhance fertility, foster reafforestation and safeguard nature conservation - should be applied to all of Northern Scotland. The code should insist on a general reduction in red deer numbers and its implementation should be accompanied by upland agricultural support reforms which would favour cattle husbandry at the expense of sheep.

43. There should be a much greater degree of integration between forestry and farming, with forestry and related timber processing industries being increasingly the responsibility of local interests rather than government agencies or large private corporations; the aim being to replicate in Northern Scotland the common Continental pattern of woodland management.

44. Future reafforestation should also break with past and present reliance on exotic softwoods. Planting should include substantial stands of indigenous species such as oak, ash, hazel, birch and scots pine - thus assisting the re-emergence of at least some features of the original Highland landscape.

45. There should be some revival of land settlement along the lines of those settlement schemes which were implemented successfully in the first thirty years of this century.

46. In selected areas of high conservation value, notably the Cairngorms, the principle of local control should be applied as elsewhere; but in recognition of the national and international interest in these areas, management bodies should include representation of those wider interests and management plans should give pride of place to nature conservation.

47. None of the foregoing is intended to be definitive. Much of it may seem unattainable - though I do not believe it necessarily to be so. For the moment, however, this paper is put to the John Muir Trust only as a basis for, and a personal contribution to, discussion as to how the Trust might define its conservationist objectives in ways which will also promote, and be seen to promote, the interests of people living in the Highlands.

48. When compiling his West Highland Survey in the 1940s, Frank Fraser Darling wrote: "The greatest value the mass of Highland land could give the nation would be as a continuing wild land in which perhaps twice as many people could live than there are at present." That, I think, should continue to be the conservationist objective. What we have to devise are the means of attaining it.

49. Fraser Darling also wrote then: "There are three bodies in Scotland which should be able to work in close co-operation and rid their minds of narrowly pragmatic notions. The Department of Agriculture has great power and owns half a million acres; the Forestry Commission also has power, plantations and land; the Nature Conservancy has little land as yet but may be expected to develop ideas and techniques in conservation and the ecology of land use."

50. But there Fraser Darling was overoptimistic. These organisations, and other more recently created public bodies, have proved unable or unwilling to promote the changes he had in mind. And so we must look elsewhere for the means of achieving more enlightened policies. One source of potential advance, as already stressed, is to be found in those Highlands and Islands communities which are themselves reasserting their distinctive identities and pressing claims to greater control of their own destinies. The other possible source of progress, this paper has argued, is the conservation movement. Unlike the various official agencies, voluntary conservation bodies have the capacity to formulate those imaginative and wide-ranging policies for which Frank Fraser Darling called in vain. And as its support and influence grows among the population at large, the conservation movement also has the capacity to bring those policies to the attention of government in an ever more forceful and effective manner.

51. It is commonly remarked in Northern Scotland that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) now has more members than there are people in the Highlands and Islands. That state of affairs is thought, by most Highlanders, to be decidedly unfortunate; for it is widely assumed in the Highlands that the overwhelming majority of those RSPB members, like conservationists generally, will in some way be opposed to Highland interests.

52. But why should that be the case? This paper's theme is that there is no inherent reason why the conservation movement and the Highland population should not have a great deal in common; no reason why Northern Scotland cannot accommodate both nature conservation and a flourishing human community; no reason, in short, why the Highlands should not be, as the title of this paper suggests, a wilderness with people.

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Explanatory Notes

Black Elk or Heȟáka Sápa (c.1863-1950) was one of the Oglala Lakota people who, in turn, were a part of the wider Sioux confederation. As a youth or young man, he witnessed both the Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876), a Sioux victory over US forces, and the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890). At Wounded Knee in South Dakota, to which Black Elk refers here, some 300 Lakota men, women and children were killed by the US military.

Patrick Sellar (1780-1850) was a Sutherland Estate factor. He’s here looking to justify (in a letter to Scotland’s Lord Advocate Archibald Colquhoun) his role in ejecting many hundreds of families from the Strath of Kildonan, Strathnaver and Strathbrora to make way for sheep farmers, one of them himself.

Knoydart. The Knoydart pensinsula, once home to more than a thousand people, was subjected to several clearances – culminating in the 1853 episode touched on here. The JMT’s founding was bound up with attempts to forestall Knoydart’s possible acquisition as a military training ground.

Third World. A term from the Cold War era. Today’s equivalent might be developing world.

His, him, etc. They would be more appropriate today.

World Conservation Strategy. Published in 1980 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, with the co-operation of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Wildlife Fund, this was, among other things, an early attempt to define and promote the concept of sustainable development. My much annotated and underlined copy has long gone. But the Strategy can be found on line.

Drumbuie. A 1973 proposal to build oil production platforms for the North Sea at Drumbuie in Wester Ross attracted widespread opposition – the projected platform yard eventually going ahead, some miles to the north, at Kishorn.

Integrated Development Programme (IDP). Funded largely by the European Economic Community or Common Market (today the European Union), the IDP, launched in 1982, aimed to boost the Western Isles economy by improving agriculture, infrastructure, etc.

Hugh MacLennan (1907-90) was a Canadian novelist and academic whose novels attempted to give a literary dimension to an emerging Canadian national identity.

Nobody but God has ever been there before you. Today (not least as a result of my spending time in the 1990s with people living on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana) I have a greater appreciation than I did in 1984 of the longstanding indigenous presence in the Americas. That said, I was well aware in 1984 (which is why my paper includes an upfront quote from Black Elk) that the forcible expulsion of indigenous people (the ‘barbarous hordes’ of Patrick Sellar’s 1815 letter) from their homelands was by no means confined to the Highlands. Nor is it only in the Highlands that a good deal of today’s ‘wild land’ was not so long ago occupied or put to use by those same same indigenous people.

Past tree cover. I’m more aware today than I was in 1984 that the loss of tree cover in the Highlands was a more drawn-out process than indicated (somewhat over-romantically) here. I’m equally aware now that by no means all this loss is attributable to human action. Other factors, not least a changing climate, played a part.

Frank Fraser Darling (1903-79) was a naturalist and ecologist who spent many years in North West Scotland where, as well as producing pioneering wild life studies, he worked closely with crofters and, from Strontian, supervised the research team who helped make possible the production and publication (in 1955) of West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology, a book I treasure greatly. Fraser Darling’s 1969 Reith Lectures, Wilderness and Plenty, delivered when he was Vice-President of the Conservation Foundation in Washington DC, were a key contribution to emerging concerns about humanity’s impact on the natural environment.

Fraser Darling is one of my heroes as is evident from this account (Press and Journal, 3 November 1976) of my one meeting with him: ‘Conservation, ecology: words and concepts which have sunk firmly into the conciousness of the developed world. After 100 or more years of industrialisation and of ever-increasing exploitation of the world’s natural resources, it has finally been borne in ... that [our] activities are threatening to destroy this planet’s natural environment ... It would be wrong to attribute this development to a single individual. But there is one man who has done more than anyone else to to bring about the recent revolution in people’s attitudes to their natural surroundings. His name is Frank Fraser Darling. And he lives in retirement at Lochyhills on the outskirts of Forres.’

The Highlands are a devastated countryside. While it’s easy to grasp devastation of the sort caused by an oil spill or some such, it’s much harder, as Fraser Darling was well aware, to comprehend cumulative devastation of the sort he was looking to highlight. This point was explored by Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), another pioneer conservationist, in his posthumously published Sand County Almanac. ‘One of the perils of an ecological education,’ Leopold wrote, ‘is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.’ Thus treeless hillsides and equally treeless grouse moors might be thought highly attractive scenically, while also being, in the Fraser Darling sense, devastated.

George Younger (1931-2009) was a Conservative politician who served as Secretary of State for Scotland from 1979 to 1986.

The ‘externally managed’ and ‘failed’ plants I had in mind in 1984 were: the Fort William pulp mill which lasted for 17 years and closed in 1981 with the loss of around a thousand jobs; the Invergordon aluminium smelter which lasted for just ten years and closed in 1981 with the loss of much the same number of jobs.

Nature Conservancy. Established in 1949, this was a UK government agency. It was replaced in 1973 by the Nature Conservancy Council which, in Scotland, was replaced in 1991 by Scottish Natural Heritage, itself now rebranded as NatureScot.

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Some 2026 Perspectives

In 1984 there were few signs that forestry policy would evolve in ways suggested above. Reforestion was then typified by developments in the Caithness and Sutherland flow country where generous tax-breaks encouraged wealthy individuals to finance deep ploughing of peatland as a prelude to planting this peatland with exotic species like sitka spruce and lodgepole pine. Not least because peatland (in consequence of manmade climate change) is now considered a key carbon store, policy has reversed. Peatland retention and restoration is now backed and, though commercial forestry interests still favour exotics, afforestion or reforestation increasingly involves native species.

A longstanding and continuing reduction in sheep numbers can be seen as equally positive from an ecological perspective. But this is less a consequence of policy than of the socio-economic difficulties confronting the hill-farming and crofting sectors. These might have been mitigated in a post-Brexit context by remodelling agricultural support policy in such a way as to shift support from larger to smaller operators. This hasn’t happened. Nor has there been any meaningful attempt to create a modern equivalent of the hill cattle economy that prevailed in the pre-clearance Highlands and that, from an ecological standpoint as well as in other ways, was hugely more beneficial than the sheep economy that took its place.

Still more depressing in a land use context is the seemingly endless growth in deer numbers and the persistence over wide areas of hopelessly deleterious practices (like ground-cover burning) associated with the wildlife killing grounds or grouse moors that loom so large in upland Scotland. Equally disappointing, despite the emergence of community woodlands (see below) and some planting on farm and croft land, has been lack of progress towards forestry-farming integration and more diversified forest ownership – forestry still being owned overwhelmingly by the state or by large-scale private interests.

My 1984 paper’s references to Gaelic and to cultural issues more widely derived from my awareness (as a historian and not least as the author of The Making of the Crofting Community, 1976) of the extent to which people in the Highlands and Islands were long told that everything about them, starting with their Gaelic language, was inferior, second-rate, of no account. Developmentally, this was disastrous. When your supposed inadequacy and inferiority are dinned into you by practically everyone in authority, you can’t but end up lacking self-esteem. And where there isn’t self-esteem, there can’t be enterprise, initiative, advancement.That’s why it’s vital to encourage both individuals and communities in the Scottish north to take pride in their localities, to feel good about themselves, their surroundings, their heritage – both natural and cultural.

There has been progress. Enhanced public spending on Gaelic, practically non-existent in 1984, has led, for example, to a major expansion of Gaelic broadcasting and enhanced availability of Gaelic-medium education. Indigenous music has flourished. Higher educational opportunities have been opened up across the north by the University of the Highlands and Islands. Comments to the effect that ‘you can’t live on scenery’ are less often heard now that natural environment (locally as well as globally) is valued more highly – especially by young people. Something of these and other changes is reflected in surveys showing that (despite the obstacles put in the way of this ambition by housing shortages and other difficulties) many of the north’s young people are more attracted than my generation was to the notion that their area has a great deal to offer them.

This progress notwithstanding, policy approaches, whether on the part of government or voluntary organisations, aren’t significantly more integrated today than they were in 1984. Cultural policy, development policy and environmental policy continue to be formulated in separate silos – with little in the way of overlap or mutual reinforcement. The same can be said of land reform which is treated as if were a purely sectoral matter under a rural affairs heading – rather than being seen as something with implications for a wide range of policy sectors.

Nor has there been any administrative decentralisation of the sort I advocated in 1984. Fisheries management, for instance, continues to be shaped centrally. Over the last 40-plus years, moreover, administration of almost every type has become increasingly remote. This is especially evident in local government. In contrast to much of Western Europe, where local councils are truly local, Scotland has been lumbered with extraordinarily large authorities. Thus Kilchoan and John o’Groats, some eight hours apart by road, are administered by a single council. This is absurd. But it’s indicative of wider trends.

Thus the Local Enterprise Companies (LECs), established in 1991 and run by entirely unpaid boards, were abolished in 2007 and their functions taken over by Inverness-based Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) which itself has been shorn of influence and cash. The considerable autonomy once enjoyed by HIE and its predecessor organisation, the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) has been curtailed – HIE now being treated as a mere ‘delivery agency’ by Scottish governments which have also subjected HIE’s budget to repeated cuts. Much the same is true of other agencies, other authorities. The 1999 re-establishement of a Scottish parliament may have resulted in significant power being devolved from London to Edinburgh. But there has been no corresponding devolution from Edinburgh. Rather the reverse – Scotland, as a result, being one of Europe’s most overcentralised countries.

Alongside this – and with few exceptions – the Scottish north’s natural resources continue to be developed principally for the benefit of largely external (often overseas) interests. This is still more true of fish farming than it was in 1984. Oil-related development, meanwhile, has largely come and gone – the long-run outcome being much as forecast by Texas Jim, oilman character in John McGrath’s landmark production from 1973, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. ‘All you folks are off your head,’ Jim sings to Scots, ‘I’m getting rich from your seabed.’ ‘I’ll go home when I see fit,’ Jim continues, ‘All I’ll leave is a heap of shit.’

Today the Scottish north’s renewables assets are being exploited in ways that conform closely to this age-old pattern – one that can be traced back to the seaweed-based kelp industry of the early nineteenth century when kelp was, for a time, a lucrative source of industrial alkali. Again very big and often foreign companies predominate. Community benefit, to be sure, is available to local populations and has delivered worthwhile gains. But as can be seen from the record of our handful of community-owed windfarms (in Lewis, Gigha and elsewhere), community benefit payments amount to only a small proportion of total windfarm revenues which, outside the tiny community-owned sector, accrue elsewhere. The contrast with Denmark, where around half of all windfarms are locally owned is stark. And across the windfarm-rich north, by way of adding insult to injury, electricity prices are among the highest in the UK – as are rates of fuel poverty.

And what, since 1984, of that most basic of all resources, land? The short answer is that, while much has changed, much more has stayed the same. As in the 1980s – as in any decade in the last 200 years or more – a huge proportion of Scotland’s land resource is in the hands of a miniscule number of owners. Just 408 owners, the latest figures suggest, own half of Scotland’s privately owned rural land. And since this compares with 440 owners in 2012, ownership concentration – a concentration without parallel in much of the world – is becoming more, not less, extreme. One of this concentration’s many adverse effects (others are touched on below) is that a handful of owners (consisting increasingly of asset management and private equity interests) benefit disproportionately from already mentioned and taxpayer-funded measures to expand afforestation or engage in peatland restoration.

Where there has been advance is in the area of community land ownership. My 1984 paper’s advocacy of what I called ‘local experiments in community ownership’ was a response to the then Conservative government’s privatisation agenda. This was proceeding at pace, with a succession of publicly-owned industries, utilities and assets – gas, electricity, telecommunications, steel, water, etc – going into private hands. The Forestry Commission, it was thought, was destined to go the same way. So, it was also thought, were the crofting estates managed by the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland (DAFS). These dated from early twentieth-century ventures in land settlement when DAFS’ predecessor agencies, the Congested Districts Board and the Board of Agriculture for Scotland, acquired extensive (and once-cleared) areas with a view to creating many hundreds of new crofts.

My 1984 suggestion with regard to DAFS properties was one I’d return to. In the event, however, DAFS properties weren’t privatised, and when, in 1990-91, the 150,000 acres owned by DAFS in Skye and Raasay were offered to their crofter residents on a collective basis, the offer was turned down – not least because crofters couldn’t see their way to finding the £155,000 (well in excess of £500,000 at today’s prices) DAFS was spending annually on administering those same estates. Subsequent community takeovers of non-DAFS land would show that even extensive properties can be managed effectively for a fraction of DAFS-type expenditure. But despite this and despite legislation (Transfer of Crofting Estates Act 1997) intended to facilitate such developments, only one state-owned crofting estate (West Harris) has gone into community ownership.

Like the DAFS estates, the Forestry Commission escaped wholesale privatisation. But starting in the later 1990s, a good deal of land previously owned by the Commission or its successor agency, Forestry and Land Scotland, has gone into community control of the sort that, despite my promoting it in 1984, I then thought unlikely to happen. This land accounts for the bulk of the acreage making up the 200 or more community woodlands now in existence in Scotland.

Although community ownership of the DAFS estates in Skye and Raasay proved a non-starter, the 1990-91 possibility of this going ahead (together with the publicity thus generated) had two wider effects. It led to crofters and others taking a growing interest in the community ownership concept. And it resulted in Lewis lawyer, the late Simon Fraser, devising on behalf of the Scottish Crofters Union (where I worked from 1986 to 1990) the legal and administrative arrangements that would be needed to make community ownership a reality. It was no coincidence, then, that when, in 1992, the North Assynt Estate was put on the market by its absentee owners, the estate’s crofter occupiers both mounted a successful effort to buy it and, with Simon Fraser acting as their legal adviser, adopted a management structure of the kind that would have been adopted on the DAFS properties in Skye and Raasay had their transfer to crofters gone ahead.

Similar structures, often with Simon Fraser’s input, would be put in place on most of the larger-scale community purchases of land that were to occur in the years around and after 2000. There were a lot of these. That’s why, across Scotland, more than half a million acres are now in community ownership.

That’s a big achievement. But perspective is required. Community land ownership is geographically concentrated – nearly three-quarters of such land being in the Western Isles. And the overall total, though impressive, amounts to less than 3 per cent of Scotland’s land area. Across the country as a whole ownership (as indicated above) is more concentrated than ever – despite the Scottish parliament having enacted, since 2003, a series of measures under a land reform heading.

Continued concentration notwithstanding, the Scottish parliament’s commitment to land contrasts sharply with the 1984 position – land reform having then been off the UK’s legislative agenda for more than 60 years. Among key institutional consequences have been the 2012 establishment of a publicly financed Scottish Land Fund and the 2017 launch of a Scottish Land Commission – the Land Fund’s remit being to assist with community asset purchases and the Commission’s role being to provide the Scottish government with evidence-based guidance on how best to bring about what the Commission calls ‘a fairer, more transparent and productive system of land ownership and use’.

Because the Land Commission is strictly advisory, it’s easy to minimise its significance. But it represents a huge advance. In 1984, for example, there had been no officially-backed analysis of the concentrated nature of land ownership in Scotland since the UK government’s 1873 ‘Return of Owners of Land’. Making good this deficiency began, not with research of the type the Land Commission conducts but with individual effort in the shape of the 1977 publication of Who Owns Scotland? by retired forester John McEwen (1887-1992). ‘All my life I have been close to the land,’ McEwen wrote in his book’s opening chapter. ‘There is, however, nothing soft or sentimental in my attitude towards it, rather a deep growing concern over ... the way in which it has been managed, leading to its present degraded, underdeveloped condition. This is due to the fact of ownership, in the main, by powerful, selfish, antisocial landlords.’

McEwen’s findings, together with his explicitly anti-landlord opinions, were at once attacked by owners and their political allies. This didn’t worry him. ‘I positively enjoy controversy,’ the then 90-year old John McEwen told me when (shortly after his book’s publication) I met with him in his Perthshire home. ‘It’s good to get in a good dig at the lairds. Great to hit them really hard.’ (Press and Journal, 25 November, 1977.)

John McEwen’s favoured way forward from the ownership pattern he uncovered was land nationalisation. But John McGrath (of Cheviot fame) added a rider to this.’The land needs to be nationalised,’ McGrath wrote in his Who Owns Scotland? foreword, ‘in order to put it under local community control, with capital assistance, guidance information and technical help from a central authority.’

Thinking of this sort influenced my 1984 mentions of community ownership possibilities. And it’s possible to see something of what McGrath advocated both in the twenty-first-century expansion of community ownership and in the backing given to this expansion by public agencies like the Scottish Land Fund, the Scottish Land Commission and, from an early stage, HIE which had a key role in financing and otherwise assisting a variety of community land ownership trusts (and which I chaired from 1998 to 2004).

But as shown by the comparatively limited proportion of the overall land resource that’s gone into community ownership, its (now largely stalled) expansion is unlikely of itself to result in far-reaching change in the ownership pattern highlighted by John McEwen and highlighted, too, by the more recent work of Andy Wightman. Some of the adverse consequences of this pattern were underlined in the Scottish Land Commission’s 2019 Review of Scale and Concentration of Land Ownership, much the most substantial and authoritative investigation of a topic that’s been central to land-reform-related discussion in Scotland since the extent of concentration was exposed (and castigated) by John McEwen.

Where owners exercise monopoly ownership of land over large areas, the Land Commission showed, the impacts – as with monopoly power in any economic sector – are adverse, sometimes acutely so. Housing provision, nature conservation, economic development and associated employment creation can be – and are – impeded. Inequality is enhanced, opportunity curtailed and communities denied any say in what’s being done with – and to – the land surrounding them.

The Land Reform Act 2025 is, in effect, the Scottish government’s legislative response to those Land Commission findings. The Act obliges owners of 1,000-plus hectares (2,471-plus acres) to develop land management plans and to engage with local communities while doing so – something that can be seen as a move towards the ‘local control’ of land use I suggested in my 1984 paper. Owners will also have to give advance notice of sales and government ministers will be empowered to insist, prior to sales, on the ‘lotting’, or breaking up, of 1,000-plus hectare properties. This, it’s hoped, will boost the prospects of community purchases while also diversifying landholding in ways that reduce ownership concentration.

The long-run effect of these and other 2025 measures will depend on how determinedly they’re enforced by government. But for all that the 2025 Act adds up to something of an advance, it’s hard to do other than suspect that it won’t greatly alter the fundamentals of an ownership structure that’s for so long impacted so negatively on the public good. That’s principally because this latest Act, like other twenty-first-century land-related legislation. lacks the the radical edge of earlier land reforms. Thus the Crofters Act 1886 enforced a range of far-reaching changes of a sort that would scarcely be contemplated by government today. Crofters were provided, for instance, with a uniquely comprehensive form of security that made this security, as it remains, something that could be passed from one tenant to another in perpetuity. At the same time, croft rent-fixing powers were removed entirely from landlords and vested, as they’re still vested, in a quasi-judicial body – today the Scottish Land Court. Would such a drastic reduction in landed influence be contemplated by today’s Scottish government? I doubt it. Just as I think it improbable (to put the point mildly) that the Scottish parliament, as currently constituted, would countenance settlement legislation of the early twentieth-century sort – legislation which (as mentioned above) led to government agencies creating numerous new crofts on land acquired for this purpose.

Still less likely to be agreed is legislation of the sort put in place in Ireland by Conservative governments at a time when all of Ireland was still in the UK. This legislation (culminating in an Act of 1903) resulted in government agencies, most notably the Irish Land Commission, supervising the transfer of land from its owners to its occupiers. The process thus initiated made Ireland what it is today, both north and south of the present-day border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, an island of owner-occupying farmers and smallholders – not (as it once was and as Scotland remains) a territory dominated by often very large estates.

But if it’s difficult to envisage a Scottish government doing what the UK Conservative Party did in Ireland, experience suggests that, even in Scotland – a country where politicians of all stripes steer well clear of bringing an end to a landownership structure that’s long seemed immutable – far-reaching change is possible.

I made my initial visit to Scotland’s crofting heartlands in the summner of 1972. I was one year into researching and writing the doctoral thesis that would be published, 50 years ago this summer, as The Making of the Crofting Community. And I was accompanied by Evelyn, my wife. We’d just married and I’d persuaded Evelyn that our honeymoon should consist of a walking tour of Skye and the Outer Isles – a tour conducted, most fortuitously, in spectaculary fine weather.

Almost all the Lewis, Harris and Uist crofting townships Evelyn and I hiked through in. that long ago July were then in the ownership of absentee landlords. Those same townships were much in my mind when, two or three years later, I completed The Making of the Crofting Community with a quotation from The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. ‘The people do not own the land,’ I wrote. ‘The people do not control the land.’ Not until that situation was remedied, I added, would the crofting community be master of its own destiny.

Today, a half-century on from those words’ publication, most of the Outer Isles croft land I first set eyes on when on honeymoon is controlled, not by lairds of the sort who once owned this land, but by the people who live on and around it. Might the next 50 years see this become true of a great deal more of rural Scotland? That question won’t be answered in my lifetime. But I very much hope the answer to it will be yes.

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Acknowledgements

Not least because I haven’t of late been keeping up as closely as I once did with land-related issues, the foregoing is much indebted to people to whom I’ve turned for assistance. Particular thanks are due to Calum MacLeod, who’s had a longstanding involvement with these matters, and to Josh Doble, who’s Director of Policy and Advocacy at Community Land Scotland. All errors of fact and judgment are my own.

Informal collaborative artmaking considered as a re-commoning process in rural Stirlingshire

Michael Bowdidge (WHALE Arts Agency / Independent Artistic Researcher)

This presentation describes and discusses the implications of specific aspects of an ongoing artistic research project which emerged from a longstanding interest in working sculpturally with found or discovered materials and their surroundings. While these creative activities are always undertaken as an end in themselves, they can also function as a means by which hidden connections, narratives and histories can be brought to light.

Since 2023 the broader project which provides the backdrop to this presentation has engaged with the village of Killearn’s symbolic role, as the birthplace of George Buchanan, James VI and I’s tutor and mentor, in the adoption and further development of the plantation system by the monarch. My interdisciplinary research process explores and articulates the multiple traces which the plantation system and other extractive framings of the land have encoded within local historic designed landscapes.

My artmaking here has been informal, unsanctioned and have taken place on two adjacent pieces of land, once of which is publicly owned (Killearn Glen) while the other is privately owned (and land banked) but publicly accessible and frequently used by the community (Crow Hill). In both settings I have been using fallen branches to create freestanding sculptural forms which are intended to speak to and of the landscape, as well as photographing, undertaking archival research and producing reflective writing.

The public nature of the making of these sculptures has inevitably led to wide-ranging and informative conversations with community members, and also somewhat unexpectedly, to the discovery of a growing number of known and unknown collaborators with my creative process. The specific nature of these unexpected creative interactions and a discussion of their potential as a re-commoning process and a means of fostering a cultural shift towards ‘being owned by the land’ (after Norman MacCaig) form the substance of this presentation.

How can ‘citizen land science’ support the practice of community landownership in Scotland?

Sam Poskitt, Ellie Louise Rennie, Jess Whitaker, Annie McKee, Hannah Budge (James Hutton Institute)

Community landownership is often expected to help foster collective action towards improving resilience to environmental challenges and climate change, promoting social justice, preserving local knowledge and strengthening cultural ties to land. Yet, in practice, communities do not always possess the expertise, information, or available time and effort needed to acquire and manage land in pursuit of these aims.

This paper explores if/how the collection and use of land data through a participatory research approach can help to support communities in advancing their aims for community landownership. To this end, we co-developed a collaborative ‘citizen land science’ research project with a community in the West Highlands. We approached this by working with the community from the start to set the research agenda, listening to their aspirations for their community-owned land, helping them to identify expertise and information gaps, and designing research questions and community-led data collection activities to respond to these. Community members identified a need for support with balancing land use for multiple benefits, including sustainable income generation, biodiversity, and place-connectedness.

We reflect on the successes and challenges of this research. Our approach has reportedly reinvigorated interest in community land-based activities, uncovered local knowledge, and created space for dialogue about how land management decisions affect local people and environments. However, we encountered challenges in finding a community whose members had available time to collaborate on the research, as well as balancing collaboration and flexibility with formal requirements and timeframes set by wider project and funding agendas. We identify the importance of openness, adaptability, and reflexivity, as well as engaging the community upfront in setting the research agenda, as key lessons for other researchers and practitioners motivated to support communities engaging in landownership. We hope these findings may help researchers, practitioners and other communities navigate engagement in research partnerships.

Beyond Ethics? Sustainable Research with Scotland's Community Landowners

Catriona Mallows, Bobby Macaulay (University of the Highlands and Islands)

The growth of community landownership in Scotland has been accompanied by increasing demands on community organisations to participate in academic research. While community-based research is frequently collaborative and beneficial for those involved, evidence from the Community Landownership Academic Network (CLAN) in 2023 suggests that some community landowners experience research fatigue, extractive practices, and limited tangible benefit from participation. This paper presents findings from a project undertaken with CLAN to explore how research relationships between researchers and community landowners can become more ethical, equitable, and mutually-beneficial.

Drawing on workshops, thematic analysis, and review of academic and grey literature, the research examines the tensions between institutional research requirements, funding pressures, and the expectations of community respondents. The findings demonstrate that ethical practice extends beyond procedural university ethics frameworks and must instead be understood as relational, negotiated, and grounded in trust, reciprocity, and reflexivity. Key concerns identified by respondents involved in the project include lack of community involvement in research design, burdensome and repetitive data collection practices, inaccessible communication of findings, and limited long-term benefit for communities.

The paper situates these findings within wider debates on community-based participatory research, feminist ethics, and decolonial approaches to knowledge production, arguing that conventional 'tick-box' ethical procedures are insufficient for addressing embedded power imbalances in community research. The paper makes recommendations for more ethical research, including the co-design of research agendas, transparent communication, the consideration of shared governance of projects, accessible dissemination, and the recognition of community time and expertise. It also emphasises the importance of researcher positionality and long-term relationship building as central components of ethical engagement.

The paper concludes that research with community landowners requires institutional change as well as individual researcher reflexivity. Understanding ethics as an ongoing process of negotiation and relationship-building may support more mutually beneficial forms of community research.

Schumpeter in ‘Scotland’s last wilderness’: Community landownership as an engine of state-backed entrepreneurship and innovation

Jan M. Jasinski (University of Strathclyde)

Despite being a well-established concept for decades, community entrepreneurship (CE) has developed in recent years as a significant element of the academic entrepreneurship research agenda, while simultaneously becoming a key piece of the burgeoning community wealth-building concept (CWB). CE replaces the individual as the actor behind the act of entrepreneurship with the community, allowing it to directly partake and benefit from this economic act.

This developing paper considers the extent to which community landownership (CL) can act as an incubator for community entrepreneurship (CE). Based on in-depth stakeholder interviews and extensive document research, two case studies are conducted, comparing the parallel development of renewable micro-grid energy systems on the Isle of Eigg and the neighbouring Knoydart Peninsula. Both of these places have undergone community land buy-outs at the turn of the century, creating local trusts. As both places are disconnected from the mainland’s power grid, they each required an entrepreneurial approach to satisfy their energy needs, triggering somewhat differing entrepreneurial approaches.

After outlining their respective histories, approaches, and results, this paper discusses how CL unlocked the Schumpeterian ‘animal spirits’ and enabled CWB while fostering innovative solutions. It also considers whether the state’s backing of CL, which was present in both cases, could be used as a better way of enabling society to benefit from entrepreneurship, compared to encouraging traditional, individual entrepreneurship. The paper finally discusses whether this could present a novel, community-orientated form of Mazzucato’s Entrepreneurial State.

Community Landownership as Commons? Exploring Property, Materiality and Collective Practice

Annabel Pinker (James Hutton Institute), Carey Doyle (Scotland's Rural College (SRUC))

The status of Scottish community-owned land as “commons” remains underexamined in existing literature, raising questions about what might be gained—or constrained—by approaching it through the conceptual architecture of the commons and commoning. Drawing on material from four case studies of community landowners of large landholdings, the paper explores community landownership through the lens of commoning, which we take as a multi-faceted cluster of material, social and political practices.

The Scottish model of community landownership can be understood as a form of collectively held, territorially bounded private property supported by government policy and legislation and managed in the public interest through local, democratic structures. Communities have often acquired estates at market or close to market rates, and in most cases the land purchased is bounded not by affective place-based attachments per se, but by prior histories of its parcelling, sale and transfer. To sustain themselves and support their localities, community landowners usually seek to invest in income-generating development projects and resource-management strategies. Projects including ecological restoration, renewable energy generation, deer management, housing development and repopulation efforts reveal the varied and sometimes uncertain ways communities seek to enact material forms of care for both land and community (Virens 2023). Yet, these income-generating projects can stretch and buckle under institutional constraints (Ibid.) and may entangle communities in financial logics that sit awkwardly with their long-term social objectives.

Our paper brings these materialities of community landownership into conversation with the socio-political dimensions of more than property commoning practices (Williams 2017), with attention given to the transformations in subjectivity that can arise from the collective ownership of land (Anthias 2018). Community land estates may host, incorporate and/or interact with multiple pre-existing and emergent forms of commoning, including other community owned enterprises, crofting, public, state-owned property, as well as historical memories, as of the clearances and collective resistance, such as the land raids. Diverse organisational cultures and individual subjectivities—from activist to managerial—shape participation, care, and resistance within community landowner organisations and estates. Larger dynamics of power and control that inflect how land is used, owned and managed in Scotland animate relationships both within community-owned estates and beyond their boundaries, challenging existing land attachments and opening up disputes. We also note how the ways that more-than-human life contravenes propertied boundaries (as in the movements of deer) shapes the politics of community landownership. The paper concludes that community landownership exposes both the possibilities and tensions that arise at the intersection of commons and property, revealing the generative but uneasy coexistence between the two.

Supporting Community Land Ownership in Wester Ross Biosphere: Unpacking Tensions and Opportunities for the Future

Zoe Malcolm (University of Edinburgh)

Although community land ownership has be growing in the Scottish Highlands, areas such as Wester Ross, are flagged up as evidence that land reform still has a long way to go (MacKenzie 2013). This paper presents on findings from an ethnographic study of the Wester Ross UNESCO Biosphere Reserve – a community-led sustainability initiative covering a significant region of the North West Highlands. It unpacks some of the tensions around community land ownership within Wester Ross communities and discusses opportunities for the future in a context where private land ownership remains the norm. It considers the role of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in relation to land, drawing on critical theory to make the case for greater focus on changing land practices and ownership to create a more sustainable Biosphere region.

Resilience and Community Land Trusts

Rona Campbell (Highlands and Islands Enterprise)

The presentation would explain the PhD research undertaken to test the resilience of Community Land Trusts in the Outer Hebrides and whether they can be seen as a model for sustainable local development.

The research demonstrates that for some communities in the Outer Hebrides, a Community Land Trust has delivered significant community and economic development by providing jobs, community-based initiatives, and a greater sense of confidence amongst the residents of the estate.

Study data was gathered from twenty in-depth semi-structured interviews during the Covid-19 pandemic, providing a unique test resilience for the Land Trusts in an emergency situation. The data was reviewed using a thematic analysis and further analysed using the Community Capitals Framework to test the theory of Emery and Flora (2006), which considers whether the strength of these capitals as a good indicator of how well communities are developing in a sustainable manner. The study established the significance of the strength of social and human capital in securing enhanced resilience in the Land Trusts.

The Trusts provided leadership in the establishment of emergency networks to deliver services like food and prescriptions, as well as ensuring social contact was maintained through online events. Additionally, the study established a connection between the land, indigenous communities, and the survival of the Gaelic language. Where the Land Trusts do not always have similar responses to these challenges, the study established their ability to react to the views of their communities in a robust manner.

The study revealed the future of Community Land Trusts in the Outer Hebrides was linked strongly to interdependencies between the Trusts, the local authority, and other external agencies, including the Scottish Government. The research indicated that the Trusts were developing a stronger, more cohesive voice in what has become a complex economic and community development environment.

Does community stewardship of public forests enhance the delivery of public goods?

Chris Blake (Black Mountains College)

The primary aim of this study was to determine whether the involvement of local communities in forest stewardship could lead to the enhanced delivery of public goods when compared with public stewardship. If there was evidence of enhanced delivery of public goods, either observed or intended, could they be attributed to differences in the expressed objectives or espoused values of the community and public stewards, or to differences in the preferred outcomes or environmental attitudes of the people within the public and community two organisations? Four case studies were selected, two from Wales and two from Scotland, each reflecting different models of community stewardship, from ownership to an informal partnership agreement.

The study showed that in each of the case studies community involvement in forest stewardship either had delivered, or had plans to deliver, the public goods of biodiversity and rural vitality beyond the level planned by the public forest stewards.

I conclude that the principal driver of the enhanced delivery of public goods results not from differences in expressed objectives or espoused values but from the increased resources, financial and human, brought by community involvement and the different operational constraints that apply to public and community stewards.

Despite public forest administrations acknowledging the benefits of community stewardship, anxiety about the loss of timber production and the internal resources required to engage with community organisations, plus a perceived lack of resilience of community organisations were raised as barriers to greater community stewardship. In Wales, in contrast to Scotland where freehold asset transfer has been a policy goal for over two decades, I conclude that there is significant opportunity for more widespread partnership working with appropriately constituted community groups to enhance the delivery public goods for the benefit of all.

Community and the politics of sustainability at different scales

Tim Braunholtz-Speight (University of Leeds)

Local community organisations are often seen as essential actors in sustainability transitions, reaching community members in a way that larger scale bodies do not. However, their closeness to their members that is their strength comes with tradeoffs. I present for debate the hypothesis that community organisations are better at expanding their members powers or 'capabilities' (Sen) than restricting them - with consequences for what they can and cannot be reasonably expected to do.

There are three parts to the argument. Firstly, research into Scottish community landowners and other community asset groups illustrates how the complexity and all-encompassing nature of community 'micropolitics' (Cornwall) leads community democracy to be less 'adversarial' (Mansbridge) than politics at larger scales. Secondly, a short case study of how Scottish community land owners have approached local housing politics suggests one consequence of this: community organisations must tread very carefully when restricting the capabilities of community members.

Thirdly, the transition to a more ecologically sustainable UK will require various sorts of changes to our everyday lives. Politicians at all levels of government grapple with the choice between promoting more sustainable behaviours, and restricting unsustainable behaviours – often and understandably prioritising the former. Community organisations can certainly promote sustainability e.g. develop renewable energy, or help members get practical support with saving energy. But restricting unsustainable practices may be even harder for them to tackle than it is for 'regular' politicians. Of course, that is not to say that they can never do so, or should not try – that’s up to each community organisation to decide.

Whether this argument has any academic or practical merits, is totally unfounded, or is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever done any community work, is a matter for the conference to debate!

Rural Assets: Policy and Practice Insights from the Devolved Nations

Dani Hutcheon (Glasgow Caledonian University)

Across all jurisdictions of the UK, the acquisition of local assets, such as land and buildings, is promoted at a policy and public authority level as a valued means of creating the physical conditions for socially entrepreneurial activity and boosting socio-economic sustainability However, there is divergence in policy application and local level practice across the UK with little known about what works well in varied national and regional rural contexts.

Findings are presented from the British Academy and Nuffield Foundation project ‘Rural Assets: Policy and Practice Insights from the Devolved Nations’. The project aimed to understand the impacts of the processes of community asset acquisition upon the empowerment, resilience, and well-being of rural communities across the four nations of the UK. The research comprised of three interlinked work packages including a scoping review and analysis of policy and law, and in-depth interviews with rural community members, public authorities and key stakeholders across each nation. Findings were also underpinned by shared learning from cross nation Knowledge Exchange events bringing together communities, policymakers and practitioners.

This presentation will outline key facilitators and barriers for rural communities engaging in processes of gaining land and buildings from public authorities. Further, the research reports on how such processes of asset acquisition impact on the empowerment, resilience and wellbeing of rural communities. Given the evolving policy landscape around community asset acquisition, including the recent Scottish Community Wealth Building Bill, and the proposed introduction of a Community Right to Buy in England, key practical implications will be discussed for communities, and local and national government.

Understanding chronological differences in largescale community land acquisitions in Scotland

Bobby Macaulay (University of the Highlands and Islands), Alys Daniels-Creasey (University of Edinburgh), Catriona Mallows (University of the Highlands and Islands)

Following a number of high-profile largescale community land buyouts in Scotland in the early 2000s and into the 2010s, numbers of new acquisitions have slowed in recent years. This paper presents findings from a recent study exploring whether this trend is indicative of declining community demand for largescale land acquisition, or what other factors may be influencing it. We utilised a mixed-methods approach, combining: 13 semi-structured interviews with a wide range of community, policy and sector representatives; a survey of representatives from communities that had either acquired or attempted to acquire largescale landholdings; and quantitative analysis of secondary data on both successful and unsuccessful acquisition attempts.

We found a complicated picture of declining numbers of largescale community land acquisitions which, if expressed as a simple drop in demand, ignores other aspects of the current context and dynamics of the sector. While some suggested that latent demand may have largely been met following earlier legislative changes that enabled community ownership, increased barriers to acquisition have intensified in recent years, leading some communities to focus their energies on acquiring smaller assets.

Key barriers to largescale acquisition included stretched community and institutional capacity, insufficient and restrictive funding arrangements, complex and ineffectual legislative mechanisms, and limited appetite for risk among both communities and funders. Participants suggested institutional, legislative, and financial solutions to the identified barriers, including the need to promote alternative routes to community empowerment in addition to ownership. Crucially, the vast majority of largescale community land acquisitions have heavily depended on opportunism and the presence of a willing seller, indicating the power still held by landowners in the expansion of community ownership. These findings highlight the ongoing influence of power relations and structural conditions in shaping opportunities for community ownership in Scotland, with important implications for land reform policy, practice, and future research.

Community Ownership & the Housing Crisis

Chris Dalglish (South of Scotland Community Housing)

Community led housing is Scotland’s fastest growing housing sector and a significant part of our community ownership story. But it is poorly documented and there is a need for better evidence, not least to support the case for continued public investment.

In 2025, to address this gap in knowledge, South of Scotland Community Housing (SOSCH) conducted a ‘Census of Community Led Housing in Scotland’ on behalf of the Community Led Housing Alliance. The immediate purpose was to inform the Alliance’s manifesto and campaign for the 2026 election: ‘Back Scotland’s Communities to Provide More Homes’.

The Alliance is a network of over 70 community organisations together with the regional/national bodies South of Scotland Community Housing, Communities Housing Trust, Community Land Scotland and Development Trusts Association Scotland. It is supported by funding from the Nationwide Foundation. The Census has – for the first time – provided a comprehensive understanding of the character and extent of community led housing in Scotland. It has documented over 175 development trusts and others which are acting to address local failures in the housing system. It has shown that communities have already provided hundreds of affordable homes, including new-build homes on community owned land; existing homes which have been brought into community ownership and renovated, and; homes created from the conversion of non-domestic buildings acquired through community asset transfer. The Census has also shown that communities could provide as many as 1,700 more homes in the next five years, with the right backing.

In this presentation, Chris Dalglish – SOSCH’s Partnership & Learning Manager – will introduce the Census and its main findings, and discuss how they relate to the ongoing development of policy and practice in the sector. Drawing on the Census results, he will also discuss how community led housing relates to wider community ownership and land reform.

Tales from the Carbon Frontier: why energy communities and net zero do not go hand in hand

Cornelia Helmcke (University of St Andrews)

Community energy projects have been one of the most promising ways of generating community wealth in the Highlands and Islands directly supporting governmental just transition ambitions. Nevertheless, the Feed in Tariff scheme – the single most important UK policy mechanism in support of small renewable energy projects – run out in 2019 and CARES - the Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme – has realigned its priorities towards the finance of “local” energy (including individual or farm level installation of heat pumps and solar panels) and retrofit initiatives (partially demanding the application of specific technologies). Both changes have increased the barriers of entry into the energy market for community groups. This paper argues that this process reflects a wider trend in neoliberal net zero governance which concentrates its efforts on “derisking” large, profit-driven developments that can reduce national carbon emission numbers fast (i.e. totalisation), while calling on individual households and “consumers” to change their behaviour in the aid of decarbonisation targets (i.e. individualisation). The paper presents a narrative analysis of governmental transition ambitions and how these relate or contrast to community tales of everyday interactions with energy, climate and environment. Particularly, I will analyse the struggles and aspirations of energy communities – here loosely defined as those having a stake in renewable energy generation – amidst the expanding Carbon Frontier – the commodification of nature’s services in the aid of decarbonisation statistics and profitmaking.

Fighting for Space: A Call for Fairer, More Inclusive Community Landownership

Heather Yearwood (Community Land Scotland)

Community landownership gives local people more control over buildings and land, helping communities shape their own future. It has worked well in many rural parts of Scotland, and the idea has now spread into towns and cities. But for many groups — especially Black and Minoritised communities and communities in more resource deprived urban areas — the system is not working as it should. These groups are, quite literally, fighting for space in a system that often overlooks their needs.

This presentation shares preliminary findings from community‑led research carried out directly with 10 community groups in Glasgow and the central belt. While the findings are not intended to represent every community, they offer important early insights into the barriers these groups face when trying to buy or manage land or buildings. These barriers include: • not knowing where to start or how the process works • complicated rules that don’t suit communities spread across a city • unclear or outdated information about who owns buildings • slow and sometimes unfair treatment from public bodies • high costs and strict conditions that make long‑term success difficult.

Many Black and Minoritised groups also experience discrimination or feel that the system was never designed with them in mind. Even when groups do manage to secure an asset, they often struggle with running costs, repairs, and ongoing funding. Despite all this, communities show huge determination and creativity. They want safe, welcoming spaces for cultural activities, support services, social enterprises, and community wellbeing — but they are often forced to work much harder than others to access them. This talk will share these indicative early findings and open up a wider discussion about what might need to change in practice, policy, legislation, and support systems. The aim is to encourage further research, collaboration, and debate so that Scotland’s land reform movement can support all communities and become truly inclusive.

ScotLand Futures

Julie Rostan and James Mackessack-Leitch (Scottish Land Commission)

In 2025, the Scottish Land Commission conducted the ScotLand Futures qualitative survey, capturing how people experience current challenges and expectations around land in Scotland. Drawing from more than 1,200 responses across the country, the study reveals a collective appetite for change in the way land is owned and used in Scotland. Respondents identified a range of common challenges and avenues to reach a more positive future.

Preliminary results showed a profound desire for communities to have a "real say" in local developments. Communities currently feel marginalised in decision-making processes, leading to a sense of alienation from the very land that shapes their daily lives. The concentration of land ownership is viewed as a systemic hurdle for local growth. Respondents linked concentrated power to the inability of young families to find housing and the stagnation of small businesses, calling for a future where land serves broader social needs. Respondents expressed that large landowners should be active participants in the community; absentee landowners are seen as inaccessible and potentially detrimental. Clear examples were provided, such as cases of vacant and derelict sites, with a preference for owners who are integrated into local life. Another barrier to community trust is the difficulty in accessing information regarding land ownership. Respondents emphasised that improving transparency should be a prerequisite for accountability and local engagement.

The ScotLand Futures responses provide clear overview of the numerous challenges faced across Scottish communities. At the heart of many of these is a need for fostering a more equitable distribution of power. These insights also provide key avenues to move towards a future where land is owned and managed with, by, and for communities, ensuring a more resilient and empowered Scotland.

This session is an 'In Conversation' format between two of the biggest names in community land research.

Prof James (Jim) Hunter has literally written the book on community landownership in Scotland. Jim's career cannot be neatly summed up in terms of academia, having served in a range of other roles dedicated to the sustainable development of the Highlands and Islands region. A prolific writer and proud Highlander, his combining of these attributes drove the understanding of the Highlands and Islands 'on their own terms', and his work stands as some of the most respected texts on this topic.

Andy Wightman is one of the most high profile researcher/activists in Scotland, with his life's work dedicated to discovering 'Who Owns Scotland'. His formidable and forensic approach to researching the history of land ownership and its present implications is perhaps best outlined in his epic 'The Poor Had No Lawyers', while his ongoing work in mapping landownership in rural Scotland now constitutes the most comprehensive dataset available on this topic.

I have no idea what Jim and Andy will talk about. But that's the exciting bit!

Background

What follows is a condensed version of a dissertation which I undertook as part an MSc in Sustainable Rural Development with the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI) in 2023.

Using qualitative social research, I sought to find out to what extent involvement in developing Local Place Plans, introduced by the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019, built capacity for community ownership, focussing on the case study area of Berwickshire. In practice this involved interviewing people at the “coal-face” of community-led planning, such as those actively involved in community councils or development trusts. The research was completely independent and not commissioned by any of the organisations mentioned in the paper.

In early 2024, I wrote the following blog-style reflection to introduce key sections of the dissertation, from the perspective of my role at the time as a community development practitioner covering the same area where I was carrying out the research. This has enabled me to weave in some insights from my work role to the findings and frame what could be a challenging read for some in a constructive way.

By sharing this the CLAN feed, I hope that my findings can add to the growing body of knowledge in the interface between community-led planning and community ownership.

Reflection on LPP dissertation (March 2024)

I work for a “Third Sector Interface” or TSI. We are a link between the state and 3rd sector, a voice for local community groups to the local authority, and part of our role is to improve collaboration between the two. The TSI supported me in this research as part of my continuous professional development, but had no influence over the findings.

The research found low trust in the local authority and a general sense that their approach to interaction with communities was top-down and bureaucratic. Yet I am also aware, from attending Community Planning Partnership meetings and working closely with local authority officers and elected members, that there is an acknowledgement of the need for culture change within the local authority, to be more present in the community and to move away from ineffective consultations to meaningful community engagement, led by local groups.

While I know the following research summary may not be comfortable reading for those in the local authority, I hope that this willingness to change culture and to take a coproduced approach with communities will mean that the research conclusions can be digested with openness.

One tip I picked up as a mature student, juggling family life and work as well as studies, was to read abstracts, introductions and conclusions of papers, and only dig into the research techniques, literature reviews and presentation of results when time allowed or a deeper understanding was required. These sections give a good overview of the research without any potential for local recognition of any of the anonymised participants and so are set out below.

I recommend that the findings detailed in the conclusion section should be used to constructively shape the approach we are taking to support community-led planning in Berwickshire and hope that the research will also inspire a co-produced approach to resourcing and supporting community-led planning further afield.

Abstract

This research explores the experiences of community bodies at the forefront of developing Local Place Plans (LPPs), to gain insights into the potential for this process to build capacity for community ownership of land and assets. The Planning (Scotland) Act 2019, through which LPPs were introduced, is intended to complement Land Reform and Community Empowerment legislation to achieve this aim. However, there is uncertainty over whether this will be the case in practice, due to the increased burden which development of LPPs places on volunteers, low trust in the planning system and the potential for state co-option of the community sector.

Focusing on a case study in Berwickshire, Scottish Borders, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with seven representatives of community bodies involved in LPPs, or considering involvement. The interviews give deep insights into the barriers and obstacles faced by groups, the most appropriate support and resources they require and the extent to which involvement is building capacity and aspiration for community ownership.

The research reveals considerable preexisting involvement in community-led planning and aspiration for or involvement in community ownership. It also finds potential for development of LPPs to lead to further community ownership through increased social capital due to greater connectedness; through a stronger mechanism for the designation of land and assets of community value; and through enabling a more robust funding case. However, the findings reveal the existence of substantial barriers of pressure on volunteers and the groups’ experiences of the Local Authority as culturally bureaucratic and centralised, which could negatively impact on social capital by stifling the self-organisation of communities.

The findings give key insights into the form a co-produced supportive framework might take, to facilitate a genuinely community-led approach to the development of LPPs. Such a framework could enable barriers to be overcome and has the potential to rebuild the trust that will be essential for a working relationship between the community sector and the local state if LPPs are to lead to increased community ownership of land and assets.

Introduction

In a world facing the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, where rural land is in the spotlight for solutions ranging from carbon offsetting, to large scale wind farms, it is critical that we do not lose sight of the well-established understanding of sustainable development as a “three-legged stool”, combining environmental, economic and social development and placing local communities at the heart of development.

In Scotland, where rural land has been the scene of historic clearances of communities to meet the economic and leisure needs of a relatively small number of wealthy landowners, this remains a live issue. The concentrated pattern of landownership in Scotland persists, and now the purchase of large areas of rural land by “green lairds” for tree planting for carbon credits is posing a new challenge to rural communities.

Community ownership of land and assets is arguably the most empowering means for local communities to make all forms of rural landuse work for local. In Scotland the Land Reform and Community Empowerment policy agendas have facilitated a change in this direction, complemented by a raft of other legislation, guidance and funding.

Alongside this shift, the understanding of complex adaptive systems in the natural world has been shown to apply far more widely, including to the way in which communities thrive at their best, in harmony with the environment, when they are able to self-organise. Delegation of power to local communities is therefore vital for sustainable development.

Two connected and important enablers of this delegation of power are for local people to have a meaningful stake in planning for their local areas and community ownership of land and assets. This research explores the link between community-led planning and community ownership, focusing on a case study in rural Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders.

The planning system in Scotland provides a statutory framework for decisions relating to land and assets. The Planning Act (Scotland) 2019 brought in various changes, notably the opportunity for communities to register Local Place Plans (LPPs) with the Local Authority (LA). Community Land Scotland (2022) have expressed the potential for this new legislation to lead to increased community ownership.

Research undertaken by Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) and Nick Wright Planning was commissioned by the Scottish Government to inform the publication of a draft “how to” guide for community bodies leading on LPPs. This research explored the “challenges and opportunities” of LPPs and highlighted the potential for them to present a burden of responsibility on local communities, which, without attention to capacity building and support, could exacerbate inequalities.

Community-led planning is not a new concept to many communities in Scotland which have some form of Community Action Plan (CAP). It is possible that the introduction of LPPs could present a mechanism for state control over the self-organisation of local communities. Alternatively, this new legislation could facilitate capacity building which would enable communities previously not engaged with community-led planning to be in a position to take on community ownership.

LPPs bring with them the potential to increase collaboration between the community (“third”) sector and the state and thus to facilitate community ownership. However, doubt remains about whether the legislation goes far enough to rebuild broken trust in the planning system. Others have expressed concern about an over-dependence on volunteers, relating this to the withdrawal of the state.

Secondary legislation relating to the development of LPPs was adopted in January 2022, presenting the opportunity for community-led plans to be registered with LAs. One year on, this research set out to gain early insights into the relationship between LPPs and community ownership in the case study area. It is hoped that the findings will contribute to a body of work exploring community ownership in relation to planning more widely, a research gap recently identified by Doyle (2023: 9-10), and provide insights into the form a supportive framework could take which is co-produced with community groups.

Qualitative research, utilising semi-structured interviews with members of community bodies leading on LPPs, or considering doing so, was undertaken to meet the following aim and objectives and to answer the subsequent research questions:

Aim

The aim of this research is to gain insight into the experiences of members of community bodies at the forefront of the development of LPPs, through a case-study in Berwickshire, in order to explore the potential for this process to build community capacity for ownership of land and assets.

Objectives:

• To understand the pressures which involvement in development of LPPs places on community bodies and the obstacles being faced.
• To explore what support measures and resources are needed to ensure such community bodies are sufficiently equipped to develop LPPs.
• To gain insight into whether the experience of involvement in development of LPPs is encouraging aspiration towards, and building capacity for, community ownership.

Research questions

• To what extent does the process of developing LPPs contribute to building the capacity of community bodies for community ownership?
• To what extent does the process of developing LPPs lead to increased aspiration of community bodies to become community land and / or asset owners?

Conclusions and Recommendations

Research question 1: To what extent does the process of developing LPPs contribute to building the capacity of community bodies for community ownership?

The findings support the assertation that for communities to thrive they need to have the power and resources necessary to self-organise. This process of self-organisation involves developing trusted connections within and beyond the local community, facilitating a level of collaborative working and opening up channels of resource, support and information, thus building the social capital necessary to prepare the community for successful community ownership.

Where barriers to this process are present, the ability of community bodies to successfully develop and implement LPPs is hindered, and the lack of progress has the potential to lead to disengagement, damaged trust, and reduced capacity for community ownership.

Several barriers to developing LPPs were found, notably the perceived “top-down” culture of the LA, characterised by poor communication, a distant approach, overly restricted access to funding, a lack of understanding of local communities and a lack of trust. In addition, the burden which the development of LPPs places on volunteers presented a substantial barrier.

If involvement in the process of developing LPPs can lead to such barriers being overcome, then LPPs could present an opportunity to increase social capital and take steps towards the thriving “well connected community” which would be best positioned for community ownership. To facilitate this LAs must be willing to allow the process of accessing support and resources itself to be co-produced by community bodies in a position to develop LPPs.

This research provided an in-depth insight into what forms such support might take and highlighted the importance of local communities leading on the design and implementation of support frameworks in other LA areas.

Key suggestions for a supportive framework for the case study area, Berwickshire, were:

• Delegation of power through reduced bureaucracy for access to funding.
• Clear and jargon free communication and presentation of the invitation to develop LPPs.
• A clear structure to operate within, including a registration process and LPP templates.
• Access to support through a designated point of contact, preferably within the TSI.
• Receptivity and responsivity of the LA to ongoing feedback from community bodies to enable support offerings to be flexible and locally relevant.
• Funded training and upskilling.
• Core funding for staff, not just project funding.
• For the LA to become more aware of community bodies other than CCs, such as DTs.
• Mediation between groups which do not have a good working relationship, upon request.
• For the LA to improve their relationship with community groups, by becoming more present in the community and by acting on community priorities identified within LPP which are within statutory duties.

Research question 2: To what extent does the process of developing LPPs lead to increased aspiration of community bodies to become community land and / or asset owners?

There was some evidence that involvement in LPPs leads to aspiration for community ownership. However, there was wider evidence of a link between aspiration for community ownership and involvement in previous forms of community-led planning, such as CAPs, although this could have been due to the state of progress of LPPs at the time of the research.

There was evidence that community groups were aware of the potential for LPPs to present a stronger case for community ownership than CAPs. Despite the barriers and obstacles faced in developing LPPs, community groups were choosing to get to grips with them, primarily because they deemed it important to take up this opportunity to strengthen the community voice in decisions on land and asset use, and to enable access to funding and resources available for community-led projects, such as community ownership of land and assets.

Limitations of the research

These findings give a good depth of insight into the interactions of different communities with a single LA with regard to LPPs. While that builds a consistent picture of the approach of this LA and the impact that may have on community capacity, the findings might not be reflective of other LAs in Scotland. However, it is fair to say that the findings can contribute to this body of knowledge.

Those who agreed to be interviewed were in the main those who had decided to be involved in leading on an LPP. They may typify the “louder voices” or those with the greatest capacity for involvement, although this was not universally the case. It would have been useful if more of those who had decided not to get involved had been willing to be interviewed, to gain insights into what had led to this decision.

The choice to not pursue a mixed methods approach, primarily due to the time limitations for the research, limited the sample size and scope of information it was possible to gather. Quantitative data could have been collected from participants who were sceptical about developing an LPP and were not willing to be interviewed.

The state of progress of development of LPPs was not as advanced as was anticipated when embarking on the research, therefore insights were limited into what impact this would have on capacity once plans were developed or registered. However, the research did provide valuable insights into the potential impact on community capacity, the ambition for community ownership and into what was stalling progress.

Recommendations for further research

It is recommended that this research is repeated in other areas, to ascertain whether the perceived culture in the LA was typical or unusual and to inform co-produced supportive frameworks appropriate in other areas.

A longitudinal study in one- and five-years’ time would also be useful to explore progress in Berwickshire.

Pilot studies could be undertaken in areas without a group developing an LPP, with funded posts provided for local people to lead on an LPP and receive training, in order to discover whether this might have a positive impact in reducing inequalities.

Complementary quantitative research is recommended to gather data on the background of individuals involved in leadership roles within groups leading on LPPs, to gauge the pre-existing level of capacity and analyse whether there is a positive correlation between this and success in developing and implementing an LPP.

In the 5-year ‘Scotland’s Land Reform Futures’ project, the first research I carried out explored how alternative models of land tenure and governance in other countries addressed land reform goals such as ownership diversity, community empowerment, and public benefit, what factors contribute to or impede their success, and can be learned from them for Scottish land reform.

Continuing this research into alternative models, we looked at four case studies of innovative community-led land-based initiatives in rural Scotland. We chose cases that are examples of bottom-up initiatives supported by relationships across multiple governance levels and geographies: Tarras Valley Nature Reserve, Comrie Croft, Glengarry Community Development Trust and NorthWest 2045.

While analysis is ongoing, there are early findings about contributions/barriers to success - success generally, according to participants, meaning community development and the sustainability of the initiative). Success is also summed up in this quote from a participant from Langholm: “When people stop saying, ‘it’s yours’ and start saying, ‘it’s ours’.’’

Contributors to success include:

social capital (the value that is created by social connections and relationships in society):

formal partnerships and support peer-to-peer learning and capacity building
“we don’t all have to keep reinventing the wheel” (Glengarry Community Development Trust)

community engagement:

focus on local needs, good local relationships, economic contributions talking to people, leafleting, drop-in sessions; visibility, accessibility in the area, clear messaging feedback to community on actions and decisions taken

intangible/personal qualities:

“It takes a special kind of person that is willing to come into the office every week and be like ‘Right. I’m going to tell you about this thing that we’re going to be doing and it’s going to take forever. It’ll be really exciting.’ And to stay excited.” (Glengarry Community Development Trust) confidence to “think big and not be scared” (Tarras Valley)

Barriers or challenges faced include:

Financial:

high cost of land, costs of permissions, feasibility studies, etc. reliance on volunteers; capital funding easier to get than operational funding staff spend too much time ‘grant farming’ for their own positions government budget restraints

Capacity:

reliance on a small pool of busy volunteers geographical community may have lack of knowledge and experience with governance, ownership and management access to land – in a land-based initiative – is not necessarily the biggest hurdle “you can't empower communities without giving them the resources to actually carry out their activities… because it's meaningless.” (NorthWest 2045)

Significantly, innovative community initiatives are hindered by one-size-fits-all policies or processes that may not be joined up within and between levels and across geographies. Some brief examples include:

• Local authorities implementing the recent short-term lets licensing policy differently from each other in similar situations
• A Government agency treating a community group like a housing developer with road access requirements
• The Forestry Commission insisting on a right of pre-emption for the land a community wanted to purchase but the Scottish Land Fund not wanting to give money with that condition on it
• A general sense that government departments are siloed and this creates barriers

Greater efforts towards policy coherence, supporting capacity building and providing reliable operational funding would assist with the sustainability of these initiatives and their transferability to other localities.

The full report will come in April, 2026, to be published on the Scotland’s Land Reform Futures project website.

Contact: Naomi Beingessner, naomi.beingessner@hutton.ac.uk

Project team: Naomi Beingessner, Lorna Pate, James Glendinning, Carey Doyle, Fiona Bender, Bryony Nelson

In the context of green spaces, community asset transfer of ownership is fraught with added complexities. With increased financial pressures on Local Authorities, open land and green spaces are commercially sold or developed to generate capital receipts. This is unlike the case with built assets wherein public sector austerity leads to transfer of ownership or management to communities.

None of the four urban Local Authorities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen have transferred ownership of green spaces to community bodies under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. In Glasgow, which is the most populated city in Scotland and is reeling under an acute housing emergency, the national goal of increasing community landownership clashes with the city-level need to supply land for housing. So how should urban communities seeking to own natural green spaces practically pursue their aspirations in the face of urban governance that needs to embed community participation? Creation of bespoke and contextual knowledge and support to address heightened challenges encountered by urban communities planning ownership of green spaces offers a solution.

In an exploratory feasibility study for The Children’s Wood—a community body in Glasgow—case studies of three other community bodies (situated relatively near Glasgow), which have acquired ownership of natural green spaces, are developed. The Children’s Wood holds lease over a 1.4-hectare green space, called The Children’s Wood and North Kelvin Meadow, under the Community Empowerment Act and is exploring ownership of the space for long-term security.

Given the conflicting policy priorities concerning land use, urban community bodies like The Children’s Wood need to make a stronger case and application for landownership. Experiences of Douglasdale Recreation, Environment, Access, and Leisure (REAL) Group in South Lanarkshire, Inchinnan Development Trust in Renfrewshire, and Crail Community Partnership in Fife bring together key transferable insights.

The case studies bring out crucial considerations and strategies on governance, finance, and community support. These include strengthening the governing document, identifying localised funding, making the Stage 1 application early, and formalising community engagement. Producing replicable knowledge through peer learning benefits urban communities exploring asset transfer of ownership of green spaces.

Further research on aligning community landownership with local planning priorities is also important. Creating a Local Place Plan under the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 would provide urban communities exploring ownership of green spaces a way of working with Local Authorities that syncs with national and local planning outcomes. Analyses of local planning documents and how asset transfer requests of ownership by communities can add value to urban planning goals would enhance and sustain community ownership of green spaces.

For the full dissertation, please access the link on the Community Woodlands Association website: https://www.communitywoods.org/research-reports

For more information, please contact Poorvi Kulkarni on poorvikulkarni06@gmail.com

Introduction

The rise of contemporary community landownership in Scotland over the past thirty-five years has far outpaced systematic research into it. Legislation and funding to support its expansion has developed despite numerous and persistent knowledge gaps such as how it affects local people and environments — or indeed the historic precedence of other forms of communal land governance in Scotland and beyond. The absence of a strong and collaborative research base could undermine ongoing land reform policy in Scotland and underlines the role that the research community can and should play.

The Community Landownership Academic Network (CLAN) was established in 2021 to corral existing research, identify knowledge gaps, and work in partnership with a range of stakeholders to plan, conduct, and disseminate relevant applied research in this area. The 2026 CLAN Gathering will represent the first academic conference on this topic, with a format suited to the presentation and discussion of new knowledge and findings in this area. To ensure that such knowledge is useful and practically relevant, we greatly welcome everyone interested or involved in this topic to attend, including those working in policy, practice and funding.

Conference structure and call for abstracts

The in-person conference will specifically consider the history, policy and practice of community land. While much attention may focus on the Scottish context, we welcome submissions relating to community landownership globally. Submissions can be made for either oral or poster presentations here. Due to time constraints, we may not be able to accommodate all oral presentations, in which instance the applicant may be offered a poster presentation instead.

• The discussion of history will comprise a facilitated discussion with an invited panel of speakers, focusing on key historical developments and their impact on contemporary understandings. As such, submissions relating to the history of community landownership are limited to poster presentations.
• We welcome proposals for oral or poster presentations relating to recent research on modern community landownership in Scotland and beyond. Research proposals and ideas in development are also welcomed, with postgraduate and early-career researchers particularly encouraged to present.
• Finally, based on these presentations and other knowledge of the field, conference attendees will be invited to inform a strategic research agenda to guide future work in this area. This will take the form of a facilitated workshop which all are invited to contribute to.

Further details of timings, panel members and guest speakers will be revealed in due course, so keep an eye on CLAN’s social media for updates.

Dates, logistics and accommodation

The first CLAN Gathering will take place at UHI Perth from 16th - 17th June 2026. Perth is easily accessible on train and bus routes. The UHI Perth campus is a short bus/taxi from the bus/train stations, or around a 30-minute walk.

Affordable accommodation is available at the Perth Youth Hostel which is situated on the UHI Perth campus. In addition, there are a wide range of hotels and other accommodation options in Perth City Centre.

Lunches and refreshments will be provided for attendees, while the conference dinner will be available at an additional cost.

Costs

Costs for attendees will be kept to an absolute minimum. Funding is yet to be confirmed so we cannot give an indication of what the Conference fee may be, or indeed whether travel costs may be covered/subsidised. However, we do not anticipate the cost to be in excess of £50 per person.

Timeline

• 31st January 2026: Deadline for abstract/presentation applications (EXTENDED to 15th February 2026)
• 1st March - 30th April 2026: Registration open
• 16th-17th June 2026: CLAN Gathering

Local Place Plans were introduced by the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 to enable local communities to influence Local Development Plans. By the end of 2024 there were 88 registered Local Place Plans located largely in rural planning authorities in Scotland. How can this be explained? What are the drivers, processes and outcomes? By interviewing different actors involved in local place planning, the dissertation examined the extent to which Local Place Plans build capacity and coordinate place-based activity in rural communities and support a just transition.

Collaborative planning refers to wide involvement and engagement of local interests in plan-making to help progress change in a place. Patsy Healey’s interpretation of collaborative planning theory offers principles and ideas focused on governance, communication and relationship-building in planning processes that can be helpful when undergoing significant land use change. The dissertation argues that if just transition is based on fair and transparent stakeholder participation (also referred to in the literature as procedural justice) then collaborative planning offers useful principles for a just transition.

It's still early days but the findings suggest that the process of preparing Local Place Plans has an important deliberative role in build consensus and capacity which is important for a just transition. However, there are disparities regarding the uptake of Local Place Plans and their ability to influence planning decisions. Increased capacity and skills are needed at planning authority and community level to enable Local Place Plans to be developed evenly and equitably. The (technical) requirement to spatially map and align with National Planning Framework 4 has the potential to make communities dependent on external support and expertise. Other findings include that Local Place Plans are being used for more than ‘planning’, for example, to help access funding and to deliver local improvements linked to transport, health, and sustainability. There are early indications that the Local Place Plans register is a resource for other local interests, beyond planning.

There are range of factors are associated with the Local Place Plans process including the rural geography of communities and community benefit funds linked to renewable energy projects. The Covid-19 pandemic also was also poignant in highlighting local needs and priorities around the time of Local Place Plan development. While more research is needed to assess the practices and outcomes of Local Place Plans, the dissertation suggests that Local Plan Plans have potential to facilitate greater participation in local issues. From an academic perspective, bringing together just transition concepts and planning theory offers a valuable contribution to both theory and practice which should be further explored.