CLAN Gathering 2026- Oral Presentation Session 3

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.