Rethinking Communities, Land and Governance: Land Reform in Scotland and the Community Ownership Model

What If Communities Had Proactive Rights over Land?

I’d like to start with a thought experiment: imagine being a planner in a place where community organisations have wide-ranging powers over land ownership and use. Residents can come together to form non-profit community organisations, which can purchase and develop land and buildings to meet their needs and set out a spatial policy for their local area. These organisations have open membership, are democratically governed and act in the public interest. They have legal rights over land, including first right of purchase for pre-identified sites, and for compulsory purchase. There is technical support available to build organisational capacity, as well as funding for purchase and development. As non-profit local landowners, any value derived from development or use is reinvested locally; for example, a community-owned business can provide funding for a community garden. These community organisations own key local assets that they identify, and they work collaboratively with other landowners (public and private) to deliver projects.

In this model, communities’s role in land use planning systems is expanded – from a narrow role in commenting on others’ proposals for land (whether planning policy produced by government, or developers’ projects) – to include a range of options which arise from meaningful power over land. Communities could designate sites to protect land use, prepare a local plan, declare a preference for purchase should the land come up for sale, or force a sale in the interests of sustainable development. This approach is notably different to the role of community in planning in many contexts – this is emergent citizen control, with power, as noted in Arnstein’s (1969) oft-referred Ladder of Public Participation.

Learning from Scottish Land Justice

Scotland is 20 years into a process of creating the foundations of this system. That is, creating a land governance system consisting of legislation, policy and supports that gives meaningful power to communities over land ownership and use. The basis of this is strong governmental support – the Scottish Government has remained committed to community landownership in policy and law; such as through implementing Community Land Rights legislation, the Scottish Land Fund (currently £10 million annually), and community land ownership as a national performance indicator. In 2023, national planning policy support was adopted for community-led and owned development (policy 25 of the National Planning Framework 4). The support for community landownership was demonstrated in a recent Scottish Parliament debate on Community Empowerment in December 2022 (Scottish Government Debate: 2022), where all political parties voiced support for community landownership. The system remains a work in progress, with critics both against community landownership, and those that argue reforms are not happening quickly enough. Current improvement priorities include the refinement of Community Land Rights and doubling the size of the Land Fund.

In this article I explain Scottish community landownership and land reform and reflect on its relevance and next steps for planning practice and research. First, I describe Scotland’s land reform experience, and the community land model and key, relevant aspects of the land use planning system, addressing a gap in the planning literature on the topic. Three demonstrative case studies are then provided. Conceptually, this paper reiterates the call for further attention to land ownership to deliver planning goals (Fawaz & Moumtaz, 2017), and amplifies global understandings of the importance of alternative and Indigenous land perspectives. In conclusion I reflect on the implications for planning concepts and practice, identifying priorities for future research.

Methodologically this article draws on my work – at Community Land Scotland, the membership organisation for community landowners. Since 2020 we have advised over 80 community groups on property purchases in the greater Glasgow area and developed an urban community land reform policy agenda, while developing national land reform. This article is written from my perspective, and does not reflect the opinions of Community Land Scotland. I also draw on my previous research on social town planning (Doyle, 2018a, 2018b, 2019), and as a professional town planner in the United Kingdom (UK). The organisations and information in the case studies are all in the public domain; those involved did not participate in any specific project or research to inform this article.

An Overview of Scottish Land Ownership and Reforms

In the face of the environmental and social crises of the 21st Century, radical approaches to land ownership and use are needed and the Scottish experience is largely absent from international planning research. There is little planning research the addresses Scottish community landownership and land reform (Gkartzios et al., 2022; Reid, 2020; Satsangi, 2009); a notable research gap. Basic historical and conceptual information is necessary to understand its potential as well as its limitations.

Scotland has a long history of land governance systems for the common good. This stretches into un-recorded oral traditions. For example, seasonal migratory land use practices on common lands, such as summer ‘shielings’ occurred– and continued in some form in the Western Isles in the 20th Century. It includes 14th to 18th Century municipal “burghs” who held common good land which endures to this day (Wightman, 2010). It also includes rural crofting and associated common grazings a unique system of land governance with its own specific legislation since 1886, ensuring security of tenure, fair rents and compensation for permanent improvements. The first community land purchase of the modern era was in 1923 – the 28,000 hectare estate of Stornoway, including Stornoway town – where land and buildings were transferred from the private landowner and held for the common good.

Over the centuries – as the ebbs and flows of conquest, colonisation, enclosure, the industrial revolution, and a globalising economy occurred – increasingly large areas of Scotland became owned by single private entities. This created a highly concentrated land ownership pattern, where land was used for the benefit of the wealthy few – such as for economic experiments in sheep farming, or the maintenance of an idealised and exclusive “wildness” for recreation. To take one example, in the 19th Century a wave of Scottish estate purchases and land ownership concentration resulted from the financial compensation to British slave owners on the eradication of slavery within the UK (Mackinnon & Mackillip, 2020). A number of these new landowners implemented land use practices with a regard for human suffering that seems to have been borne out of experience of human slavery, undertaking the ‘Highland Clearances,’ a period of forced removal of residents to allow for sheep farming over enlarged land holdings. The Highland Clearances are within recent memory in Scotland – having occurred to residents’ grandmothers’ grandmothers – with families put off their land to implement extractive and exclusionary land use practices.

By the end of the 20th Century, Scotland had the most unequal land ownership pattern in the Global North, with an intact feudal land system (Wightman, 2010). In 2000, one of the initial acts of the newly established Scottish Parliament was legislative change to remove the feudal land system which had been in place for 800 years. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 introduced a range of notable rights including the right of (non-motorised) responsible access across most land in Scotland, and a Community Right for first purchase over land in rural areas. This was the start of contemporary Scottish Land Reform, a process aimed at creating a fairer land system in the public interest. Landmark legislation has included the Land Reform (Scotland) Acts 2003 and 2016, and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. Notably, the 2016 Act removed the rural geographic restriction on legal rights and supports, with community land ownership then fully implemented across Scotland. Land reform is defined by the Scottish Government as: “Improving Scotland’s system of land ownership, use, rights and responsibilities, so that land contributes to a fair and just society while balancing public and private interests.” (Scottish Government, 2022b). It has been argued that the truly radical aspect of the 2003 Act was implementing a rights-based approach to community land (Reid, 2020) – this implements Conventions on Communities’ Social, Cultural and Economic Rights, and foreshadows later commitments developed by UN Habitat III.

However, despite 20 years of land reform, the country continues to have one of the most unequal land ownership patterns in the Global North, characterised by excessively large land holdings exerting monopoly effects, and absentee landownership. Scotland has this concentrated pattern of private landownership because of several historic factors, including feudalism, succession law, fiscal policies and agricultural support (Glass et al., 2019). A new legislative land reform programme is currently being delivered, including a new Land Reform Act, a review of the Community Empowerment Act, and a new Community Wealth Building Bill.

The overall system for the ownership and management of land in Scotland can be seen as having three main components (Land Reform Review Group, 2014). The first is property laws governing how the land is owned. The second is regulatory laws governing how land can be used – which includes the planning system. The third component is non-statutory public sector measures to influence how land is owned and used in the public interest.

The Scottish land reform process is attempting to implement more socially just, environmentally sustainable approaches to land use and development. It is not a perfect model, with wide-ranging challenges including ongoing refinements to fundamental components such as Community Rights to Buy and the structure of the Scottish Land Fund. Acknowledging limitations, with a commitment to the principles of land reform and improvement – is part of the process.

Understandings of Land and Property

In Scotland in 2023, we frame human-land relationships through concepts of property. In liberal democratic societies, property broadly takes the limited form of ‘ownership,’ simplifying the complexity of land, resources and animals through individual, exclusive possession of identifiable things by humans. The entrenchment of individual private property ownership implements a property model where the pre-eminence of a legally-identified owner is assumed over other claims such as formal and informal communal claims. Under capitalist social relations, it also typically assumes private property owners are rational actors, motivated by self-interest, and engaged in competitive dynamics, such as against neighbours or state intervention (including planning). Blomley (2017) highlights that the dominant private property model exerts a powerful imaginative hold – shaping our understandings of the possibilities of social life, ethics, and the ordering of the economy. Scottish land reform creates some cracks in the dominance of this private property model, through which alternatives can emerge. To give one example, the 2016 Land Reform Act required the Scottish Government to provide a land rights and responsibilities statement (emphasis added), a balancing of private property rights with responsibilities in the public interest upheld in Scots law (Mure, 2022). One effect of this redefinition is to make land both for private enjoyment (and development), but also with arising responsibilities which can be referred (non-statutorily) to the Scottish Land Commission (such as allowing public access as required under the 2003 Act).

Community land models, as well as other communal land types such as common good lands and land held by public bodies, all implement land ownership models which are not exclusively private. Land reform processes are producing a more diverse economy of property relations, normalizing the existence of a nuanced range of communal models alongside private property. This nuance is practical in many ways – as this article seeks to outline – and is meaningfully redistributing power over land. It also provides for evolving understandings of land and property beyond the dominance of classical liberal models of private property, or any simplistic binary between private and public property. In Scottish Land Reform, legislative tools, mobilizing discourses, and governance mechanisms all combine to create space for a fuller range of property concepts and relations to emerge in the public interest.

The Scottish Community Land Ownership Model

In Scotland in 2022, what constitutes ‘community landownership’ is well established: ownership (legal title and a generally exclusive right of possession) of land and/or assets by a Community Body that is locally-led and linked to a defined geographic community (McMorran et al., 2018). Community Bodies have the right to register an interest in buying land, which allows for them to be first in line to purchase should it come up for sale (Part 2 of the 2003 Land Reform Act, as amended). They have a right to force a sale of abandoned, neglected and detrimental land (Part 3a of the 2003 Land Reform Act, as amended) and to force a sale of land in the interests of sustainable development (Part 5 of the 2003 Land Reform Act, as amended). Communities also have a right to request purchase or leasing of land and buildings from public bodies (as per Community Asset Transfer in the Community Empowerment Act 2015). These legal rights are underwritten by supports, which include the Scottish Land Fund currently £10 million per year for community land purchases.

Scottish Community Bodies that own land are governed democratically, with open membership within a specified geographic area. This is a notable difference to other community forms of property holding, including land-based charities such as Community Land Trusts, which do not always have open geographic membership or local democratic oversight. Scottish Community Bodies are therefore a notable model relevant to the Community Land Trust literature (Engelsman et al., 2018, etc). Within the Scottish system, Community Bodies are required to act in the public interest in a manner that can be upheld in law, with communities’ public interest rights legally balanced with private property owners when they use Community Rights to Buy. As publicly functioning organisations operating in the public interest, they can be considered a type of hyper-localised public body.

This community land ownership model operationalises local direct democracy and has been applied to a wide range of contexts, sites and changing circumstances over time. 75% of people on the outer Hebridean islands live on community owned land, with 711 land and building assets owned by communities across Scotland (Scottish Government, 2022a). The majority of these assets have been purchased from private landowners, through negotiated sales similar to a private property purchase (unpublished data). Community buy-outs from private landowners can be considered to bring land and buildings into a local common good. This builds local democracy and community power over land.

Importantly, the Scottish system of supporting community landownership goes well beyond temporary lease-based property arrangements between public bodies and community organisations. These arrangements have increased as part of “Asset Transfer” programmes, with emerging evidence of the ways communities are taking up local services which public bodies used to provide (Earley, 2020; Slade et al., 2021). While leasing can build expertise in community organisations, lack of funded maintenance, plans for after the lease expires and community control over these processes are notable issues. Attention to power in these cases would likely note its deficiency at the community level.

Challenges with community landownership include over-reliance on volunteers (particularly in the early stages), and associated volunteer fatigue. Land purchase processes are complex, particularly those that rely on legal rights, presenting challenges for almost all community groups. There is a tendency for communities to focus on “saving” buildings or assets which are not productive in a narrow economic sense, such as in response to the withdrawal of public services or a desire to save heritage buildings. There is also a tendency for communities to attempt to use their Land Rights to stop development, when these rights are really designed for delivering community need. By definition democratic oversight also comes with winners and losers. Geographic community definition entails an inclusion/exclusion process through boundary making, which becomes more complicated in dense urban areas.

The Scottish Community Ownership model has affinities with Community Land Trusts used elsewhere globally, but there are a few notable differences. Community land ownership embeds direct local resident democratic oversight through open membership in a defined area – it is fundamentally about communities of place, rather than shared interest over land. Scottish community landowners own land and buildings while Land Trusts typically own the land whilst offering land and building uses under lease. Land trusts have also focused on housing; in Scotland communities deliver a range of development.

With regard to land use planning, Scottish communities have a growing number of policy tools to exert their vision over land. However, in practice they have minimal power and little opportunity to determine outcomes., There are high quality national standards for community engagement (SCDC, 2005) and notable research on Early Engagement in Planning (Wright & Tolson, 2020). However, methodology and research does not necessarily produce implementation. Community councils are statutory agencies who comment on planning applications, with elected councillors but with little training and variable influence (Symonds, 2022). With the 2019 Planning Act, community bodies can create local place plans, but adoption of these plans into spatial policy is subject to local authority timescales and sign off and there is no guarantee they will have much bearing on local authority decisions. There is no third party right of appeal in Scotland. All these optional and outcome-uncertain planning tools raise the likelihood of engagement fatigue. Scottish communities are engaged with in many ways but meaningful outcomes from these deliberations – and power at the community level – can be thin on the ground.

However, land reform is increasingly changing land engagement practices. Land ownership responsibilities include increased engagement requirements for land use development and management. There are also emerging proposals for increased engagement in land sales, such as a 2022 proposal by the Scottish Government for land use management plans and pre-notification of intended sales.

Increasingly, communities involved in land use planning in Scotland are attempting to use these more proactive land ownership rights to exert their vision for land. This can include a range of things, from buying land which was previously proposed for development – such as by Inchinann Development Trust and Viewpark Conservation Group, both of whom bought woodlands within Glasgow’s greenbelt. There is also increased interest in community landownership from community organisations engaged in planning issues, exploring whether community landownership presents a more satisfactory method for becoming involved in land (Doyle & Yearwood, 2022).

Community landowners work collaboratively with public, private and other community organisations. What diversified land ownership with a community land sector delivers are communities with meaningful stakes in the land use development system. This is effective power and land at the redistributive, or predistribution, level – allowing communities notable powers and supports to deliver development. This speaks to how we deliver social justice (Fraser, 2005) – if achieving social justice relies on mutual reinforcement of all dimensions and is fundamentally about participatory parity (McAreavey, 2019); what does it take for all communities to participate on an equal footing in property development?

Finally, community land ownership also engages with alternative ways of being on and with the land. Beyond extractive global capitalism, beyond mega-cities, from remote rural areas such as the Hebridean islands, notions of Dúthchas¹ – of land, history and community – are played out and remade in community spaces. Community land organisations often consider history, nature, development and power in their own ways: some employ radical governance and creative approaches, others implement standardised social enterprise models; some ignore these concepts entirely. These alternative spaces vary, and are small, but can create the fresh air needed to see beyond the smoke of the frequent crises of 21st Century.

Case Studies

The following case studies provide illustrations of the diversity of Scottish community landowners. They demonstrate the breadth of community land projects, with examples given from a rural island, from the centre of Glasgow, and greenfield development on the edge of the city. The examples were chosen based on direct knowledge of the groups, as well as their land use planning work.

South West Mull and Iona Development Trust

With a geographic area comprising part of the Isle of Mull in the inner Hebrides, this development trust has the aim of delivering community led projects that support economic, social and environmental regeneration. Their first project in 2015 was Tiroran Community Forest, 789 hectares purchased from a public body, which they now manage sustainably. They have created woodland crofts to address depopulation – requiring a tricky planning consent for housing outside of a rural settlement. They lease a Community Centre, providing community office space, and sub-let commercial space (currently to an arts and crafts cooperative and a gym). They created a community garden, which grows local food and has a tree nursey for the community forest. In 2018 they bought two acres of shoreside with boatyard – and in 2021 installed a community owned seaweed farm on a 6-hectare offshore site. Lack of affordable housing is a notable issue leading to a declining population on Mull, so they are researching housing needs, first in 2017, with updates in 2022, and are in the early stages of a community-led housing project.

Kinning Park Complex

Kinning Park Complex is an independent organisation that owns and runs a multi-use building near the centre of Glasgow. The red sandstone building was constructed in 1910 as part of a Secondary School. When it closed, it became a council-run community centre between 1979 and 1996. However, in 1996 the local authority decided to close it. Local residents, who used the centre, occupied the building for 55 days and nights and pressed their case for the centre to be kept open. After a lengthy standoff, a nominal rent was agreed, and a local community group took over the running of the building with limited maintenance provided by the local authority. Projects and activities were provided in line with community need, and have included childcare, arts studios, and event space for community celebrations. Responding to the introduction of Community Land Rights and supports in urban Scotland, the organisation decided to set up as a Community Body compliant with the requirements of the Scottish Land Fund. In 2019 the community bought the building from an arm’s length external organisation to the city council. At the time of purchase, lack of maintenance was so pronounced that the building was not wind or water-tight. Renovation began in 2020, overlapping with Covid 19 lockdowns and leading to an expanded programme and costs for renovation.

The organisation continued to operate outside of the building during renovation, and they opened the doors to the public again in 2022. Recent projects have included community gardening, community meals, digital inclusion, and a repair café. The building now hosts co-working spaces, artist studios, offices, event space, and tool library pick-up. The team also prepared one of the first Local Place Plans in Scotland, called “Because We Say So!.” Since the Local Place Plan was issued to the City Council in early 2022, they have continued to implement the projects identified as priorities through this spatial planning process, including supporting a DIY Skate Park, a community garden, and setting up two new organisations (Friends of a Local Park and a back lane association), and reconstituting the community council.

Inchinnan Development Trust

Inchinnan is a village of 1,874 residents, which has been under consistent development pressure due to proximity to the city of Glasgow. The proposed sale and development of Teucheen Woodland by a private land-owner galvanised the process of taking the woodland into community ownership in 2021. This was an extension of the work of the community council, who set up the Inchinnan Development Trust, with the aim of preserving and enhancing the local environment through responsible, informed management and sustainable development. The trust now owns and manages the Woodland whilst developing a strategy for next steps which includes a range of possible options such as transfer of football playing fields from the local authority, expansion of their woodland to create biodiversity connectivity, and turning a derelict petrol station into an elder care and child care facility. They also continue to engage with large scale housing development projects in the area, overlapping with the community council’s formal role in this.

Community Land Owners in the Public Interest

The examples show the range of work that can be delivered by community property owners, illustrating the notable complexity of projects that range from individual development projects to strategic planning, as well as the scale of ambition.

These projects were delivered through Scotland’s land reform process, specifically the goals of diversifying land ownership patterns, as well as the extension of rights and supports for community landowners. The policy goal of diversification of land ownership raises the question of who owns land and, possibly more importantly, who should own the land. Land reform builds debate on land fairness, as well as questions of what land is for, and how we relate to it. It develops local democracy, and creates the potential for meaningful redistribution of power at varying scales.

It is notable that community landowners often become proactive over land use planning issues, as demonstrated in the case studies. Inchinnan has expanded from a narrow community council consultation role to owning land for local community benefit and is in the early stages of strategic spatial planning. Kinning Park Complex have recently delivered a major capital project and one of the first local place plans in Scotland. South West Mull and Iona Development Trust, in place for almost a decade, has a portfolio of property projects ranging from “bread and butter” planning issues like housing provision, through to innovative businesses such as the seaweed farm.

The case studies illustrate the effectiveness of a combined approach to delivering land use change and diversified ownership. Planning in Scotland regulates land use change and development – all landowners, regardless of who they are, need the same consents for development on their land. This veneer of objectivity has been implicated with the unequal impacts of planning (Ellis, 2015)– planning is at once objective, but also operating in complex unequal contexts imbued with power. What the Scottish model offers is an attempt to rebalance land governance within this unequal context, with substantive power available to community organisations.

The Scottish community landownership model requires community bodies with public interest aims and local democratic oversight, which can work across both land ownership and land use. This added level of democracy at the most local levels creates responsive, flexible local institutions which can deliver on projects that meet locally-identified needs, address challenging issues like market failures, or open space for creative approaches to inclusion or heritage.

Community organisations have an increasing range of tools to implement their visions over land, with simple steps like commenting on a planning application, or electing local representatives, through to meaningful development powers in the public interest. The point is not that every community will want to, or should, own or develop land or buildings. Rather, the point is that the land governance system should allow them to do this if they want to.

Further Research

Global processes are uneven, and from rural Scotland an alternative system of land holding known as community landownership has emerged for which there is 25-years of practical experience but, as yet, only limited academic research within planning, geography, and economics. This emerging research area is of international relevance. Relevant academic work and policy making needs to be reviewed and drawn into an effective research strategy. The research gaps are numerous – the paragraphs below identify some priorities for future work.

The first priority would be a thorough literature review; this text sets out an initial approach. Much more needs to be known about differential experiences of community-owned property and land reform process for social justice, within Scotland, within the UK and internationally. Fundamental questions of land, property, commons, participation and power are central, and need to remain at the heart of future research. More knowledge is needed on international Indigenous and community methods for land justice, including interactions with land use planning systems (Blatman-Thomas & Porter, 2019), and how Scotland’s approach fits into these. Within the Global North, racialised regimes of property are producing ever more entrenched inequalities (Ranganathan & Bonds, 2022) – community land trusts have historically served as a mechanism for more just property approaches, and comparative work on land trusts and the Scottish model of community land ownership would be valuable. Conceptually this speaks to decolonialisation – but it need to be practically oriented, focused on responding to calls to change systems of planning (Legacy, 2021; Porter, 2011).

A deeper understanding of what community landownership brings to participation in planning needs to be developed. There is a notable need for research to address key conceptual and substantive issues here, developing our knowledge and practice of land ownership which supports local democracy and non-extractive forms of development, and how this relates to land use management in the public interest. We need to account for the inherent conflicts in planning, and in community engagement work generally, while producing normative outcomes. For example, can we re-frame public participation in planning (Innes & Booher, 2004) to include a rights framework ranging from consultation to ownership, with rights, institutional capacity and authentic dialogue as a minimum for meaningful participation?

The wide definition of Scottish land reform does not map cleanly onto a narrow land use planning focus, which will require widely scoped research enquiries. Legal research will need to be at the root of much of this work, as the Scottish approach is rights based. A fundamental overlap between planning and land reform may be explored through legal understandings of the public interest, and how this is applied to land, and the role of communities and power in these processes. This also raises questions of how legal systems can support new, more ethical, approaches to land in the Anthropocene, such as agroecology (Calo et al., 2022) and the rights of more-than-human species (Govind, 2020).

There are many gaps in a growing body of community landownership research. Urban experiences of Scottish community land ownership are particularly absent from academic research on community landownership, which typically focuses on rural experiences (e.g., Danson & Burnett, 2021; Macaulay, 2019; Braunholtz-Speight, 2011). Relevant urban work (e.g., Adams et al., 2001; Adams & Tolson, 2019), has not engaged in depth with the processes of urban land reform introduced in 2016, nor community landownership. Further interrogation of differences and similarities between community land projects would be conceptually and practically useful – such as comparative studies of urban, suburban and rural community woodlands, or rural and urban community centres. Indepth studies of innovative urban community land projects, such as vacant high street buildings like Mid Steeple Quarter in Dumfries, would be valuable. Differential experiences by social factors, particularly class and ethnicity, should be a priority for future research too. While there is evidence that community landownership is of significant interest to those in urban communities with less resources (Doyle & Yearwood, 2022), further work is needed to ensure inclusive access to the benefits of community landownership.

There has been minimal study of the relationships between community land rights (over any type of land) and asset transfer (from public bodies in particular). Much research within the UK is focused on asset transfer from public bodies as a result of austerity and new forms of localism (Slade et al., 2021; Earley, 2020; etc). This focus can seem myopic – the fight for public services with public bodies appears all encompassing – are we too worn down by the battles of austerity? A comparative study of asset transfer from public bodies, Assets of Community Value, village greens and commons in England and Wales could be a useful step forward in evolving research on creating new commons (broadly defined) in those areas.

Research on methods for democratising urban development and the development of new commons, such as new municipalism, lacks engagement with land (Russell et al., 2022, etc), and where land and property is addressed it also tends to focus on the public body/community body nexus. Research could be advanced on ways of improving local democratic control in the public interest across landownership. Scottish community land models and land reform processes generally should provide inspiration for thinking beyond fixing the degraded state of our municipalities to creating more equal, democratic, regenerative systems.

These new systems are not just focused on urban experiences but draw from uneven flows across the imposed urban: rural divide, and are comfortable centring rural experiences (Gkartzios et al., 2022) as much as urban. The work since 2016 in applying Land Reform across the urban and rural divide should prove fruitful for academic study across many academic specialisms. To give one example, international studies of the changing nature of property have focused on the growth of urban investor and corporate ownership. The Scottish perspective, where there has been exceptional growth in the financialisation of land for corporate carbon offsetting, remains a notable gap (Robbie & Jokubauskaite, 2022).

Conclusion

This paper has explained Scottish Land Reform and community landownership, providing a short overview with examples of current practice. The Scottish experience shows how attention to land ownership and land use planning can work effectively together to deliver inclusive, non-extractive and sustainable land uses.

The previous section sketches out a research agenda for building knowledge on citizen control over land, seeking to deliver the system I explained at the outset of this article. The end goal here is proactive community land rights as a normal option, internationally. This would be systems of land governance – including ownership, use and policy supports – through which local democratic processes can deliver local visions for land. Strong, legally-based, policy for community landownership, and community-led land use, would sit side by side with other property development and land management approaches. Private, public and community approaches would all work together – a rebalancing of sorts, where communities have citizen control.

This end goal may seem bold – but ultimately I am repeating what I have heard from those who have spent the last 25 years delivering community land projects. In my mind I hear something my colleagues have said to me many times, in a soft Hebridean accent: “Community land ownership has been transformational for us. Why shouldn’t it be a normal option everywhere, like it is a normal option here?”

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the many people in the Scottish community land sector who devote significant time and resources in the interests of creating a fairer world, as well as the editors for the invitation to write this piece and their thoughtful comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carey Doyle

Carey Doyle has been a town planner for over two decades, working across private consultancy, academia, and the third sector. Her work focuses on delivering inclusive sustainable outcomes from land through practice and research. In 2020 she joined Community Land Scotland, where she manages the Community Ownership Hub: Glasgow and Clyde Valley and leads on action research and policy development for urban land reform. www.communitylandscotland.org.uk.

Notes

1 A Gaelic word expressing the idea of unity existing between land, people, all living creatures, nature and culture. See for example thenational.scot/news/18306403.duthchas-word-describes-understanding-land-people-culture/