The Scottish Government has a Net Zero target date of 2045, and all areas of society are expected to play their part in reaching that goal. The land use sector is tasked with reducing greenhouse emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere through changes such as planting more trees and restoring peat bogs – and doing so in a fair way that minimizes detrimental effects and brings benefits to Scotland’s people.
In this blog, Naomi Beingessner discusses a SEFARI Gateway Innovative Knowledge Exchange funded project that engages with communities where ‘green’ investment in land has had significant impacts, and considers how communities and landowners may improve community engagement and involvement in land use decision-making.
Introduction
Since the Scottish Government committed to reaching Net Zero by 2045, discussions have arisen around how land use and management must change to help meet this goal. A recent trend is the growth of the market for carbon sequestration and ecological restoration, which has implications for land value and use. This has led to new actors purchasing or and investing in land to undertake nature restoration, regenerative land management or approaches that maintain or enhance natural capital, and/or sequester carbon (McKee et al., 2023; Merrell et al., 2023), a new form of land use that has raised questions. A March 2024 Parliamentary Committee Meeting saw MSPs ask about the effects of these new landowners and land use changes on communities, and whether green land investment profits should be shared with communities. As land use change can have large impacts on a small scale such as a community level (Sharma et al., 2023),the pace and scale of land use change occurring in Scotland (often related to landownership change) risks contributing to economic disparities and community disempowerment in land use decision-making (McMorran et al., 2022; McKee et al., 2023).
Our recent Scottish Government-commissioned research, Social and Economic Impacts of Green Land Investment in Rural Scotland, found both beneficial and detrimental impacts on communities and recommended that communities be involved in land-use decision making, and natural capital investor-owners consider the long-term consequences of decisions and activities on local stakeholders. Building on that research, this project aimed to provide tools, capacity, and knowledge regarding good community engagement practice for communities and landowners.
Project
With community engagement emerging as a significant factor for perceived successful outcomes for both communities and land managers/owners, our project was designed to engage directly with investor-owners and communities who wish to improve community engagement and involvement in decision-making. This approach aimed to build capacity and provide tools for communities and landowners to deploy.
Research on community engagement in Scotland, with a particular focus on so-called ‘hard to reach’ voices, found evidence of several research gaps when considering community engagement in the Scottish context (Lightbody, 2017:4). Therefore, our project began with a literature review that aimed to address part of this gap, by taking a focus on community engagement in relation to natural capital investment and its distinctiveness from other forms of engagement. This approach was designed to ensure our fieldwork was be grounded in research on existing tools that aid community engagement. Two examples are the ‘Delivering Community Benefits from Land Good Practice Guide’ produced by the Scottish Land Commission and the ‘Recipe for Engagement’ by the Agile Initiative. Subsequently, with fieldwork data, we planned to assess how these tools meet the needs of the community members and green land investor-owner representatives.
Our fieldwork involved two participatory workshops in locations where green investment and land ownership change have recently taken place. We wanted to seek to those who live and work in the rural communities impacted, or likely to be impacted, by landownership and land use changes: these include community members, natural capital investors, land-based workers, land managers, and local governance representatives.
After sharing our previous research’s findings around positive and negative impacts on communities, the following questions were explored through participatory and creative workshop activities:
- What benefits and negative impacts have you seen from local green land investment activity?
- Who should be involved in community discussions about land? How can people be encouraged to participate?
- What are the hopes for the future of the community and landholdings? Optimistically but realistically, what is a desired outcome?
- What are community and landowner needs that must be fulfilled in order to reach the desired outcome?
We then planned to co-create a route map with workshop participants to enable inclusive community engagement around long-term land use planning in their local area, as a tool for both the green land investor-owners and community groups. The route map will be designed to describe a consensus-derived desired future land use vision and how community involvement in decision-making will be implemented. Furthermore, the workshop discussion also considered community needs (e.g. the potential benefits of land use change, forms of representation in decision-making, communication mechanisms) and the support necessary for both community and green land investor-owner to achieve the future vision (e.g. from government, statutory bodies, facilitators).
The route map and workshop reports form the basis of a digital storymap, including case studies and linking to the community engagement resources from the literature review, which will be shared with workshop participants, policy makers, and organisations that represent rural communities and landowners across Scotland.
If you want to find out more and what happened, then please read our case study….
Author
Project team
Lin Batten, Bryony Nelson, Acacia Marshall, Umar Farooq
Acknowledgements
Our gratitude goes out to the workshop participants and everyone in communities who shared our research. Special thanks to Dr Annie McKee for assisting with conception of this project, James Glendinning for input, and to Dr Michelle Wilson for her assistance.
Image Credit: The James Hutton Institute.
References
Lightbody, R. (2017). ‘Hard to reach’ or ‘easy to ignore’? Promoting equality in community engagement. Edinburgh: What Works Scotland. Available online: https://whatworksscotland.ac.uk/publications/hard-to-reach-or-easy-to-ignore-promoting-equality-in-community-engagement-evidence-review/
McKee, A., Beingessner, N., Pinker, A., Marshall, A., Currie, M. and Hopkins, M. (2023). The Social and Economic Impacts of Green Land Investment in Rural Scotland. The James Hutton Institute. Report for the Scottish Government, December 2023.
McMorran, R., Reed, M.S., Glass, J., Bauer, A., Glendinning, J., Macaulay, B., McKee, A., Peskett, L., Rothenberg, L., Rudman, H., and Williams, A. (2022a). Large-scale land acquisition for carbon: opportunities and risks. A SEFARI Special Advisory Group. Available online: https://sefari.scot/sites/default/files/documents/Final%20report.pdf
Merrell, I., Pate, L., Glendinning, J. and Thomson S. (2023) Rural Land Market Insights Report 2023. A report commissioned by the Scottish Land Commission. May 2023. Available online: https://www.landcommission.gov.scot/downloads/645cda7a2ba61_Rural%20Land%20Markets%20Insights%202023.pdf
Sharma, K. et al. (2023) ‘Glocal woodlands – The rescaling of forest governance in Scotland’, Land Use Policy, 126, p. 106524. DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106524