Demand for large-scale community land ownership in Scotland remains strong, but the rate of new acquisitions is slowing. Further, most large-scale acquisitions are concentrated in the Highlands and Islands, with much of Scotland seeing little activity.
This SEFARI Gateway Fellowship identifies a consistent set of barriers, including limited community capacity, complex processes and constrained funding, which are preventing further progress.
By clarifying where and why these challenges arise, the findings provide practical insights and can support community organisations, support bodies and funders seeking to unlock future community ownership.
Stage
Purpose
Modern community landownership in Scotland emerged in the early 1990s and started to become recognised as an effective approach to community-led sustainable rural development. The approach involves community organisations taking legal ownership of largescale land assets and managing them for the benefit of local people. Over time, a range of support, funding and legal mechanisms have been developed to facilitate further acquisitions, leading to a broader movement of community-owned land in Scotland.
However, the rate of new acquisitions has slowed in recent years, with expansion in the number of largescale community land acquisitions becoming more gradual. Largescale (over 500ha) community assets are also unevenly distributed, tending to be clustered in specific areas of the country while the vast majority of Scotland is devoid of them. Anecdotally, there have been a number of reasons suggested for this, but there has been no systematic research into these trends or their underlying causes.
The purpose of this Fellowship was to establish a baseline of knowledge as to the historical and geographical spread of largescale community landownership and reasons for these trends. It also sought to identify key barriers to largescale community land acquisition and suggest solutions to them, highlighting future research, policy and practice priorities which can support the continued development of largescale community ownership.
Results
The study found that, despite the numerous developments and expansions of support, funding and acquisitions mechanisms instituted over the past twenty-five years, the rate of new acquisitions has remained fairly consistent since the early-1990s, aside from two short periods of rapid expansion (2005-2007 and 2015-2016).
The vast majority of largescale community land acquisitions are located in the Western Isles and Highlands, accounting for over 75% of acquisitions and over 94% of hectarage between them. While these areas continue to dominate the sector, in recent years there have been new acquisitions in other areas, including Orkney and Dumfries and Galloway. Accompanying this, the types of assets being acquired has also changed recently, with crofting estates being replaced by nature reserves and other land uses.
The research identified a number of perceived barriers limiting further largescale community land acquisitions:
• Stretched community capacity and insufficient support from external organisations
• Lack of ongoing support for the acquisition from local residents
• Insufficient available funding, and constraining conditions on its use
• Overcomplicated and ineffectual legislative mechanisms for acquisition
• Reliance on a willing and cooperative seller
• Lack of appetite for risk both within the local community and from funders
To address these, suggested solutions included:
• Increasing institutional support and community capacity
• Improving promotion and communication of previous successes
• Strengthening and simplifying legislative mechanisms
• Improving and promoting routes to community empowerment short of ownership
• Enhancing availability of funding and support for the acquisition process
The findings suggest that the challenge is not a lack of demand, but a system that makes large-scale acquisition difficult to achieve in practice. Progress would require coordinated action across policy, funding and support structures.
Benefits
Demand for largescale community land acquisition remains strong, however, barriers to such acquisitions have increased. Understanding the nature of these barriers enables support organisations and those advocating for an expansion of community ownership to target their efforts more effectively.
The findings offer direct relevance to future policy and structural support from organisations such as the Scottish Land Commission and Scottish Land Fund, both of whom are committed to expanding community landownership. This research also challenges claims that the community land movement has stalled or ceased to be relevant, and indeed may even indicate a stronger case for community ownership in the face of a rapidly changing land market in Scotland.
We hope that the dissemination of these findings helps to reflect the experiences of community organisations, many of whom have highlighted these challenges over a number of years and are being tasked with greater and increasingly complex responsibilities, often with limited capacity and support. We hope that these findings serve as an accurate reflection of their ongoing struggles.
For more information, please email Dr Bobby Macaulay (University of the Highlands and Islands) at bobby.macaulay.perth@uhi.ac.uk.
Main Image: Celisse Ruiz Macaulay
Project Partners
Bobby Macaulay (University of the Highlands and Islands)
Catriona Mallows (University of the Highlands and Islands)
Alys Daniels-Creasey (University of Edinburgh)