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Community Based Land Reform: Lessons from Scotland
John Bryden, Aberdeen University and Charles Geisler, Cornell
University
Paper presented at the IRSA XI World Congress of Rural
Sociology,
Trondheim Norway, July 2004
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In recent years, the Scottish Highlands have become the epicentre of a land
reform significant for its strong embrace of culture and community. Close
inspection of the Scottish land reform – wherein communities are granted the
right to purchase lands to which they historically enjoyed only conditional
access – leads to a series of questions about the relationship between land
reform and community.
We argue that most land reforms have paid insufficient attention to community
strengthening as an end in itself and are the weaker for it. Drawing on insights
from community-based natural resource management, we offer qualified evidence
suggesting that, as in the current Scottish case, community-centric land reform
has a promising future. We trace the pre-reform history of community buy-outs in
Scotland and pose various issues that must be addressed if Scotland’s
community-centric
land reform legislation is to succeed.
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Further Information
Documents archived at
http://www.cerai.es/fmra/archivo/from_scotland.pdf
The
Centro de Estudios Rurales Y de Agricultura Internacional is organising next
World Forum on Agrarian Reform
IRSA – International Rural Sociology Association
www.irsa-world.org
Professor John Bryden is currently the Emertius Professor of the
Arkleton
Institute, Aberdeen University and Director, Web Policy at the
University of the
Highlands and Islands, Inverness.
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