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.

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.