Articulations of the Struggles for Community Land Rights in Scotland: ‘It is from many small streams that big rivers rise’ 

Land reform in Scotland continues to be a dynamic and contested political process. While recent legislative developments, most notably the recent Scotland Land Reform Act 2025, signal political attention to land ownership and governance, the lived realities of community struggles often remain marginal within formal policy debates.

As part of the UKRI/EPSRC-funded Reversing the Gaze project, we have been exploring what Scotland’s land reform journey looks like when viewed through experiences and framings commonly associated with struggles for land rights in the Global South. Central to this work was a two-day workshop held in Glasgow on 1–2 September 2025, which brought together community actors, activists, and practitioners from across Scotland.

The workshop created a space for participants to share stories, challenges, and strategies grounded in everyday engagements with land and community land ownership in Scotland. These conversations revealed land reform not simply as a legal or technical process, but as something deeply relational intertwined with memory, identity, emotion, culture, and collective survival. Participants spoke powerfully about what it means to live with, care for, and struggle over land in contexts of long-standing concentration of land ownership.

Our newly released report, Articulations of the Struggles for Community Land Rights in Scotland: “It is from many small streams that big rivers rise”, captures these discussions and reflections. Rather than offering a policy evaluation alone, the report foregrounds community voices and highlights how land reform is understood, experienced, and contested on the ground. It documents key themes emerging from the workshop.

The title reflects a recurring sentiment expressed during the workshop: that meaningful change emerges through collective, incremental efforts. Community land struggles are not singular or uniform but are shaped by many “small streams” of action, resistances, and imagination that, together, can generate transformative possibilities albeit within a highly restrictive market-based political economy of land reform in Scotland.

While the conversations were rich and wide-ranging, the report does not claim to capture everything. In particular, complex questions around the economics of community land ownership, such as what it means to achieve and sustain “economic success” are not addressed in depth here. These are issues we intend to explore further in future project outputs.

You can read the full report here

We invite policymakers, activists, researchers, and community members to engage with the report and join ongoing conversations about land, justice, and collective futures in Scotland.