Reversing the Gaze Report: A workshop exploring multiple visions of the struggle for community land ownership in Scotland

This withdrawal unfolds alongside the undeniable force of capitalism and market barriers. Across interviews, participants articulated how land value, especially in the natural capital and carbon-offsetting era, have risen beyond the reach of ordinary people. Land reform legislation expects communities to compete in open markets, which are increasingly dominated by speculative purchases, global capital, and green-washed investment portfolios. One interviewee grasps this dynamic with sharp clarity: “Everything is geared to make it as hard as possible for you to succeed.”

Others express incredulity that carbon credit schemes seen by many as extensions of capitalist market logics are still shaping land prices and defining environmental policy.

Urban–rural divergence

While rural communities benefit from inherited collective structures such as grazing committees (which also bring diverse challenges), urban communities often need to build organisational frameworks from scratch. The thematic map’s link between Urban–Rural and Plurality reflects how these distinct conditions intensify struggles over representation and inclusion.

Plurality itself becomes a labour-intensive pursuit. In diverse urban environments like Govanhill (the location of the workshop), openness to diverse voices requires emotional resilience and persistent engagement. “Consultation is hard bloody work!!” one participant noted, highlighting the frictions inherent in building inclusive spaces across divergent cultures, decades of economic austerity and political positions.

Struggle and collective action

Plurality is not merely demographic; it is ideological. Communities must decide which values they centre: anti-racism, anti-capitalist, feminist practice, plurality of identity, and how these commitments shape the boundaries of participation. As another contributor notes, “plurality involves holding space for difference while refusing to legitimise harmful beliefs or oppressive behaviours.”

This connects intimately to the theme of struggle and collective action. For many participants, the energy, unity, and sense of purpose generated during moments of collective resistance are far more powerful than those experienced after ownership is secured. As one participant put it: “The fight is the consultation… the struggle itself unites the community”.

Once an asset/land is secured, the wider group of people who campaigned to take ownership in the first place risk becoming passive service users rather than active agents of transformation. The question becomes how to sustain the solidarity, imagination, and political fire of the struggle once the immediacy of resistance fades.

History and Cultural Memory

Scotland’s struggle for land ownership is heavily shaped by history and cultural memory, another core node in the thematic map. For rural communities, collective memory invokes stories of the Highland Clearances, of crofting struggles, of cultural suppression, and of traditions kept alive through language and song. One Gaelic-speaking participant emphasised that “carrying the stories is the only element of power… the fight back”.

History is not merely a backdrop; it is an active force that informs worldviews, solidarities, and land relations. Through this lens, land reform is not just about a material redistribution of land but a cultural and spiritual restoration of living on the land. Historical memory shapes how contemporary alliances form, how mistrust persists, and how solidarities are built across difference.

Participants highlighted international connections: learning from experiences in Tanzania, South Africa, Colombia, and the Papau New Guinea, and drew parallels between Scottish struggles and other global histories of dispossession. Coalition-building is thus not simply organisational work; it is an act of bridging collective pasts and imagined futures. Yet fragmentation remains a persistent challenge. As one interviewee argued, the movement does

not need consensus but rather “convergence across difference”, spaces where multiple visions of land justice can coexist without being collapsed (what ever that might be) into a single ideological frame.

Community ownership

These factors: structural, relational and cultural factors shape the communities around an evolving vision of recommoning. Community ownership is not reducible to legal mechanisms or asset acquisition. Rather, it signals relational practices: collective stewardship, mutual aid, cultural expression, and imaginative experiments in community life.“Recommoning is not just ownership… it is a practice, a way of being,” several interviewees emphasized.

As another participant framed it, the goal is “protecting the value of dissent, disagreement, and expression”, creating conditions for people to imagine futures beyond capitalist constraint. In this sense, community ownership becomes a horizon of possibility, a project of rebuilding social life, political agency, and

ecological connection. It is about reclaiming not just land but the very capacity to dream collectively. The thematic map’s interconnections illustrate how this future orientation emerges only when communities confront contradictions, resist market domination, acknowledge historical trauma, embrace plurality, and build coalitions capable of sustaining struggle.

Ultimately, the over 100 years of community ownership story in Scotland is one of resilience and imagination amid profound structural challenges. It is the story of people who, despite the constraints, persist in shaping new forms of collective ownership, connection, and hope. As one participant reflects, “We can’t fight for community ownership without addressing the monster that is capitalism”. This is a reminder that the work is vast, ongoing, and transformative.

The workshop

With the aim to create a space where these differences are not obstacles but resources for solidarity and coalition building, the workshop brought together community leaders, land activists, academics, artists, and movement organisers.

Through this diverse presentation of advocates for community ownership, the event sought to understand collective organising while recognising that community visions are diverse.

Resistance, negotiation, and imaginative redesign: multiple strategies

Participants emphasised that successful community action involves simultaneous engagement across activism, negotiating bureaucratic processes, and imaginative visioning for community survival. Direct action was framed as historically and contemporarily significant, while skilful negotiations through a complex bureaucratic terrain remained essential tools.

Some participants evoked the long history of occupation as part of resistance against land concentration in Scotland, noting that communities have turned to squatting or direct action because formal mechanisms have failed to provide meaningful access or/and control of land. One participant recalled that occupation is both symbolic and practical: “a tactic” and “a strategy for drawing attention” to structural inequities. Others emphasised that resistance alone cannot build sustainable futures; negotiation and engagement with administrative and bureaucratic systems are equally necessary.

Activism, in their view, includes not only climbing over fences but learning to “speak the language of legislation,” turning administrative spaces into arenas of struggle. This diversity of strategies i.e., resistance, negotiation, and imaginative redesign reflects the multifaceted effort required to reclaim agency in a system designed to limit it.

Cultural Integrity, Language and Land Justice are Inseparable

Workshop participants argued that community empowerment cannot simply rely on access to limited financial support. Participants stressed that land reform must attend to the cultural and linguistic fabric of communities. Culture is not an adjunct to land relations but a vital component, shaping identity, belonging, and collective memory.

Concerns about cultural commodification and misrepresentation, particularly within tourism and the arts, highlighted the need to safeguard authenticity and protect community narratives. Community empowerment is never separable from cultural integrity. Participants spoke with sensitivity and urgency about the erosion and exploitation of Gaelic culture, not only in heritage institutions but in everyday spaces and interactions i.e., from museums to tourism and academic research.

According to workshop participants, community stories are lifted from their contexts and repackaged for commercial appeal, while communities themselves receive little recognition or benefit. One participant described how “the stories being told are suffocating the indigenous” origins and the hearts of those who continue to carry the scars and memories of those stories in communities today.

These sentiments captured the emotional and cultural harm caused when narratives are extracted and distorted. Culture, language, and land are not isolated domains but deeply entangled: the loss of land threatens the survival of culture and language. As others observed, sharing culture is part of community survival, yet it carries risks of misuse. Communities find themselves negotiating a fragile line between sharing i.e., the desire to keep traditions alive and the fear of seeing them commodified.

State institutions are necessary but inadequate

Workshop participants articulated a palpable frustration with state institutions, which many described as both essential and profoundly inadequate. There is a “…growing democratic deficits, because when institutions…can just shrug and say there’s no funds, then they somehow are not accountable for things not working as they should.…government is too distant and abuses the mechanism… and sometimes abuses the mechanisms that are put in place to actually move things forward.” Despite the state’s authority over land reform, it frequently fails to act, stalling initiatives through administrative inertia, risk aversion, or the absence of strong political will for distributive justice.

Participants gave examples of public bodies unable to implement their own strategies, of councils offloading responsibilities onto communities without the corresponding resources, and of land initiatives collapsing due to bureaucratic entanglements rather than political opposition. The notion of a “benign state” was rejected outright i.e., the state as a neutral player or a strong advocate for distributive land justice; if anything, participants argued, the state has retreated into market logics that prioritise efficiency and ownership over collective and ‘community’ well-being. Yet, paradoxically, communities still require the state, its legal powers, its landholdings, and its role as regulator.

This contradiction generates a tension that continues to shape strategic decisions between community members, including how to work with a system that is simultaneously needed and unable to deliver.

Extractive forces continue to shape communities

Participants pointed to tourism, academic research, and global investment logics as contemporary forms of extraction. These processes often involved the appropriation of cultural knowledge, stories, labour, or land value without reciprocal benefit to communities. Participants stressed the need for ethical safeguards, local control, and gatekeeping mechanisms to counteract extractive pressures.

Overlaying state weakness are the extractive pressures that communities face daily. Tourism in some communities of the Highlands was particularly described as ‘a form of cultural and spatial extraction’. Examples were given of busloads of visitors arriving to consume experiences, stories, and landscapes without contributing to their care and protection. Participants recounted disturbing examples: tourists being told sensationalised stories about “witches” or misrepresented histories, and tour operators profiting from distorted narratives.

Academic research was cited as another extractive force, with community members overwhelmed by repeated requests for access, knowledge, or personal histories, often with little reciprocity. One participant admitted to having “templates” for responding to researchers who repeatedly asked the same questions, reflecting a fatigue borne of being treated as a resource rather than as collaborators.

These dynamics underscored a need for ‘collaborative gatekeeping’ i.e., ethical, cultural, and procedural requirements to protect community autonomy. Ethics, in this context, is not abstract but deeply practical. It informs decisions about who gets to tell stories, who bears responsibility for land stewardship, and how communities rebuild trust and continuity across generations.

Land Reform is morally and, historically contingent, cultural, and relational

During the workshop, participants insisted that land reform is fundamentally a moral and relational endeavour, which is also historically contingent. It is not simply about acquiring land or rewriting policy and legislation but about transforming relationships between people and place, communities and state, past and future.

Historical injustices were described not as distant memories but as living structures that shape current inequalities. The common political refrain that land reform should create “no losers” was challenged; as one participant argued, such an ideal ignores the reality that many have already lost land, culture, security, and that meaningful justice may require forms of redress and redistribution that challenge entrenched power dynamics within land ownership models in Scotland.

Participants framed land reform as a fundamentally normative undertaking embedded in relationships among people, place, culture, and power. Historical injustices, including the Clearances, were understood as living structures that continue to shape contemporary experiences, underscoring the need for models rooted in justice, reciprocity, and collective dignity.

Overall Sentiments Expressed at Workshop

Across the different sessions of the workshop and also in the inbetween times (coffee breaks and meals), the most recurring emotional tone was negative; expressed through pessimism, frustration, cynicism, and fatigue. This negativity was directed not at communities but at systems, structures, and extractive forces

Key negative emotional indicators

• Pessimism and weariness about the state’s failures and repeated obstacles: “pessimism, weariness… same ideas [about land reform] going round and round… never progressing”.
• Frustration with bureaucracy, land fund opacity/inadequacy, and structural barriers: “frustration… bureaucratic failures… lack of  transparency… disempowerment”.
• Anger about cultural commodification and exploitation by tourism and researchers: “commodification… concerns over extraction… exploitation… exhaustion from academic intrusions”.
• Cynicism toward consultations and policy processes: “consultation fatigue… jadedness”.
• Grief and concern about ecological crisis and political instability: “grief… ecological crisis… aggressive [extractive] neoliberalism”.

Overall sentiments expressed at workshop

While negative tones seem to dominate participant discussions about land distribution and reform, positive sentiments emerged strongly during discussions of collective action, imagination, and shared cultural strength.

Positive Expressions of Hope and Solidarity

• Hope for change and belief in community capacity: “hope…” “optimism…”, “motivation…”, “encouragement…”
• Pride in cultural assets and community resilience: “pride in cultural assets…”, “moral compass…”, “community resilience…”.
• Joy and connection during collaborative moments: “fun…”, “generosity…”, “sharing… connections… ideas..”
• Constructive, productive tensions interpreted as signs of engagement: “productive tensions…”, “learning…” “action…”