In danger of co-option: Examining how austerity and central control shape community woodlands in Scotland

Abstract

Community ownership and management of land has gained prominence in environmental policy discussions, especially within land restoration debates. Within Scotland, community land ownership is promoted as a means to give communities greater say over land use decisions, receive a greater share of the benefits from land, and help deliver a just transition to the government of Scotland’s net-zero targets. These goals are supported by legal mechanisms that enable appropriately constituted community bodies to buy or lease erstwhile private and public assets to deliver a wide range of social, environmental, and economic objectives. Drawing on interviews and secondary data, we inductively explore the transfer of public forests to communities in Scotland, examining the context of these transfers, the challenges in acquiring and managing forests, and broader implications of asset transfers for community empowerment. We find that community woodland groups operate in a political context shaped by public sector austerity, increasingly stepping in to provide services that local governments have withdrawn from. Our distinct contribution is to demonstrate the ways in which formalization and standardization can have a centralizing effect on place-based initiatives. Both these trends, we argue, can lead to uneven outcomes for community groups. As communities increasingly become part of global environmental agendas, we argue for a critical political geography of’community empowerment’, one that pays attention to the relationship between political processes and uneven outcomes.