Search for publications

Community Ownership Through Land Reform?

15 pages

This paper focuses on the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, which gave communities legal powers to take land into collective ownership. It explains the two different rights to buy and reports communities’ experiences with these two different mechanisms. The author concludes that though it is unclear whether the Act will be reformed by the new Scottish government or not, there is a lobby pressuring the government to simplify the Act and make it more practically useful. This paper is part of a series of papers which have resulted from the Whose Economy? seminar series, held in Scotland in 2010 – 2011, whose purpose was to provide a space for researchers, representative organisations, policy-makers and people with experience of poverty to come together and explore the causes of poverty and inequality in today’s Scotland.

KeywordsCivil society Land rights Poverty in the UK United Kingdom