Land Governance: The Case for Change
Welcome back. We’re now, finally, moving on to an alternative solution that seeks to address the weaknesses, and harness the strengths, of existing approaches to solving Scotland’s socio- and ecological challenges. For those joining us for the first time, I’d recommend reading this series’ first and second posts to start with, which survey those very challenges and set out the criteria solutions to them should be judged by.
With the holidays fast approaching, and given the last two posts have been rather lengthy, this week’s edition will be a good chunk shorter. So before getting into the weeds of the alternative solution, let’s examine in more detail how that solution is situated: its priors and its base assumptions.
It would be worth briefly summarising existing solutions, as well as the problems they are seeking to solve. Ecologically, Scotland’s landscapes are heavily degraded: they are historically devoid of life, for the most part blanketed by sheep grazings, shooting estates, commercial forestry, and carbon-leaching peatlands. The little that is left is at risk, and current restoration projects are insufficient in righting the sheer extent of decline — let alone meeting national nature targets. Sociologically, Scotland’s landscapes are historical relics. Their ownership structures reflect the sociopolitical dynamics and desires of centuries past, bearing little relation to our present circumstances and needs — their justification being little more than maintenance of, or reversion to, the status quo.
Current solutions to those challenges, previously dichotomised as scaled-up community landownership or scaled-up private land acquisition for the explicit purpose of nature restoration, are inadequate. Neither address the need to construct a land governance system that agglomerates central oversight while devolving minute control and management to a local level.1 Neither, too, address the need to overcome excessive parcellisation of land and related methodological issues in true landscape-scale nature restoration.2 And neither offer comprehensive long-term protection measures of restored or to-be-restored land.
Both, though, separately offer benefits. Expanded community landownership, for one, rights historical sociological wrongs and mitigates the sociopolitical and economic inefficiencies associated with concentrated landownership. Expanded private acquisition — if of a centralised, well-resourced, kind — could offer the practical financial scaleability needed in nature restoration that no other approach currently provides. These considerations, though, are ultimately short-term. They do not offer compelling visions for the future, nor do they address anything other than immediate, singular, problems. Unmet and arguably more important long-term criteria — namely levels of agglomeration, parcellisation, and protection measures — should take precedent.
That is because these criteria are systemic: they fundamentally influence the underlying logic of land-use decisions. To this should be added one last criterion. Ecological and sociological decline is historically the result of disenfranchisement. It is the result of a stripping of power, of agency, from human and non-human communities directly reliant on the land they inhabit. Land-use decisions were and are abstracted — subject to the whims of single individuals or organisations. This is rooted in presumptions of ownership: in the idea that land and those who inhabit it can be owned or controlled, that human and non-human communities alike can have their needs and interests disregarded. It is an expression of practical human dominion — of humanity’s ability to dictate ecological outcomes, those who these outcomes are affecting having little input in decision-making processes.3
This supplementary criterion, then, is that of socio- and ecological democracy, of finding ways to reverse embedded presumptions of landownership, of integrating local human and non-human voices into land-use decisions. With this comes the current definition of ownership — one that urgently needs altered. Ownership is for the most part defined by a combination of legal and equitable control — that is the ability to decide outcomes, and to profit or make a loss from them. Legal and equitable control are inextricably linked. Those making land-use decisions are thereby predisposed to make these entirely in accordance with their personal financial interests: those interests are typically not aligned with other actors’, and there is little incentive to act in accordance with the human and non-human fates they influence.
This systemic exclusion of the affected augurs the undeniable need for alternative land governance structures. Existing solutions, whether communal or private, do not fundamentally question the calculus of landownership. Were we to design a land governance system from scratch, we likely wouldn’t come up with anything close to the present irrational reality. We would envision a system that incorporates the criteria discussed previously — that builds healthy, dynamic, structures which takes account of human and non-human interests more broadly.
Current floated alternatives maintain existing structures while fiddling around the edges: community consultation schemes here, conservation covenants there, inter-parcel planning supposedly everywhere. The status quo is essentially entrenched, fixed and absolute landownership accepted as axiomatic. That axiom is perhaps best expressed by the seemingly innocuous language we use. To describe a large patch of land as an estate is odd — it presupposes singular ownership and dominion: it presupposes human ownership and dominion, and management for exclusively human ends. Scotland is not covered in estates. It is covered in degraded land, land segregated by artificial, ahistorical, and unecological boundaries. We desperately need a better system.
And if a better system is to emerge, now is the time. We stand at a point of phase change: land is being considered as more than an inanimate canvas to paint our desires on — valued both intrinsically and financially, with novel instruments likely to assign a higher value to natural capital than counterfactual, exploitative, use. A shift of this magnitude reflects a shift in state, say that from liquid to gas. Energy abounds and is in flux: corresponding unpredictability, fluidity, and flexibility must be taken advantage of not to cement the status quo, but to overcome the historical inertia of entrenched land governance structures. We must imagine governance structures which produce positive outcomes as direct and constant consequences of their design, rather than as a result of periodic changes in influencing incentives.4
So, with this in mind, I’ll be envisioning that alternative next week. Stay tuned, and please do share this series with anyone you think might be interested. And, as always, I love hearing your feedback so do leave it in the comments below!
Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.
The issue of agglomeration-disagglomeration goes beyond the boundaries of nation-states. The focus on Scotland, here, is purely practical.
The term landscape-scale is heavily overused, and its meaning has been diluted thereby. Here I mean beyond single large estates, and beyond clusters of large estates, to encompass near-national networks of landholdings.
The question of dominion has great environmental-historical depth that I won’t get into here, but for all intents and purposes humanity does control the (geologically) short-term outcomes of its surrounding ecologies.
Refer to previous booms in forestry and wind power. Will natural capital still be a compelling proposition in fifty or one hundred years from now?