Now that land redistribution has stalled, Olivia Oldham-Dorrington looks at the kinds of reform that can happen when social movements and cross-class coalitions build the power to win it.
Since devolution, Scottish governments have pursued a land reform agenda intended to diversify landownership both in terms of the concentration of land and the types of landowners. These reforms have been seen around the world as a beacon of hope and an example of what might be possible when it comes to land relations elsewhere. Yet while 2.3% of Scottish land is now owned by communities, at the other end of the spectrum land is becoming increasingly concentrated. In 2012, 440 individuals owned 50% of rural Scotland; in 2024, this number has fallen to 433.
How can we make sense of this situation of progressive governments, seemingly committed to a radical agenda of land reform, presiding over an increasing concentration of landed power?
What does the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill actually do?
The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill 2024 is the latest phase of the land reform agenda to make its ponderous way through Holyrood. While earlier statutes have sought to provide communities with various rights and avenues by which they can acquire the land on which they live and work, the current Bill is more targeted towards existing owners of land.
The Bill contains several key reforms. First, it creates an obligation for large landowners to engage with their local communities to produce regularly-updated land management plans, and to consider reasonable requests from local community bodies to lease the land.
Second, the Bill effectively prevents off-market sales of large landholdings by creating two new mandatory mechanisms. The first requires notice of the sale to be given to a number of interested parties, giving community groups an additional opportunity to register an interest in the property. The other gives Scottish Ministers the power to determine that large landholdings must be sold in lots to different people, rather than as a whole to a single buyer. The responsible Minister can only decide to require the land to be ‘lotted’ if this would make the land more likely to be used in ways that might make a community more sustainable than if the land was sold as a whole.
Finally, the Bill also establishes a Land and Communities Commissioner, who would join the Scottish Land Commission, and it makes a number of changes to the laws pertaining to leasing land, particularly small landholdings and agricultural tenancies.*
While putting forward several legal and administrative innovations with regard to how land is sold, the Bill is a significant step down in ambition from the consultation document that preceded it in 2022, as well as from the recommendations of the Scottish Land Commission, leaving many activists and reformers disappointed. For instance, the Bill does not create any kind of public interest test for land transfers, something found in the land regulation of many other countries including France. It does not give the voluntary Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement any kind of obligatory status, unlike the Brazilian constitutional requirement that land serve a social function. It does not cover any transfers of large landholdings made through inheritance, or the sale of shares in companies that own land. And it does not place restrictions on the ownership of large areas of land by entities not registered in Scotland, the UK, or even the EU.
As Andy Wightman puts it, “[t]his Bill is the least ambitious land reform bill ever introduced to the Scottish Parliament. It contains excessively bureaucratic, legalistic mechanisms to intervene in a vanishingly small number of instances with no prospect that much will change as a result.”
Reformist land reform will always let us down
Although large landowners and their representatives have described the new Land Reform Bill as “radical”, “destructive” and “disproportionate”, it is nothing of the sort (and what is truly disproportionate is the ownership of 3,196,339 hectares of rural land by only 433 individuals). Rather, the Bill is the latest lukewarm instalment in a series of legislative acts that have failed to grapple with the fundamental issue at the heart of the Scottish landscape: ownership.
Amna Akbar, a legal scholar, has recently written about the concept of ‘non-reformist reforms’ as a way of understanding how law relates to emancipatory struggle. Akbar presents the law as a site of domination, exploitation, expropriation and the legitimation of all of these; and, simultaneously, of political, economic and social struggle. Reformist reforms to the legal order are designed to fix, and in doing so to shore up, existing systems and relations of power and domination. On the other hand, non-reformist reforms draw on social movements and cross-class coalitions to undermine these systems and relations, explicitly building towards alternative ways of organising and navigating the world. Ultimately, non-reformist reforms aim to radically redistribute social power.
The lens of non-reformist reform is useful for analysing both the current Land Reform Bill and the Scottish Government’s broader land agenda. It can help us to understand why these reforms—while symbolically significant, and transformational for many of those communities and individuals who have been able to make use of their provisions — have barely changed the dynamics of landownership in this country.
Scottish land reforms since 2003 have only ever made limited moves to curtail the rights of owners. The Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement, introduced in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016, expresses a normative belief in the responsibilities of owners, yet remains voluntary. It does not meaningfully limit the expansive legal and material rights of ownership. Furthermore, the reforms
have maintained a focus on private, small-scale ownership as a key, desirable form of diversified ownership in rural Scotland. Even when it comes to community ownership, the reforms have not fundamentally challenged the nature of ownership rights themselves. As legal geographer Carol Rose writes, “[t]he limited commons is a recognizable version of a bounded and exclusive property, even if the boundaries encompass an entire community rather than a single individual… [T]hey are commons on the inside, but property on the outside.”
The intention for land reform in Scotland was to intervene in the balance of landed power and empower communities, but this promise has not been realised. The radical ambitions of the land reform movement have been co-opted by the state, legitimising the latter by providing it with a veneer of progressivism while threatening to dampen the radical fire at the heart of the movement. Reforms that could have been non-reformist, had they been the basis of an upwards ratcheting of demands and transformation, have instead served to repair the flawed system of landownership by mitigating the most extreme concerns of communities subjected to the whims of ‘bad landlords.’ In doing so, these reforms have entrenched the broader patterns of landownership. This is partly why we see such a disappointing lack of ambition now, rather than a meaningful deepening of transformative measures.
Land-based resistance in Aotearoa
So, what might a non-reformist approach to land reform look like? How can non-reformist, revolutionary ambitions be maintained in the face of the ever-present risk of co-option? Again, the theory of non-reformist reforms can give us useful tools to think with. The distinction between a reformist and a non-reformist reform is not always clear; according to André Gorz, whether a reform is non-reformist depends to some extent on the ability of a movement to continually ratchet its demands towards transformative ends. It also depends on how the reform is won—whether it is benevolently bestowed by existing holders of power, or won through explicit and active opposition by social movements to the status quo. Finally, non-reformist reforms must redistribute power away from capitalists and other political and social elites, towards those marginalised by existing structures of power.
To spark inspiration for what a non-reformist land reform that exemplifies these qualities might look like, we can look beyond Scotland’s borders. In 2015, the Indigenous-led campaign known as #ProtectIhumātao in Aotearoa New Zealand set out to stop a commercial housing development on ancestral land, which had been unjustly confiscated by the New Zealand Crown in 1863. The campaign vigorously opposed the development through various legal avenues, including domestic courts, appeals to Parliament, and even the United Nations. When these all failed, the land defenders moved onto the land, occupying it in order to thwart the progression of the development and to uphold kaitiakitanga—that is, the active stewardship and guardianship of the land. Ultimately, the campaign’s direct action forced the New Zealand government to purchase the contested land from the developers, and to begin a still-ongoing process, in partnership with the land defenders, to find a positive resolution.
We can understand the protection of Ihumātao as a kind of non-reformist reform in several ways. Firstly, the land defenders rejected the authority of the Crown to set the parameters of engagement and terms of debate with regard to the land, going beyond what was considered possible under existing legal logics. In doing so, they undermined existing systems of political and proprietary power. For example, the campaign sought to reclaim privately-owned property, which falls outside the Crown’s framework for determining the return of unfairly confiscated Indigenous land. Not only that, but they also contested the colonial-capitalist understanding of the land as privately-owned property, instead characterising it as an ancestral landscape that is the source of identity, relationships and wellbeing.
Secondly, the campaign won concessions from the New Zealand government through direct opposition, rather than conciliatory requests: laying bare the incompatibility of their demands with the status quo. As Pania Newton, one of the leaders of the campaign, put it, “Ihumātao has compromised… enough for the greater good.” #ProtectIhumātao was also grounded in the demands of mana whenua, the Indigenous people of the land, who are marginalised, excluded and expropriated by the dominant system of property relations. It foregrounded their vision of a different way of understanding, governing and relating to land.
Finally, the campaign has aligned itself with the broader movement for constitutional transformation in Aotearoa New Zealand that seeks to reorganise the distribution and arrangement of power between the Crown and Indigenous Māori. In this way, #ProtectIhumātao recognises that land is not just a question of land per se, but rather one of the very parameters of political, socioeconomic, and ecological authority. In other words, it is a constitutional question.
What might non-reformist land reform look like for Scotland?
While the case of Ihumātao comes from a very different geographical, political and social landscape, it can provide important lessons for those on the Scottish left who hope to revitalise the land reform agenda and its radical roots. It demonstrates how, in order to avoid co-optation and stagnation, the land reform movement must continue to make explicit the incompatibility of its ultimate goals with the status quo of existing landed power and the property relations that constitute it. Advocates will be the first to acknowledge that the land reform process has not yet fulfilled its ambitions. The failure of land reform to change entrenched norms of property so far should not lead us to a conciliatory approach towards political and economic elites and the structures of power they control and benefit from.
Seeking social transformation through reform is inevitably challenging: all reforms, even non-reformist ones, can eventually be hollowed out and emptied of their radical potential if movements accept partial victories as successes rather than as steps in an ongoing struggle of transformation. To maintain their non-reformist nature, reforms must instead be understood as fissures in the legitimacy, authority and power of existing political and economic power.
Learning from the #ProtectIhumātao campaign also suggests the value of re-orienting the terms and framing of the debate towards those who have been historically and contemporarily dispossessed of and excluded from the land, rather than the landed few. In a recent article in this magazine, for instance, Tara Wight and Heather Urquhart discussed the lack of resonance of calls like ‘land to the tiller’ in a country where a vanishingly small percentage of people are actually landworkers. Scotland has, as we all know, one of the most unequal landownership distributions in the world; the majority of people are, effectively, landless. It may be worth considering, then, how a framing of ‘land to the landless’ might build cross-class popular power behind the movement.
Finally, the case of Ihumātao points to the importance of recognising the centrality of struggles over land to struggles over the very nature and locus of political and economic power—that is, of their constitutional nature. Land reform is about land, yes, but it is also about power. A truly non-reformist vision for land reform is one that boldly and openly aims to bring about a transformation in who has authority, how, where and over whom they can exercise it, and to what end.* Those who are keen to dig into the details of these reforms are recommended to take a look through Malcolm Combes’ extensive review of the Bill here, as well as Andy Wightman’s analysis here.
Olivia Oldham-Dorrington is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, where she investigates the links between property relations and food system transformations.