Cultural divisions, crofter capitalism and the ideology of ‘community’ in community land ownership

Abstract

Between 2013-2015 various community members in the Scottish Isle of Tiree were engaged in discussions and research about potential ‘community ownership’ and the benefits this may bring to the island. Community land ownership (CLO) is a right which Scottish communities hold to be able to buy land or assets from a private landlord in order to transform land tenure relations and encourage communities to ‘develop sustainably’. The ‘community’ in question is defined as a community of place. However, in Tiree, ‘community’ was revealed to be not so cohesive or homogenous, as legislation deems it to be.

The CLO project was dropped due to there not being enough crofter support for a full scale buy-out of unbought crofting land and common grazings. This project aims to interrogate the sociological processes underpinning the failure of the project. This is to speak to the broader question of whether ‘community’ is a suitable vessel through which to mediate more equitable land tenure relations and thereby address sustainability challenges. It was explained by participants that the lack of crofter support was due to divisions between pushy incomers and marginalised, unconfident locals. However, I follow the broad approach of laying out a contrast between the cultural explanation of the failure and economic explanations of community tensions to suggest that this cultural explanation may not provide a complete picture. This is done through mapping the economic interests of crofters in tension with participants’ understandings of sustainability challenges on the island. I argue that in analysing these economic tensions, it is possible to complicate the narrative of cultural divisiveness between incomers and locals, towards understanding the influences of the economy on community actors, and I suggest that these are important grounds on which the debate should proceed.