Crofter Forestry, Land Reform and the Ideology of Community
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663908093967 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | Alison P. Brown |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
CROFTER FORESTRY, LAND
REFORM AND THE IDEOLOGY
OF COMMUNITY
ALISON P. BROWN
University of Stirling, UK
ABSTRACT
Government policy towards the crofting form of land tenure in Scotland is investi-
gated in terms of the ideology of ‘community’. The example of ‘crofter forestry’, the
creation of woodland on crofts, is examined, and the assumptions of law and policy
are contrasted with the experience of crofters themselves. A comparison is then made
between the croft forestry legislation and later land reform legislation that applied not
only to crofting tenure but also to other rural communities, in terms of a changing
approach by the state to the construction of community.
KEY WORDS
commons; crofting; geography of law; land reform; woodland tenure
INTRODUCTION
THE AIM of this article is to investigate the construction of ‘community’
in land reform legislation in Scotland, with particular reference to
crofting tenure. Crofting is a form of land tenure peculiar to the
Highlands and Islands of Scotland; it was created in the 19th century and has
remained a channel for government agricultural and housing policies for
peripheral areas. Crofting tenure resulted from the clearance of land for
commercial stock-rearing and the relegation of crofter tenants to part-time
holdings on the coastal fringes (Carter, 1974; Smith, 1992). Crofting differs
from agricultural tenure in that it gives tenants greater rights (it is in many
respects close to owner occupation) and there is more direct involvement of
the state in its regulation. Crofting, however, has become far more than a
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 17(3), 333–349
DOI: 10.1177/0964663908093967
legal form. It has also become a focus for political organization, a way of life,
a cultural landscape and an identity (Ennew, 1980; Hunter, 1976, 1991). It is
also a principal feature in the contemporary land reform debate, being pre-
sented as a means of retaining population in remote areas and in keeping with
wider trends towards more diverse and environment-enhancing land use.
This article takes as its main focus the Crofter Forestry (Scotland) Act
1991, which gave crofting tenants additional rights to create and own wood-
land, then compares the nature of ‘community’ underpinning that legis-
lation with that constructed by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, a more
far-reaching mechanism of land reform (The Scottish Office, 1999). After
locating this analysis in the context of a critical geography of law and explain-
ing the background to crofter forestry, this article focuses on the changing
legal and social relations surrounding use of common grazing areas for
forestry. It concludes with an outline of the contrasting nature of ‘community’
in more recent land reform legislation. Although both legislative provisions
are underpinned by an ideology of community, in practice crofting tenants
appear to prefer individual to common management and ownership. There-
fore, this article considers whether this form of land reform should be seen
in terms of relations between local communities and the neo-liberal state
that governs in an increasingly centralized manner, utilizing the ideology of
‘community’.
The methods used in this research consisted of analysis of written sources
(official documents, publications of non-governmental organizations, press
reports) and face-to-face interviews with official and non-governmental
advisers and with crofters. The sections of this article that discuss forestry
are based on a larger research project carried out in 1994–6 for a PhD thesis
(Brown, 1997) that examined crofter forestry in terms of the relationship
between environmental policy, the land tenure system and the changing
nature of communities, and examined critically the construction and imple-
mentation of the crofter forestry legislation.
LAW, SPACE AND TENURE
By its hostility to context, by being ‘the antithesis of region, locality, place,
community’, law and legal abstraction can even be said to be the antithesis
of geography (Pue, 1990). In practice, seemingly a-spatial law has spatially
significant aspects. Moreover, law can adopt specifically spatial or ‘universal’
forms in different situations. A critical geography of law provides a frame-
work for considering the relationship between law and society from a spatial
perspective (Blomley, 1989, 1994; Clark, 1989). This can consider the local
mediation of law and how locally constituted actors confront law; informal
legal systems and the quasi-legal relations of local communities; but also state
law and its local interpretations by agencies. It can also investigate the
‘politics of place’, that is, how decisions about space and law affect localities
and how social conflicts reflect locally specific definitions and disputations
of legal and social relations.
334 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 17(3)
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