Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how community-owned woodland crofts in Scotland reconfigure access and agrarian property relations. Drawing on an ethnography of three community ownership organisations, it assesses the political potential and limits of woodland crofting amid entrenched rural power structures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper revisits the political potential of property transformations through an analysis of community-owned woodland crofts in Scotland. Amid a national pattern of highly concentrated landownership, community-owned woodland crofts represent an emergent reconfiguration of agrarian property relations. As community-allocated smallholdings that are withheld from the open land market and grant lifelong tenure, they redistribute access to land and foster forms of agroecological production that counter global trajectories of agrarian intensification. However, despite gesturing towards a contemporary mode of common ownership, the prevalence and political potential of community-owned woodland crofts remain limited by entrenched power relations and socioeconomic inequalities. Drawing on Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access (2003), I assess how these property transformations are actualised or hindered amid shifting bundles of power that shape who can derive benefits from land and how. I present data collected during an organisational ethnography conducted with three Scottish community landownership organisations: two of which successfully created woodland crofts, and one whose failed attempt demonstrates the ongoing control that private estate owners exert over rural land—even after it has come under community ownership. Through this analysis, the paper contributes a conceptualisation of community-owned woodland crofts as sites where future European ruralities—particularly those that counter trajectories of depopulation and land consolidation—are enacted and contested. In doing so, I situate the potentials and limits of Scottish woodland crofting within discussions of land control in the UK and beyond.