Changing land governance in Scotland - game management between adaptation and resistance

In Scotland, there is a close association between land management and property rights through the traditional sporting estate, which governs much of the sporting culture and economy. However, recent policy changes at both... [ view full abstract ]

In Scotland, there is a close association between land management and property rights through the traditional sporting estate, which governs much of the sporting culture and economy. However, recent policy changes at both national and European levels that reflect a turn towards multi-level, multi-actor governance have resulted in a growing diversity (and an increasingly explicit divergence) of public and private land management objectives. This has led to the creation of new formal institutions governing land and game management, which assign influential roles to public bodies and NGOs who have previously not had much say in how land and game are managed. They are complemented by voluntary, collaborative arrangements that are hoped to foster innovation and cooperation at the landscape scale.  

Here, we explore how land managers respond to these changes. We draw on two sets of in-depth interviews, conducted in 2010 and in 2017/18. In our first study, the development towards a more inclusive, multi-actor governance of the natural environment and the resulting discourse that promoted multifunctionality and the need to involve a wider range of actors in decision-making, together with concomitant counter-urbanisation and urban mobility, were interpreted as a threat by our study participants, and met with a counter-discourse that cast traditional land users as a threatened and autochthonous minority. This counter-discourse posited that decisions on land use needed to be based on appropriate knowledge, which was argued to be held exclusively by the land managers themselves, and could not be learnt or otherwise acquired. As a consequence, any legislation resulting from the new governance arrangements was considered illegitimate.

Our second set of interviews – eight years later – explored land managers’ decision-making practices in this complex field, with evolving debates on the regulation of game management, everchanging funding incentives (e.g., for woodland expansion), and against the background of Scottish Land Reform. Our findings suggest that collaborative arrangements, promoted by the national park authority as an alternative way to achieve change, tended to be seen as (and in some cases were actively rendered) ineffective. Estates seemed to respond to the emerging governance changes through a mix of adaptation and resistance, and we will present examples of how these two approaches were combined in practice in intricate ways.

We will conclude by reflecting on the implications of our observations for the discourses and practices around land management in the early 21^st century.