Is Treasa Tuath Na Tighearna (the People are Stronger Than the Laird): Exploring the Complexities of Power Relations Within Scotland’s Just Transition Policy Community

As part of a broader “green revolution” agenda (Scottish Government, 2021), Scotland is at the forefront of polities implementing just transition policies (Abram et al., 2022), targeting a net zero economy by 2045 (Scottish Government, 2021). Land reform has been a key motif on the political agenda in Scotland for centuries, and the most recent political response to this debate has explicitly linked future reform to the push for net zero (Wightman, 2015). Land use change is fundamental to the achievement of this target, with the Scottish Government pursuing a market-focussed ideological approach contingent upon attracting private investment in renewable energy and carbon sequestration practices such as peatland restoration and re/afforestation (Scottish Government 2022, 2024). Such an approach has raised concerns over a new era of land-based extractive practices that see the imposition of novel capitalist spatiotemporalities upon rural communities, such as accumulation by dispossession or repair (Franz & McNelly, 2024; Castree, 2009; Harvey, 2004; Huff & Brock, 2023). Rural Scotland is a zone of contestation, where plural values and power relations between actors will shape Scotland’s just transition (Carmen et al, 2023; Cole et al, 2023). The injustices of the Highland and Lowland Clearances still resonate to this day with highly concentrated land ownership in rural areas contributing to a lack of agency for rural communities over land use decisions (Daniels-Creasey & McKee, 2022). Despite a recent political push to renegotiate entrenched power relations and to increase the diversity of landownership models, rural communities remain concerned that they will be expected to bear a disproportionate burden of the socioenvironmental costs associated with reaching net zero, coupled with inadequate opportunities to participate in the decision-making process (Daniels-Creasey & McKee, 2022; McIntosh, 2023). A counterhegemonic coalition, bridging existing land justice activists and more contemporary social, climate and environmental justice movements, has emerged in response to the perceived injustices of the policies underpinning the Scottish Government’s just transition approach. Within this coalition, a plurality of community-led alternative futures has emerged in the rural context (see for instance John Muir Trust, 2022; Atlas Arts, 2024), contrasting with the top-down approach instigated by the Scottish Government. Using the just transition concept as analytical lens, my project seeks to foreground the different coalescing and conflicting futures emerging from this “policy community”; to reveal the web of power relations between human and more-than-human actors that are shaping Scotland’s just transition policy (Shore & Wright, 1997). This paper will present the findings from an initial round of data collection, focussing on perceptions of the just transition from “agents of change” within this policy community, with a primary analysis of the rural justice implications of the Scottish Government’s ideological approach to land use policy for net zero and how this is shaping the research agenda for the remainder of my project (Flood et al., 2022; Winkler, 2020).