The Social Production of “Local Knowledge”

A couple months ago I tweeted about a dissertation epiphany that I’d had after a rare full night’s sleep.

The social construction of local knowledge! Yes! That closes the gap!

<sorry, minor dissertation-related epiphany this morning>

— Michael T. Bacon (@MichaelTBacon) July 25, 2019

After which the one member of my committee who follows me on Twitter bugged me for details. Okay, fair enough, it’s probably not the worst idea in the world to get me to actually generate some text about it. This got long enough to do in parts, so here’s part 1, which is mostly about the things which don’t answer the question. The epiphany stuff comes in the next few parts.

The Setup: What makes community land buyouts work?

The premise of the practical applicability of my dissertation comes down to something like this: The Scottish community land ownership movement, driven by community buyouts and boosted by the community right-to-buy and the Scottish Land Fund, has produced results that would generally be enviable in many communities that are suffering economic stagnation, environmental degradation. I take this as given based on previous work, a position not accepted particularly among enthusiasts for neoliberal economics, but well supported by the still-emerging research in the area.

What I find particularly notable is that despite having many runaway successes, a sizable number of partial successes, and a vanishingly small number of outright failures, I generally failed in my initial attempts to find commonality in strategy, language, approach, or underlying trick for why these buyouts worked that was generally applicable across trusts rather than unique to each.

So the question stands: what makes the community buyout movement so successful?

First guesses

Is it clean energy projects?

Broadly speaking, many of the more successful trusts had engaged in clean energy projects, tapping into Scotland’s hefty reserves of rain and wind to generate power for clean energy-hungry policy frameworks. When successful, the energy systems they’ve launched have created revenue streams that allow the trusts to engage in other business. And yet, even this doesn’t explain successes. Some trusts, like the Pairc Trust, had launched their buyout effort in direct response to wind farm proposals that local residents felt created inequitable distributions of community benefit.

Is it artificial success generated by government largesse?

Critics of the community land ownership movement point to payouts from the lottery-funded Scottish Land Fund, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and other state-funded actors, and claim that any economic successes are simply the product of dumping money into an area, and that these results could have been achieved without community land ownership.

Leaders in Community Land Scotland have shot back at this accusation, first with the running total comparing the total sum of the Land Fund spent on acquisition of community land since the founding of the fund (currently hovering in the £60 million mark) with how many kilometers of the new Edinburgh Tramway that this sum would have paid for (currently less than two). Beyond the jocular comparison to urban projects, community land leaders also note that the amount spent on community land is dwarfed by agricultural subsidies, mining subsidies, and losses to tax haven behavior.

Further, and more to the point, almost none of the Land Fund money stays within the local community. Most land that went into community ownership was formerly held by absentee owners. Largely, those owners have received their purchase money and left their former landholdings for good.

Finally, it’s worth noting that many private landowners have treated their rural holdings as minor charities, taking sometimes large net losses on the operation of their estates – losses that often failed to change the tales of economic stagnation, out-migration, and general community decline.

Can commons theory answer this question?

Theorizations of the commons re-emerged in the last decade of the 20th century, specifically but not limited to Elinor Ostrom’s classic Governing the Commons. Ostrom, along with others such as Daniel Bromley and Ronald Oakerson, persuasively demonstrated that commons regimes are not doomed to be “tragic,” as Garrett Hardin had famously claimed in 1968. Their work, particularly during an intensive period in the 1990s, provided an analytical framework for understanding, predicting, and designing commons regimes for success. In the years that have followed, interest in the commons as a framework for all sorts of matters has flourished, often with quite disparate interpretations of what commons are.

However, much of commons literature has focused on the possibility for successes and the frameworks which must be in place, along with the capacity for greater equity. Far less available, however, are explanations of why a transition to common property management would generate such a broad range of positive outcomes and a re-emergence of economic vitality and transitions to better environmental stewardship.

Further, in my field research, common property regimes were often not strangers to these areas. Nearly every crofting community in the highlands retains a large designated common grazings area which is managed by the local crofting commission. While changes in the nature of crofting and pressures from neoliberal governments have ham-strung the work of crofting commissions, the transition to community land ownership has only changed the nature of the local common property regime and in many ways made it less like the classic cases that Ostrom analyzes.

In my analysis, commons theory has a large and central role to play in explaining community land ownership successes at a theoretical level, but it is not sufficient to explain an almost sudden and multi-faceted burst of community vitality.