Land reform in Scotland: is it achieving environmental justice?

Aylwin Pillai and Anne-Michelle Slater (University of Aberdeen) are unable to attend to present their paper at the UKCLE event on Environmental justice in legal education reform in Scotland: is it achieving environmental justice? on 29 March 2010. The details of their paper and slides are provided below for information only. The paper considers the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and its ability to promote environmental justice in rural Scotland, with particular reference to its relationship with the planning regime.

Environmental justice as a concept has had a turbulent history in Scotland due to political rhetoric, vague, imprecise terminology, and changing political preferences. This presents difficulties in teaching the concept. Notwithstanding this, it is important to Scottish legal education and a case study of the role of environmental justice in Scottish land reform illustrates its fundamental significance. The links between environmental regulation, land reform and planning reform offer a wealth of opportunities to introduce the concept of environmental justice to students and it is a valuable tool to encourage evaluation of the law.

This presentation will examine the way in which environmental justice is used in teaching as a means of evaluating the principle of sustainable development and the objectives and achievements of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. Although environmental justice is not an explicit policy goal behind the legislation, Friends of the Earth Scotland (FOES) and academics Agyeman, Dunion and Scandrett have all drawn links between land reform and environmental justice. Further, the FOES campaign coincided with the Land Reform Policy Groups land reform deliberations and many of the issues which drove the environmental justice agenda are also reflected in the land reform agenda. Scottish land reform can be seen in the light of a number of social justice and environmental justice concerns including access to the countryside, unequal distribution of wealth in rural areas, rights to resources and equitable sharing of resources, and community self-determination and participation in land management.

The presentation will focus on part two of the Act, the community right to buy, since it has been described as the core of Scotland’s flagship land reform legislation. Distributive and participatory justice are crucial to the legislation. In addition to the achievement of sustainable development, the key policy drivers behind the legislation are land redistribution and community empowerment. Using environmental justice as an evaluative tool has helped students develop their own notion of sustainable development, changed some of their pre-conceptions and has raised new and interesting issues for discussion, particularly at LLM level where the students are predominantly from developing countries.

References

• Agyeman, J. (2002) ‘Constructing environmental (in)justice: transatlantic tales’, Environmental Politics 11(3), 31-53.
• Dunion, K. and Scandrett, E. (2003) ‘The campaign for environmental justice in Scotland as a response to poverty in a northern nation’, in J. Agyeman, R.D. Bullard and B. Evans (eds.) Just sustainabilites: development in a unequal world. London: Earthscan.

About Aylwin and Anne-Michelle
Aylwin Pillai is a lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests are land law and environmental law. She completed Arts and Humanities Research Board funded research into Part 2 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 in 2005. Her main interest is in the influence of Scots land law, particularly the rights and restrictions attaching to land ownership, on land use and progress towards the sustainable development of rural communities.

Anne-Michelle Slater is a lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests include land use planning law and policy, in particular its relationship to the development of the concepts of environmental justice and sustainable development.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010