Two Highland-based rural development experts join board of directors at Community Land Scotland
Two Highland-based rural development experts have joined the board of directors of Community Land Scotland.
Megan MacInnes who lives in Applecross and Rachel Skene from Helmsdale both have considerable experience in land rights campaigning.
Community Land Scotland is the lead organisation for support and promotion of community ownership.
Megan MacInnes was brought up on a croft in Skye. She has 25 years’ experience working on community land rights and land reform in Scotland and internationally – including eight years based in Southeast Asia.
Since 2021, she has been the Local Development Manager for the Applecross Community Company, the development trust on the Applecross peninsula.
On being appointment to the post, Megan said: “Being able to acquire land and assets in Applecross has been absolutely key to our ability to deliver community benefit activities and generate revenues that can then be turned back into investments for Applecross. If we didn’t own the land and didn’t own the buildings, we wouldn’t be able to do any of that.
“People who live in sparsely populated areas and far away from what feels like the decision-making centres really need and value the kind of support we get from Community Land Scotland. This includes helping raise our voices and experience within national policy and legislative debates. It will be a priority for me on the CLS board to help ensure these vital roles are able to continue.”
Megan says her experience in rural development work in Southeast Asia informs her thinking.
Her time living there included community development projects, supporting the mapping and titling of indigenous people’s land, as well as securing housing rights.
She continued: “I started doing very grass-roots work with indigenous groups in North-east Cambodia. The importance of having secure tenure of land and natural resources was huge for these communities, their livelihoods, food security and cultural heritage. Very much, the same is true for communities in Applecross and other parts of rural and urban Scotland.”
Megan held the post of Commissioner for the Scottish Land Commission between 2017 and 2023 where she took a leading role on the connection between land reform and human rights.
Between 2009 and 2020 she worked with the international human rights and environmental NGO, Global Witness.
“While at Global Witness, I spent a lot of my time working with the human rights and land reform frameworks of the United Nations, with international companies and their investors and with corporate governance regulations, trying to prevent investments that caused land grabs and human rights violations”, she explained.
“At the end of the day, despite the obvious differences, as pressure on land everywhere grows, the parallels between land reform in Scotland and many other countries increase. I hope that my experience overseas and within the international frameworks will make a positive contribution to the work of Community Land Scotland.”
Rachel Skene’s experience of comcommunity-ledtion has been gained in Sutherland and Caithness and across the Highlands.
She grew up in Tongue, before graduating from Glasgow School of Art. Determined to make her life in the North, she returned home and combined freelance design work with a role with the Mackay Country Project, researching and recording community knowledge across Duthaich Mhic Aoidh.
Rachel said: “It was a different approach to community involvement where we, a community-based team of people, advocated for much greater community influence. Our responsibility was to reflect the real lived experience of communities to the decision makers.”
Rachel built on this formative experience in subsequent roles with Strathnaver Museum, Bettyhill and the Timespan Art Gallery and Museum, Helmsdale - both facilities inevitably reflecting the area as a centre of some of the most brutal Highland Clearances.
She continued: “The Clearances can sometimes be quite obliquely represented, and people can see those actions as very historical and distant. But people acting together on land issues today can make a real difference – while we can point to the examples of those who gave evidence to the Napier Commission in the 1880’s and raised their voices in order to represent the experience of their communities, we also increasingly have contemporary examples and community leaders who inspire, and reassure, that positive change is possible.”
A move from the third sector saw Rachel work for over ten years in Highland and Island Enterprise’s Strengthening Communities Directorate. But she returned to grass-roots action in 2022, taking up an offer as project lead for the NW2045 Scottish Government Regional Land Use Partnership, then one of five in the national Pilot.
This work delivers for the NW2045 community generated Vision, which calls for more opportunities for communities to positively influence decisions about land use; for communities to have a clear voice in shaping the prospects of place, and in decisions made about land and other natural resources; and to be able to forge a place where communities can determine their own prospects.
“With Community Land Scotland”, Rachel says, “I will share my experiences of how and why communities must have more control, must have greater agency and be increasingly respected and understood as central to legitimate place-based partnership working.
“There is much to be done to really empower communities in forging resilient futures, and to ensure communities do not continue to be under- capacity and therefore unequal partners in the work needed. This work must be in the hands of those who acutely know what is needed to protect, to sustain and to capitalise that within and across communities - these are the people at the centre of making change happen from within.”
