A working land: crofting communities, place and the politics of the possible in post‐Land Reform Scotland1

In the context of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 , this paper examines the political possibilities that are created when land is removed as a commodity from circuits of global capital and when, in areas under crofting tenure, it comes under collective ownership. Drawing evidence from the case of the North Harris Trust, Isle of Harris, the largest community purchase of land thus far, the paper considers how place is re‐configured in complex and contingent ways through the re‐working of the materiality and meanings of the land and of nature. The latter includes disturbing class‐based and colonizing discourses of ‘wilderness’, on the one hand and, on the other, exploring the ways through which the wind is commodified. The paper argues that this re‐constitution of land and nature does not lead in a simplistic way to a reversal of processes of enclosure (and globalization) but rather, through the co‐performance of land and nature in the new political spaces created by a community trust, the relationship between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ is altered such that a more sustainable and socially just future may be imagined.