The Scottish Land Fund was an innovative programme that supported communities in rural Scotland to take charge of buildings and land.
It wanted to help change historic patterns of land ownership, actively involve communities in ownership and management and so contribute to regeneration and environmental diversity.
Our evaluation set out to assess what happened and how successful the programme was. SQW (in association with Land Use Consultants) undertook the evaluation, which began in 2004 and ended in 2007. The Land Fund was part of our wider Green Spaces and Sustainable Communities initiative, the rest of which was evaluated separately.
The Land Fund continues to be relevant in and beyond Scotland. It helped 187 communities to pioneer community ownership and so to take more charge of their destiny. We continue and expand the work of the Land Fund in Scotland through Growing Community Assets, while other asset transfer programmes are being developed in other parts of the UK.
More generally, the programme helped to empower communities and to give them confidence and experience in developing and running projects.
The evaluators wrote a report each year, and we wrote an overall summary of findings at the end of the programme. Links to all of these and to other documents appear below.
Please contact us if you would like to know more about the evaluation.
Documents