Community engagement for Scottish landowners
Managing community engagement for Scottish landowners to ensure compliance, reduce risk and strengthen relationships between landowners and communities.
The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 introduces new statutory responsibilities for landowners – placing community engagement, transparency and accountability at the heart of land management.
OpenGround: a strategic rural community engagement package fosters open, productive dialogue between landowners and stakeholders.
Our proactive communications strategy is designed to meet – and exceed – the community engagement criteria set out by the Act, ensuring you meet statutory requirements while reaping the rewards of positive community engagement.
Our trusted and experienced team of Scottish communications experts will make your land engagement simple, transparent and effective.
Our promise
Clark delivers a sustained programme of effective stakeholder communications, ensuring regular engagement with your community stakeholders to strengthen relationships, demonstrate transparency and build trust.
We deliver a proactive stakeholder engagement strategy that communicates significant land-use changes sensitively and efficiently, creating space for active engagement.
Our comprehensive feedback reports provide you with direct audit trails and evidence of the impact of all stakeholder communications.
If you need a formal community consultation, we manage the full process using a thorough approach that gives you the confidence to focus on important estate matters, knowing that community engagement is being handled.
Clark can also support the development and design a clear, accessible, accurate and impactful Land Management Plan.
The result? A tailored engagement plan that delivers the most value for your community and landholding.
Here’s what you can expect
Open Communication with key stakeholders, resulting in strengthened community relationships.
Driving change through proactive engagement and timely, accessible, compliant communications that foster goodwill.
Demonstrable impact via a thorough feedback report on how stakeholder views influenced decisions and impacted your Land Management Plan.
The benefits
- Peace of mind that community engagement is being managed effectively and professionally.
- Demonstrates compliance with the Land Reform Act and a commitment to fair, transparent land management.
- Relieves the pressure and affords you the time to focus on day-to-day operations and rolling out a wider land management strategy.
- Fosters goodwill and trust from stakeholders, improving land management processes.
- Boosts reputation, unlocking future partnerships and commercial opportunities.
- A complete community engagement report, ready for the Land and Communities Commissioner.
Why Clark?
For several years, Clark has led the communications and stakeholder engagement strategy for Scottish estates and has driven community consultation on some of Scotland‘s largest infrastructure projects and numerous renewable developments.
This experience, and further consultation within the sector, has been used to develop OpenGround, a ‘boxed’ solution to new obligations around community engagement and transparency arising from the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025.