The Community-Based Landscape Regeneration Toolkit is a resource co-created with communities to support socially embedded, democratic, and equitable landscape regeneration practices. As environments change under climate, biodiversity, and land-use pressures, landscape improvement efforts often proceed through private or third-sector initiatives that can exclude community input. Focused on the Cairngorms area of Scotland, the toolkit responds to a context where ambitious nature restoration policies coexist with persistent land inequalities and limited democratic local governance. Highly concentrated land ownership in rural Scotland can impede community influence on land-based decision-making. Our research on communities and landscape regeneration points to the need for place-based transformations that address rural depopulation, support livelihoods, and invest in local infrastructures.

This toolkit provides a mutual learning resource for communities to inform and advance community-based approaches to landscape regeneration, with relevance for a wide range of stakeholders. Drawing on interviews, workshops, site visits, and scans of relevant toolkits and policies, it identifies opportunities and barriers for communities engaged in and impacted by landscape regeneration. Five key findings from the research that inform this toolkit show that:

1. Land ownership and control are greatly restricted, which land reform and related measures can help to address.

2. Landscape regeneration needs to be tied together with the wider development of rural economies.

3. Communities often have unequal capacities to design, develop, and carry out regeneration plans and practices.

4. Communities often feel they have limited voice and influence, and are disempowered from land-based decision-making.

5. Democratic participation can be constrained due to gaps between local and regional levels of governance.

Through a more in-depth discussion of key findings and landscape regeneration stories, the toolkit outlines projects and initiatives working to improve and democratise land access; align social, ecological, and economic benefits; expand community capacities and skills; enhance community engagement in decision-making; and integrate democratic renewal with ecological renewal. Through a review of community and environment toolkits, together with co-designed aims and action points, the toolkit highlights concrete support and steps for strengthening community involvement and leadership in landscape regeneration. Five key aims and actions the toolkit identifies include:

1. Strengthening community land control through reduced administration, improved resources, and enhanced land-based policies.

2. Aligning social, ecological, and economic benefits within landscape regeneration initiatives.

3. Expanding community capacities through networks, education, and resource sharing.

4. Enhancing community engagement in land-use decision-making through more joined-up and inclusive approaches.

5. Integrating democratic renewal with ecological renewal especially through strengthening local democratic community participation.

This is the first toolkit of its kind to specifically address community contributions to landscape regeneration. The expanded text that follows provides a more detailed overview of the key findings, toolkit review, aims and actions, along with references and a glossary of key terms. These materials provide a community-oriented and co-created set of perspectives on how to address the urgent problem of environmental change through grassroots involvement with landscape regeneration.