Changemakers: Maggie Chapman

A former Co-convenor of the Scottish Green Party, Maggie Chapman is a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for North East Scotland, having been elected first in 2021 and then re-elected in May 2026. From 2007 to 2015, she was a councillor for the City of Edinburgh Council. She represented the Scottish Greens on the Smith Commission for further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament.

Until 2015, she was a lecturer in cultural geography, environmental ethics and social justice at Edinburgh Napier University. She has been Rector of the University of Dundee since 2025, having previously served as Rector of the University of Aberdeen between 2014 and 2021.

Maggie Chapman (MC) was interviewed by John Barry (JB) and Jonathan Essex (JE).

JB: What are the changes you think we need to see to make the sustainability transition in different sectors?

MC: I think the easy answer is pretty much everything. Whatever sector we look at, we need to see some kind of transformation.

Energy is obviously an easy one to talk about. Moving away from fossil fuel extraction – that ‘just transition’ that we've been talking about for what seems like a very, very long time now. Phasing out fossil fuels, investing massively in renewables and in energy efficiency, changing how we build and what we do with our built environment as well.

Alongside that – because we don't just see it as a technological or energy source change – it's about having the best jobs that go along with that. So ensuring the energy workforce is properly unionised, that there's strong worker voice in all of those conversations. And that we think about green jobs in energy much more broadly. It's not just about energy generation or energy extraction. A green energy job can be retrofitting homes as well.

I suppose that ties into transport and the shift that's needed there. It makes me think about the Victorians when they were asking themselves how they could get around faster. And one possibility was faster horses, when really it turned out the answer wasn't that at all – it was trains, and then later the internal combustion engine.

So we mustn't just replace our current transport infrastructure and transport systems with the same things but powered by different energy sources. I think we need to completely rethink what we use transport for and how we use it. Not just mass transit for people who have to travel for work, but also changing how we do things so people don't have to travel.

It's something that Greens have talked about a long time – the 20-minute neighbourhood, (or now the 15-minute neighbourhood). Harder in rural areas and for some parts of our society, certainly, but important.

JE: We know as Greens where we want to go; the trickier question, sometimes, is how are we going to get there? What do we actually need to do to get the mechanisms of government, industry, business, economics to actually make that happen? There are differences within the green movement on where we're going, on how far and how deep that transition might be. What’s your theory of change and what would you say are the key stepping-stones on the path to bring about those kinds of transformations?

MC: Okay. So I suppose everything I’ve spoken about so far requires a redistribution of wealth and power, and a very, very clear sense that power is going to shape the outcomes.

The crises that we face aren't inevitable. They're a consequence of how power has been mobilised, how power has been used. So I think we need a decentralisation of power from corporations to communities that might involve much stronger regulation.

It certainly involves wealth redistribution, expanding democratic control over land, over housing, over transport systems, over energy, strengthening workers' rights, using the powers and institutions of the state to be effective and community-focused, to develop local and regional economic strategies that have communities and workers at their heart.

And I suppose in some ways it’s about using the crises – whether it's the climate crisis or the biodiversity loss crisis – using those as catalysts to create political space for the arguments that we need to win. And understanding that systemic reform often comes from moments of crisis. And that’s partly about decentralisation and redistribution of wealth and power.

Then there also obviously needs to be investment in in supporting communities and workers with the skills, the knowledge and the training to  make good use of such redistributed power and wealth. But doing that in a coherent and organised way rather than piecemeal. I think there’s some really, really good stuff happening, but it's very disconnected and quite bitty across the piece.

There's a cultural shift that has to happen along with the economic shift, around changing behaviours, But I'm not really talking about individual behaviours. I think individual behaviour change will happen, but we need to see that systemic behaviour change – making things like warm, well-insulated buildings the norm; making sure that energy generation is community-owned, local and more resilient.

One of the big limiting factors that we come across in Scotland time and time again is the National Grid, because whilst we’re generating a lot of energy in the North Sea, whether that's from fossil fuels or wind, it then has to travel thousands of kilometres around the UK. If we move away from centralised power generation and have community-owned wind, sun, solar, tidal and other systems, then we need a different kind of energy distribution system as well.

JB: I want to ask about two dimensions of the ‘how’. All of us here are involved in politics, but how does getting elected and changing policy top-down on the one hand compare to non-parliamentary, bottom-up changes that need to happen?

MC: It's a question I ask myself quite a lot – why the hell am I doing this? And for me, the representative democratic structures we have at the moment are the ones we have to use. It's about making use of what we've got.

I want to see much, much more decentralised democracy, much more localised political decision-making and much more power being held by people, by communities. That's maybe particularly stark in Scotland. Scotland has the least local democracy in the whole of Europe. And the local democracy that we do have has very, very few powers over income generation or borrowing, very few of the macroeconomic levers that would be normal elsewhere.

I don't know enough about political systems elsewhere in Europe, but I do know they’re much more decentralised than ours. What we have isn't what I want, but because it's what we have, I think we need to work with it to get to where we want to be.

Having said all that, I don't think that we can do any of this without a social movement. I think that's where change comes from. We see that consistently throughout history: the representative political structures are the last ones to act to bring in the regulatory changes. Quite often, what we've seen – whether we're talking about feminism or the anti-racist movement – is a mobilisation of that social movement. And I think that grass-rooted democracy is what will actually deliver the changes.

There's that wonderful Podemos quote: ‘Having one foot in parliament, one foot on the streets.’ And I think making sure that we’re always supporting and building that grassroots, street-based movement is really, really important.

JB: As the old adage goes, polite women didn’t get the vote. What do you see as the role of more disruptive tactics, non-violent direct action? Or even, at the extreme, is there a potential role for violence in the transition?

MC: I think non-violent direct action definitely has a role to play. Politeness doesn't very often get you anywhere. We've seen that very, very plainly with some of the pretty aggressive and nasty tactics being used on the right, and how that’s shifted British discourse very comprehensively to the right on certain things. There's always a risk, with stunts or tactics like that, that they can be easily dismissed. But I think there's definitely a role for non-violent direct action.

On the point about violence, I think it probably depends what we mean when we say violence. Harm to other people is not okay, but destroying or damaging equipment or buildings – I think that is legitimate. Not violence against the person, but against property and equipment and that kind of thing – I think that's legitimate. And I think there definitely is a role for those kinds of tactics to be used, because they are disruptive and we do need to disrupt. We need to disrupt not only the status quo of our politics but also the status quo of our economy. And if it takes those direct engagements to help do that, then yeah, I think they are necessary.

JB: What types of coalitions, or what different sectors and groups do you think, from your own experience in Scotland, are going to be needed as the agents of the transition?

MC: If we're talking about that social movement as coalition, who needs to be involved in that? Well, you need trade unions and workers in there. But you need trade unions to be challenged as well, and sometimes the challenge to the trade unions will come from emerging loci of power. They might be community groups, they might be community campaigners or climate activists that are disenfranchised by the current economic system, so don't actually fit into that nicely regulated and pretty formulaic structure that trade unionism represents.

So I think it’s about coalitions of workers of minoritised and otherwise marginalised communities, who will always be the most negatively affected by any economic crisis. Ensuring that we bring in or, or allow in, people who don't think politics is for them, who would never see themselves as activists or campaigners, but ensuring that there is space created in that way.

And I think that then determines, or requires, different ways of making decisions, different ways of identifying how decisions in that coalition are made – who gets to speak when, all of those kinds of things. So, so being mindful of the power that we as Greens hold in, in very particular conversations, or the privilege that we have as Greens, as people who've been involved in climate activism; allowing coalitions to build beyond and out from that. I don't know if that answers your question.

JE: I agree, all of those things are good. But we've got a climate emergency, a cost of living emergency. We've got rise of the far right. We need to bring about change fast. We need to deal with the ecological breakdown before we have any kind of social breakdown. We could have more of the same, but you talked in transport terms about a shift. What do you think needs to be new and different in terms of our theory of change going forward compared to what it is now? And what do you see as the main barriers or blockers of that change coming about?

I'll answer those questions in reverse. In terms of barriers, I think political timidity and lack of courage in some quarters, lack of understanding in others, and – probably most significantly – vested interests in the status quo. I joke sometimes, let's just nationalise all housing, let's just nationalise all transport systems, or collectivise them in certain ways. Let's appropriate the means of production, of transportation or whatever. And it's very tempting to go all out and say, actually that is the scale of transformation and speed that we need.

But that's not going to happen. And if it did happen, it wouldn't be peaceful. And there would be significant violence and harm. And I don't think that's acceptable. So I think what we need is to pull the centre of gravity of our politics, whether that's representative politics or participative and inclusive politics, well back or away from the right. And I see the vested interests in the fossil fuel economy as propping up the right. I see them as very much part of the same system of oppression. And that requires those disruptions that we were talking about earlier – the people who are willing to put their heads above the parapet, people who are willing to say the things that are uncomfortable, do the things that are uncomfortable.

But for that to work on a long-term basis, you need buy-in from people. So it has to go along with the democratising of decision-making, democratising of power, democratising of our economy. Autocratic revolution might be one way to solve the problem, but it doesn't actually solve that democratic engagement and the people element of it long-term.

So yeah, in terms of what needs to change, what we need to do more of, I think there needs to be much, much franker dialogue and conversations within political circles, whether that's representative politics or elsewhere. And then decisions taken to actually do it. With the parties that hold power at the moment, that feels very difficult, and it's incredibly frustrating. I think if we had the answer to that question, we would have done it by now, potentially.

JE: One very quick follow-up, which is about the far right challenging net zero. Do we defend net zero and, if you like, the Ed Miliband position? Or do we talk more stridently about what going for zero carbon will actually entail and the disruption that would cause to our society? Because it feels that in defending net zero, we’re defending the status quo against making it worse, and blocking out the chance of a sustainable future. But that seems to be what many mainstream Greens are doing at the moment.

MC: I think in some ways we've been backed into that corner. We've not given ourselves the time to have the conversation about articulating what a zero carbon future looks like. Net zero has never been language that I like. It's quite like sustainable development, isn't it? You can make it means whatever you want it to mean. And therefore it's meaningless. I don't like net zero. I would go for a much clearer articulation of what the life without fossil fuels looks like, whether we call that zero carbon or not. I think the defence of the status quo, or using that defence of the status quo as a way to push back against the far right, misses the point.

I think the far right has a point. They are disenfranchised. They are pissed off that people are living in poverty, that they don't have decent houses, all of these things. And I think there's an articulation in those spaces that we need to be making as well. You know, we are fighting the same systems. We are fighting the same status quo in some ways. We just have very, very different views of what the outcome of those battles should be.

JB: Last question from me, Maggie. It's a big one, although you've had a lot of big questions. What gives you hope? How do you keep on keeping on?

I'm generally politically pretty optimistic. And I find that Raymond Williams quote, you know, ‘the job of the radical is to make hope possible rather than despair’, convincing. I have that in the back of my mind all the time. But having said that, I’ve found the last couple of years really, really hard. I've been struggling to maintain my hope and then communicate it beyond.

But what gives me hope is looking at where there are really, really strong and grounded communities. Sometimes they can be very, very small, but where they are looking to transform. Sometimes that's in my region, in the northeast of Scotland, sometimes it's on the other side of the world. I think looking at the different wars and conflicts that are happening at the moment, and looking at the processes and systems of resistance, and the refusal to die, quite frankly – that's something that gives me a lot of hope. It doesn't naturally give me any answers, but it certainly gives me hope.