A £6 million Scottish fund will be launched today to help more local communities buy their land.

Environment Minister Stewart Stevenson will launch the Government-financed Scottish Land Fund at the Galson Estate on Lewis – a 56,000-acre community-owned estate which is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its buyout.

The crofters there had threatened Scotland's first hostile buyout, using land reform legislation to purchase the land against the wishes of the owners, who were finally persuaded after four years of negotiation.

It was one of the last funded (£510,000) by the old lottery-financed Scottish Land Fund (SLF).

It awarded £13.9m to 188 community groups throughout the country, allowing them to buy or gain control of 173,000 acres of local land along with 67 buildings and amenities, and create 186 full-time and 219 part-time jobs.

Its most celebrated success was the island of Gigha, where 300 years of population decline has been dramatically reversed.

The fund was wound up in 2006, and its work transferred to the Big Lottery Fund's £50m Growing Community Assets (GCA) funding scheme, which had a wider remit than just land purchases. However, in the same year the GCA announced £2m of support for islanders to buy the South Uist Estate, the biggest buyout yet.

More than 500,000 acres of Scotland is now under community control. But over recent years there have been calls for a fund focused on buying land to be reinstated, as the Scottish Government faced criticism that the momentum behind the community land movement had all but dissipated.

Today Mr Stevenson will go some significant way to answering critics, with the money coming from the Scottish Government, not the lottery. It will be £6m over three years and will be administered by Big Lottery Scotland and Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE). The thinking behind it is that these bodies are well-placed to advise on how communities can gain access to other income streams.

Mr Stevenson is expected to say: "Community land ownership can bring tremendous benefits both to communities themselves and Scotland as a whole.

"Land ownership is key to building independent, resilient rural communities and creating a sense of confidence and community empowerment.

"That's why the Scottish Government continues to fully support buyouts and is committed to providing opportunities for rural communities to acquire land."

The announcement will be welcomed by Community Land Scotland, the umbrella organisation which represents Scotland's community landowners such as Assynt, Eigg, Gigha, and Galson It was established to campaign for a new land fund and to revitalise the community land movement.

Last year it argued for £10m over the remaining four years of this Parliament. At £6m for three years, the community landowners are likely to regard this as very close to their ambitions, and a significant step forward.

Meanwhile, Scotland's community landowners have been recognised in a national scheme to identify Britain's "new radicals" – people and organisations pursuing innovative solutions to established economic and social problems.

Welcoming the recognition by Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), David Cameron, chairman of Community Land Scotland, said: "We are delighted to receive this recognition and for community landowners to take their place among others who are innovating and leading the way to find new ways to tackle long-standing problems."

Highland historian Professor Jim Hunter, who nominated the community land sector award, said: "In the last 20 years, people in the Highlands and Islands have taken into community ownership an area equivalent to that of an English county like Nottinghamshire or West Yorkshire. That's remarkable enough.

"What's still more remarkable is the way those same people have done things – like reversing population loss and growing long-shrinking economies – once thought impossible."