Redistribution within a Democratic society : the 'finished business' of he Italian agrarian reform

The experience of the Italian agrarian reform defies the dominant view in today's development literature that the redistribution of agricultural land to the rural poor is not feasible under democratic regimes. This pessimistic view is based on the slowness and inefficiency of many expropriation and settlement schemes in the developing world, which have fallen victim of the undue influence of the landowners and of the technical complexities of implementation. This bleak generalization ignores the case of the Italian agrarian reform of the 1950s, which took place in the context of a newly restored democracy, and yet has effectively expropriated and redistributed hundreds of thousands of hectares to the rural poor in only three years. Despite its limited geographical coverage, agrarian reform has been able to end to a decades- long rural conflict; to eliminate the backward production system based on absentee latifundia; has re-vitalized land markets and promoted family farming. The following factors explain the unexpected effectiveness of the Italian agrarian reform. First, the concessions that the government chose to make to the landowning class - necessary within a democratic power-sharing system - consisted in a reduction of the territorial area covered by the program, but not in the relaxation of the expropriation procedure, whose automatism and objectiveness left few chances to the landowners to influence the process at the implementation stage.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Bianchi, Tito

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Judith Tendler.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29260

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29260