Rethinking the Southern Italy Development in the Early Nineties

Within Italy, the existence of a “Southern Question” emerged after the Unification of the Italian Kingdom (1861). It evokes the problem of the underdevelopment of this area. In 1992 the government terminated its “extraordinary intervention” program to develop the South (dated to 1950). The paper explores the role of expert knowledge in rethinking and arguing new approaches to address the problem of Southern Italy development. It claims that the relation between politics and experts (historically clustered around reviews, academic research groups and research centres) reinterprets and negotiates the problem’s definitions and solutions. Using evidences from archival work on documents and records of the Parliamentary Committee for Supervision of the Ordinary and Special State Intervention in the Mezzogiorno, the paper analyses how expert knowledge could exercise its influence in a period of national political crisis. It suggests that the interaction between experts and government could also have some unintentional performative and diffusive effects.