Re-Politicising the Market Through the Commons: Land Associations and Collective Governance in a Southern European Mountain Region

This paper contributes to the debate on the re-politicisation of the market in Southern Europe by examining contemporary processes of commons reactivation in territories historically marginalised by industrial capitalist development. Drawing on ethnographic research on agricultural settlement policies promoted by radical ecological and neo-rural movements, the article investigates land associations as socio-legal devices capable of re-embedding land, labour and community relations within collective frameworks, challenging the depoliticised logic of the market in contexts marked by depopulation, land abandonment and social fragmentation. The theoretical framework is grounded in critical approaches to the commons as social practices, rather than as fixed resources. Following Peter Linebaugh’s conception of commoning, the paper understands the commons as historically situated, conflictual and reproductive relations that exceed both private property and state-centred governance. In dialogue with Silvia Federici, the analysis highlights how land commons represent a crucial site of resistance against contemporary forms of accumulation by dispossession, reopening spaces for social reproduction, territorial autonomy and the reactivation of embodied and situated knowledges. These perspectives are further integrated with selected contributions from Ostrom, Harvey, and Dardot and Laval, framing the commons as a contested field where institutionalisation, market pressures and transformative political potential coexist. Empirically, the paper focuses on the case of Colloro, a small mountain village in the Val d’Ossola (Northern Italy), historically characterised—since the early Middle Ages—by communal land regimes, codified in local statutes, and by strong traditions of collective self- governance. The recent establishment of a land association in Colloro is analysed not merely as a technical instrument for land consolidation, but as a contemporary reactivation of long-standing alpine commons, connecting historical institutional arrangements with present-day experiments in collective land use. The land association enables the removal of agricultural and forest land from speculative or abandonment dynamics, reorienting it towards collective use and ecological reproduction. In this sense, it represents a concrete attempt to re-politicise land as a social relation, countering its reduction to a market commodity. The paper situates this process within the broader historical trajectory of Southern European mountain regions, where industrialisation and urban-centred development have systematically extracted labour and value, producing demographic decline and territorial vulnerability. By analysing land associations as hybrid institutions, operating at the intersection of grassroots initiatives, public policies and post-capitalist imaginaries, the article shows how markets are not merely regulated or corrected, but actively contested and reconfigured from below. These practices do not aim to exit the market entirely; rather, they politicise it by subordinating exchange to collective decision-making, social needs and ecological constraints. The case of Colloro demonstrates how commons-based land governance can function as a laboratory for the re-politicisation of the market in Southern Europe, revealing the persistence of communal institutions as living resources for contemporary struggles over land, livelihood and social reproduction. Far from being nostalgic remnants of the past, commons emerge here as a political frontier of late capitalism, where alternative modes of economic organisation and territorial belonging are actively negotiated and enacted.