ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the path trodden by Italian agricultural economists in a series of projects concerned with the problems of marginality. It examines the importance of an awareness of the variety of the causes of marginalization processes. The chapter shows how the researchers very soon realized that the phenomenon of marginality is pluridimensional, and therefore determined by a set of interacting causes. The meso-level analyses aimed at an integration of the structural analyses like these performed for the Increase of Agricultural Resource Productivity (IPRA) project with information that is difficult to 'measure' using quantitative methods. In fact, in the course of the IPRA project, despite the innovative overall approach and the objective of proposing initiatives to lift the areas out of a state of marginality, the researchers showed an understandable difficulty in setting aside traditional approaches.
