Culture for development: the Italian dualism and the Ford-SVIMEZ Centre (1955-1969)

Abstract This article reconstructs the history of the ‘Centro per gli Studi sullo Sviluppo Economico’ created through a collaboration between the SVIMEZ (Associazione per lo sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno) and the Ford Foundation and active between 1958 and 1969. Through the analysis of unpublished documentation from the SVIMEZ archives, the article shows how the ‘Italian laboratory’ of Southern Italy became an international case study in the context of the Cold War and the dawn of development economics. The Centre played a crucial role in training economists and officials and in disseminating the Italian experience at the Mediterranean and global levels, combining international theoretical approaches with the empirical legacy of policies for the ‘Mezzogiorno’. The paper highlights how this experience represented a meeting point between American philanthropy, Western modernisation and bottom-up development practices, contributing to the construction of transnational networks and the spread of development culture in the era of decolonisation.