Cooperation In The Romanian Countryside

The collapse of communism in Romania held the promise of a revival of private, small-scale farming; however, the Romanian transition experience has not fulfilled these expectations. This book explores why farmers continue to place land in cooperative forms of farming when theory suggests that private farming is more productive, and whether there are efficiency gains to be had from cooperative farming endeavors.

This ambitious work is the definitive account of Russia's land reform initiatives from the late 1980s to today. In Russia, a country controlling more land than any other nation, land ownership is central to structures of power, class division, and agricultural production. The aim of Russian land reform for the past thirty years--to undo the collectivization of the Soviet era and encourage public ownership--has been largely unsuccessful. To understand this failure, Stephen Wegren examines contemporary land reform policies in terms of legislation, institutional structure, and human behavior. Using extensive survey data, he analyzes household behaviors in regard to land ownership and usage based on socioeconomic status, family size, demographic distribution, and regional differences. Wegren's study is important and timely, as Russian land reform will have a profound effect on Russia's ability to compete in an era of globalization.

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu's birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union.

The book demonstrates that reform policies_including privatization of land and the shift from collective to individual farming_have a significant impact on agricultural growth, rural incomes, and poverty alleviation. The analysis spans more than 40 years of agricultural and rural development in Azerbaijan, based on country-level statistical data and original farm and household surveys.

"Based on two years of fieldwork in a NE Romanian village, this book offers an ethnographic, interdisciplinary interpretation of social interactions in a low trust society. In Sateni, cooperation with unrelated or unfamiliar partners fails to take off while distrust permeates everyday life and cultural representations. This book argues that the costs of misplaced trust restricted Sateni moral expectations and cooperative practices to family, kinship, and friendship ties. Household autarchy and personalized morality offered an optimal strategy against political, ecological or social unpredictability. Trust appears by social agreement around cultural representations of moral behavior, persists by social interdependence, and collapses when interests misalign. Outside family-centric social relationships lies a struggle for scarce resources of land, money or prestige, with deception or predation lurking around every corner. Kinship, economy, politics, and rituals are organised around the distinction between the mutualism of trusted partners and perennial competition against the rest of the world. This ethnography analyses the intersection of ecology, history, traditions, social organisation, technology, and evolved human dispositions for cooperation and conflict which create and change a culture of distrust"--

Measuring Social and Economic Change in Rural Russia is based upon nine household surveys in seven rural regions of Russia from 1991 to 2003; including a four wave panel study over an eight-year period. The findings that O'Brien and Patsiorkovsky share in this important work are the only long-term indicators of how ordinary people have learned to adapt to an economic system that was thrust upon them when the Soviet Union collapsed. Three main themes are explored: the relationship between formal and informal institutional change; regional responses to reforms; and the impact of household labor, social networks and community involvement, and physical capital on inequality in material, social, and psychological conditions. This comprehensive study's conceptual and interdisciplinary approach will appeal to anyone interested in the transition of countries from socialist to market economies.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.