Bernard Maris and Institutional Economics: An Interlocution on Regional Transformation

An admirer of John Maynard Keynes and an advocate of a historically grounded economic theory, the French economist, Bernard Maris, investigated the possible emergence of alternative monetary, productive, and distributive institutional arrangements for a more just society. Based on a dialogue between institutional economics and Bernard Maris, the present paper aims at proposing general guidelines for the construction of a plan for subnational development towards a more equitable and inclusive society on the regional, individual, and geo-economic levels. With a special focus on the region of Occitanie-Maris's native region, located in the Southwest of France-the study borrows Karl Polanyi's lens, in his The Great Transformation, to envision a possible reduction of dependency in each one of those three levels through the process of decommodification of money, labor, and land, respectively. Because of its ability to take into consideration specificities (being them departmental, territorial, and/or social), institutional economic theory seems adequate to support subnational development, especially in a region with great diversity and a high level of socio-economic and geographic disparity like Occitanie.