Distributism is not a single clear doctrine, like liberalism, Liberarianism, or Communism. Its basic thought structures may in fact preclude such: its core idea, that things should be "distributed", speak to a sense, at least implicitly, that true one size fits all solutions simply might not really exist.
I believe its most influential form historically was the Chesterbelloc's, though that version is a bit too trenchantly Catholic and too mired in medieval nostalgia.
As I would describe it, distributism holds that socialism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin, and that what they represent is the
concentration of wealth. In socialism the government owns everything and decides who gets what; in capitalism the capitalists own everything and decide who gets what. Both represent the transfer of property away from ordinary people and towards huge centralised organisations, and in the end the organisation has all the power. So an individual's life becomes dependent on the organisation. It doesn't matter whether your life is dominated by the state or by the company you work for: the result is the same, which is you not having any power to decide how to live.
According to distributism, the best response to this is to instead try to distribute property widely. Rather than a mega-rich state or a mega-rich company which then looks after lots of people, every individual household should own enough to get by. An early distributist slogan was "
three acres and a cow" - the idea being that every household would own that much.
If you're familiar with Catholic social thought, distributism has similarities to the idea of
subsidiarity. Subsidiarity says that basically everything that needs doing should be done on the smallest or most local level that can practically do it, so you can see the strong localist trend.
For what it's worth, while I'm highly sympathetic to distributism, I think a major problem it has is that in a modern economy the competitive advantage you get from centralisation is so massive that distributed communities can't really compete. So your options are to give up distributism, or be outcompeted and destroyed by the people who did centralise. In that light I think Chesterton's and Belloc's suggestions are not practical today, and indeed weren't practical even in the 1910s. (Scott Alexander
reviews Chesterton and points out that he seems to think that "roll back the Industrial Revolution" is an option, but... well, it really isn't.) So I'm also sympathetic to H. G. Wells'
socialist response to Chesterton and the distributists.
As with most things in politics, it all comes down to balance. Get too enthusiastic about distributism and you fail: centralisation is too powerful. But centralise too much and the liberty of the common man and woman vanishes entirely, as does any power for them to order their lives as they choose. How do you build a state strong enough to protect individuals and families, but not so strong that it destroys them? And having built that state, how do you make sure that it even does its job, rather than ends up full of people fighting silly status games and competing for power and nepotically seeking advantage?