This page helps you locate resources to develop a deeper understanding of what cooperatives are, their history, their futures, and how they can lead to transformative change in communities and societies.
The academic resources on this page are easily accessible to anyone interested in cooperatives. This page also provides content for academics to inform students about cooperatives. All articles linked in this page are open access.
Consensus Decision Making
Consensus decision making sits at the heart of cooperative organising. However, this process is often poorly understood, this can lead to concerns and conflicts. The guide below produced by Seeds for Change offers a theory for consensus decision making that also includes practical guidance on the process.
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The cooperative movement is strongly interconnected with the history of anarchist political theories. This might seem surprising for some because anarchism is often viewed as chaotic, destructive, even violent. And yet, anarchism simply refers to voluntary collective organising for mutual benefit (as opposed to organising with principles of hierarchical power).
Unfortunately, anarchist organising remains poorly understood, partly because its supporters tend to resist formal definitions and constitutions. An important exception to this trend is The Anarchic Agreements text, produced by Ruth Kinna, Alex Prichard, Thomas Swann, and Seeds for Change.
As well as helping to explain the overlap between anarchist theories and cooperative organising, this document provides a field guide for building groups and coalitions capable of radical change.
These same authors have produced two pamphlets for more detailed information about specific topics mentioned in the above PDF. To learn more about this, follow the button below to be taken to another page:
Anarchist Political Economies
Based on history’s past of anarchist decision making and politics, it is not impossible to imagine a world today where cooperatives are influenced by anarchist political economies.
This is an article that states that anarchist organising values always risk to be influenced by the short-term interests in the presence of capitalist competitive pressures. Therefore, it can be quite difficult to work with anarchist organising values in today’s market where there is very high competition, there is scarcity and economic uncertainty.
This article also discusses utopianism, as the author states that utopias always have to be re-envisaged in the light of past and real-existing practices.
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Multi-stakeholder Cooperatives
In most cases, cooperatives will be influenced by more than one group of people (or stakeholders), meaning that they will be classified as multi-stakeholder cooperatives.
More clearly, rather than being organised around a single class of members, multi-stakeholder cooperatives formally allow for two or more “stakeholder” groups within the same organisation, such as consumers, workers, volunteers and more.
The following article will further explain this concept, as well as take you through the opportunities and challenges that multi-stakeholder cooperatives come with, concluding to when this approach may be beneficial. Lastly, it will also discuss additional ways to engage a range of stakeholders in a cooperative’s success.
Cooperative Goals: Socially and Economically Sustainable Goals
Cooperatives, as a whole, not only strive to meet the collective needs of its members, but also society as a whole.
The article below investigates how cooperatives can influence social and economic aspects of the markets.
Starting from how we can build capacity for living and organising in ways that align better with natural systems, the article below imagines many ecologically sustainable and socially just alternatives to problems we are currently experiencing.
It evaluates different ways of experiencing and understanding our social relationships, as well as how we research alternative organisations which are empowered to make the changes we all want to see – towards sustainability (in its broadest sense) and more.