Stream 3

Cooperatives and Decolonizing the Economy

Stream leads: Judith Harris (University of Winnipeg), Ana Heras (Universidad Nacional de San Martin), Marcelo Vieta (University of Toronto)

Description:

Empirical evidence is increasingly showing that cooperatives are diverse organizations able to efficaciously address a plurality of socio-economic needs and desires. They do so in more democratic and sustainable ways than investor-owned firms and are more responsive to communities and people who want to enact social solidarity in practice (Bianchi & Vieta, 2020; Burin et al, 2022). There is, it has been theorized, a “cooperative advantage” for community resilience and social solidarity in practice (Novkovic, 2008; Spear, 2000; Vieta & Lionais, 2015). This advantage extends to populations whose access to the right to labour is threatened or constrained, and social-solidarity and cooperative models become crucial ways of organizing (Harris & McLeod, 2014; Heras et al, 2023). In short, cooperatives uphold local economies, secure community wealth, create and sustain decent jobs, and foster workplaces where decision making is in the hands of workers, thus creating spaces for exercising civic and human rights daily (Vieta et al., 2016).

Over the past 200 years, cooperatives and other kinds of social-solidarity enterprises have organized working-class or community-led responses to capitalist-led oversight and crises (Birchall & Hammond Ketilson, 2009). And they stepped up again in serving and protecting communities during the recent pandemic (De la Fuente et al, 2022; Hill et al., 2024; Merrien et al., 2023). Cooperatives are thus also suggestive of ways beyond capitalist enclosures and exploitation, prefiguring ways of decolonizing economic life.

However, as cooperatives fill in the gaps left by capitalist greed and financialized neoliberal states (Ratner, 2015), they have also been accommodative to capital and appropriated by capitalocentric policies and practices (de Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2010; Gibson-Graham, 2006). The dominance of neo-liberal practices continues to deprive people of the capacity to imagine any alternative (Restakis, 2021). Often neglected in the official historical narrative, cooperatives have been used as instruments for empire building (Rhodes, 2017) and settler-colonial land-grabbing in the project of displacing Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands (Sengupta, 2015; Wuttunee, 2006). Moreover, non-formal and informal cooperation and economic organizing that predate official cooperative histories by millennia have been ignored or effaced by Eurocentric paradigms and research approaches (Gordon Nembhard, 2014; Hossein et al., 2023).

This stream of the conference seeks to bring to light some of the countless examples of informal and formal cooperatives and cooperation throughout the global South and North that suggest and prefigure pathways to decolonizing the economy. While keeping hold of cooperativism’s historical contradictions, the panel seeks to unpack and put into relief the ways that informal and formal cooperatives and cooperation have been mobilized historically and contemporaneously for organizing economic life, for resisting capitalocentric ways, and for reconceptualizing a world with less exploitation that promises to contest and eradicate neocolonial, extractivist, and marginalizing tendencies.

Examples of the papers and presentations welcomed in this stream, highlighting either historical or contemporary practices of decolonized and decolonizing cooperation and cooperativism, may include:

• Indigenous or non-Eurocentric communities’ myriad economies of reciprocity, redistribution, householding, solidarity economics, or democratic organizing (Curl, 2009; Healy et al., 2023; Kimmerer, 2013; Trosper, 2022; Weston & Bollier, 2013);

• Reciprocity, foundational to co-operation (ICA Principles) and land-based cultures’ further acknowledgement of reciprocal relations between human kind and the land or all our relations, “the honourable harvest” (Kimmerer 2013) being one expression of this mutuality;

• African-rooted notions of ujamaa cooperation, susu rotating savings and credit groups, ubuntu ways of being with others and the world, or BIPOC-led cooperatives (Gordon Nembhard, 2014; Hossein et al., 2023);

• Andean systems of ayllu village production, and concepts and practices of suma qamaña, sumac kawsay and other Indigenous expressions of living a “plentiful life” found throughout what is today known as Latin America (Gudynas, 2011; Vieta & Heras, 2022);

• Practices of the commons (De Angelis and Harvie 2014; De Angelis 2017);

• Autochthonous or Indigenous-led forms of cooperation and communal organizing, such as practiced by the Zapatistas, Rojava’s democratic confederalist system of socio-economic organizing, Cooperation Jackson, or other less- or non-capitalist cooperative-based models (Azzellini & Vieta, 2025);

• Practices of mutual aid, caring economies, eco-villages; community barn raisings, and communal work bees, such as the Finnish talkoots (Paterson, 2010)

• Infinite forms of craft-based production (Horvat,1982); or

• Myriad other forms of less-capitalocentric and more communal forms of cooperation and cooperativism (Anderson et al, 2023).

Questions taken up could include:

• What are some of the ways that non-formal, informal, unofficial, and formal cooperatives or cooperation are taken up today in the global South and North for contesting and moving beyond capitalocentric ways?

• How have cooperatives both served or resisted (neo)colonial projects?

• How are cooperatives deployed for moving beyond (neo)colonial practices and policies?

• How can the global South be strengthened by collaborating cooperatively across geographies?

• How do we reconcile the ways of knowing that underlie the formal ICA co-operative values and principles with non-formal ways of knowing and the values and principles that guide co-operatives in land-based cultures (Harris, 2021)?

References:

Anderson, G., Desai, D., Heras, A.I., Spreen, C. (2023). Creating third spaces of learning for post-capitalism: Lessons from educators, artists, and activists. London: Routledge.

Azzellini, D. & Vieta, M. (2025). Commoning labour and democracy at work: When workers and communities take over. London: Routledge.

Bianchi, M. & Vieta, M. (2020). Co-operatives, territories and social capital: reconsidering a theoretical framework. International Journal of Social Economics, 47(12), 1599–1617.

Birchall, J. & Hammond Ketilson, L. (2009). Resilience of the cooperative business model in times of crisis. Geneva: International Labour Organization.

Burin, D, Heras, A., Tejerina, R., Navarro, D. Straini, A., Morelli, F., Blanco, A., & Caputa, M. (2022). Procesos de subjetivación y aprendizajes cooperativos. El caso de PRONOAR, Rosario, Argentina como una intervención post-estructural. Revista Sociedad Hoy, 29, 61-89.

Curl, J. (2009). For all the people: Uncovering the hidden history of cooperation, cooperative movements, and communalism in America. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

De la Fuente Goldman, J., Heras, A.I., & Burin, D. (2022). Trabajo y salud mental. Dispositivos social solidarios y políticas públicas durante y postpandemia. Revista de Prácticas y Discursos, 11(18), 1-22.

de Peuter, G. and Dyer-Witheford, N. (2010). Commons and cooperatives. Affinities, 4(1), 30-56.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006). A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon Nembhard, J. (2014). Collective courage: A history of African American cooperative economic thought and practice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Gudynas, E. (2011). Buen vivir: Today’s tomorrow. Development, 54(4), 441–44

Harris, J. (2021). Creating space for economic reconciliation: Indigenous panel with Mary Nirlingayuk, Wanda Watunee and Louise Champagne. Review of International Co-operation, 106, 92-102.

Harris, J. and McLeod, J. (2014). Complex Alliances: A Community- and Institution-Based Project for Educating Justice-Involved Women. Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, 4, 211-233.

Healy S., Heras, A.I., & North, P. (2023). Community Economics. In I. Yi (Ed.)., Encyclopedia of the social and solidarity economy. A collective work of the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on SSE (UNTFSSE). Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

Heras, A., Burin, D., De la Fuente Goldman, J., Herrera, P., Movida de Loco, Vieta, M. (2023). Inclusión sociolaboral en clave de salud mental comunitaria. Una perspectiva geográfica. Párrafos geográficos, 2(22), 12-36.

Horvat, B. (1982). The political economy of socialism: A Marxist social theory. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Hossein, C.Z,, Sharon, Wright Austin, D., & Edmonds, K. (2023). Beyond racial capitalism: Co-operatives in the African diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kimmerer, R.W. (2015). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Novkovic, S. (2008). Defining the co-operative difference. Journal of Socio-Economics, 37(6), 2168-2177.

Paterson, A.G. (2010.) A buzz between rural cooperation and the online swarm. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 4(1): 83-109.

Ratner, C., 2015. Neoliberal co-optation of leading co-op organizations, and a socialist counterpolitics of co-operation. Monthly Review, 66 (9), 18-30.

Rhodes, R. (2017). Empire and cooperation: How the British Empire used cooperatives in its development strategies, 1900–1970. Edinburgh, UK: Birlinn.

Sengupta, U. (2015). Indigenous cooperatives in Canada: The complex relationship between cooperatives, community economic development, colonization, and culture. Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 4(1), 121-152.

Trosper, R.L. (2022). Indigenous economics: Sustaining peoples and their lands. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Speth, J.G. & Courrier, K. (2021). The new systems reader: Alternatives to a failed economy. New York and London: Routledge.

Spear, R. (2000). The cooperative advantage. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 71(4), 507-523.

Weston, B. & Bollier, D. (2013). Green governance: Ecological survival, human rights, and the law of the commons. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wuttunee, W. (2006). Making space: Aboriginal perspectives of community economic development. In E. Shragge, & M. Toye (Eds.), Community economic development: Building for social change. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press.

Vieta, M., Quarter, J., Spear, R., & Moskovskaya, A. (2016). Participation in worker co-operatives. In D. Horton Smith, R.A. Stebbins, & J. Grotz (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of volunteering, civic participation, and nonprofit associations (pp. 436-453). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vieta, M. & Heras, A.I. (2022). Organizational solidarity in practice in Bolivia and Argentina: Building coalitions of resistance and creativity’. Organization. 29(2), 271-94.

Vieta, M, & Lionais, D. (2022). The new cooperativism, the commons, and the post-capitalist Imaginary. Journal of Co-operative Studies, 55(3), 8-24.