Co-operative Resilience

Despite challenges and limitations, co-operatives in the developing world are gradually growing in number and successfully serving many individuals and communities around the world in need of basic services. In fact, there are numerous examples where they’ve proved more resilient than conventional companies. Anchored in their local community and guided by their core values and principles, they’ve continued to function even when confronted with economic, political and environmental crises.

Some co-operatives, however, perform better than others and these could provide key insights on what might be needed to develop a resilient organisational structure – defined as the ability to cope with shocks and crises and adapt to new circumstances while simultaneously taking advantage of opportunities that emerge from these.

Until now, co-operative literature has largely underexplored the factors that are conducive to resilience. Now, in Resilience, a chapter in The Co-operative Firm Keywords edited by Andrea Bernardi and Salvatore Monni and published by RomaTrE-Press, IKD member Alexander Borda-Rodriguez and Sara Vicari have drawn on a systematic review of literature in both developed and developing countries. The factors they found to be conducive to co-operative resilience were then used as the basis of their research in Malawi and Uganda.

In particular, the authors identify five overlapping and interconnected factors as those most conducive to co-operative resilience:

• membership rooted in co-operative values
• networks
• collective skills
• innovation
• government support.

The chapter also draws on the authors' findings that the Malawian co-operative unions have embraced a reflective attitude towards their own performance and limitations that has significantly increased their success, allowing them to identify key weaknesses and to develop strategies and social and technological forms of innovation to deal with these.

Read Resilience in full.