In this paper we focus on financial co-operatives as economic enterprises with a civic mission, their process of repositioning vis-a-vis the market, civil society and the state, and the resulting 'co-operative trilemma' that they face. A recent qualitative analysis of five major co-operative...

Using data from eleven African countries, examines the impact of liberalization measures on the status, structural organization and performance of cooperatives in Africa.

Discussion on the contribution of cooperatives to poverty reduction in Africa has quite often been based on their potential role rather than the actual impact, partly due to the dearth of empirical studies since the early 1990s. This paper provides evidence on the contribution of cooperatives to...

The cooperative sector in Belgium has always been very much linked to other social movements. In the 1990s the backbone of the sector, namely the cooperative banks, have undergone major transformations. In this article, the two most important cooperative financial holdings that were created to...

As a particularly heterogeneous social System, Belgian NGO's have recently been involved in a self appraisal process. Given the multiple internal and external challenges facing them, this process is considered as indispensable to the reaffirming of their legitimacy and even their survival. Among...