Rural Cooperatives as Agents of Change: A Research Report and a Debate. Rural Institutions and Planned Change, Vol. VIII.

In the 1960s, UNRISD carried out research projects on development planning and rural cooperatives. Work on cooperatives, which involved 40 case studies in 13 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, identified their advantages in terms of regulating markets and promoting more equitable forms of resource allocation, but it also revealed serious limitations. If cooperatives were to contribute effectively to social and economic development, there needed to be a favourable sociopolitical context where they were supported by state policies and local social structures. Often, however, cooperatives were controlled by local elites—and when they did challenge existing power structures, they were easily neutralized. This is the final volume of this series.