engleski

Cooperatives In Local Communities - Weaknesses And Resilience

Cooperatives as alternative economic model can be found everywhere around the world. Recently, with the growing demand for investments in cooperatives due to increasing global competition, some of them have gone through transformation toward big agro - industrial corporations. Despite long and rich tradition of cooperatives, Croatia shares with other neighboring transition countries many negative experiences associated with cooperatives from socialism and early transition period. Cooperatives as alternative economic model are nowadays oriented toward local community and social needs of unprivileged population in risk of poverty. Their development in the direction of social entrepreneurship is particularly interesting in offering efficient models of new systems of social welfare. In Croatia, the cooperatives mostly operate as fragmented units, have no export orientation, nor are they approaching to more efficient co-operative models. In the paper are presented the findings from two projects: "Role of Local and Regional Self-Government Units in Cooperative Development" and "Factors of Success and Models of Cooperative Cooperation" that are specifically focused on developing a networking model at the local level, which provides a better environment for small, poorly developed Croatian co-operatives. Data from 43 interviews and on –line survey based on the sample of 600 cooperatives are analysed with the focus on detecting the weaknesses and resilience in economic performance as main factors of cooperatives’ sustainability.

cooperatives ; resilience ; Croatia

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