The future of energy generation is expected to become increasingly decentralized. Today, many customers are already more than demand units, they also act as energy producers (prosumers) and thus participants in the energy market. The development of energy cooperatives with underlying microgrids in recent years undermines this observation. Information and communication technologies enable the ma...

We hypothesize that institutions such as agricultural cooperatives influence regional levels of variety diversity through input supply, processing or marketing functions. This diversity can also affect yield, a partial measure of crop productivity. We test these hypotheses with data from southern Italy, a mega-diversity spot and centre of diversity for durum wheat. Cooperatives in the southern ...

Cooperative enterprises were first founded to organize business activity in a more humane and democratic fashion than was the case conventional firms promote social goals broader community beyond profit maximization. This orientation has led challenges for cooperative governance as these seek balance pursuit of their objectives with survival competitive markets. The universe is very diverse, ho...

water user cooperatives were formed due to consideration to people's empowerment and participation in water investment and management. the purpose of this study was to investigate the mechanisms of development and strengthening of water user cooperatives in the aras river basin. the study population consisted of the management board members of the water user cooperatives in the aras basin in th...

2 Is cooperative action modern or old fashioned? Why should policymakers pursue it in development strategies? In what way are cooperatives different in terms of economic theory and organisation theory? And if there are differences in organisation, human resource management practices, property rights and forms of collective action, what are the governance issues to be addressed so as to allow co...

This study analyzes characteristics determining member’s willingness to invest in cooperatives using ordered logit model. The data were collected in a field survey among 122 cooperative members in north-central China. The descriptive analysis of survey evidence suggests that cooperatives in China generally having poor ability to deliver the processing services related to product package, gradin...