Developing Public‒Cooperative Partnerships

Public-cooperative partnerships – cooperative organisations acting in collaboration with government bodies to involve communities and meet their needs – offer many opportunities to strengthen state-citizen cooperation. This chapter reflects on lessons from past examples of associative democracy and reviews the evidence from new innovations from different countries. In Northern Italy, multi-stakeholder co-operatives provide social care for the elderly, the disabled and marginalised groups, with workers, volunteers, and service users all given a real say. New social contracts in support of public-cooperative partnerships have been drawn up and backed with local authority by-laws in cities such as Ghent and Bologna. In the US, community land trusts have flourished in Vermont and other parts of the country. In Wales, politicians and communities have jointly developed new forms of democratic housing. These diverse examples demonstrate how public-cooperative partnerships can be more widely developed to expand the scope and depth of state-citizen cooperation.