A new (and open) cooperativism has been proposed as a viable conceptualisation for the rapid (re)development of cooperative values and principles in grassroots movements rather than the institutions of ‘old’ (consumer-based) co-operatives.
There are various points in history theorised as significant to the development of new cooperativism, including: the social co-operatives of Italy that developed in the 1970s and led to new co-operative laws in 1991; the subsequent rise of social and community co-operatives in Italy; the ‘multi-stakeholder turn’ in cooperative thinking in the 1970s that fuelled development of social enterprise in the UK in the late 1980s/early 1990s; the enactment of legislation in Quebec in 1995 that led to a rise in the number of multi-stakeholder and solidarity co-operatives in North America; the rise of grassroots movements in South America, particularly after the 2001 crisis in Argentina that led to the creation of a movement of ‘recovered companies’.
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