ECOs: Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives
Now’s the time to design sustainable landscapes.
Ecoregional Cooperatives can help.
This page describes ECOs as a conceptual approach to landscape conservation and cooperative governance.
The following essay explores Ecoregional Cooperatives as a conceptual governance model, independent of any specific policy initiative.
What are Ecoregional Cooperatives?
Ecoregional Cooperatives (ECOs) are a conceptual organizational model for coordinating conservation and development activities at ecoregional scales. As envisioned, ECOs would be locally led, member-based cooperative entities designed to bring together diverse landscape stakeholders through a multi-stakeholder governance structure. The intent is to create institutional capacity for addressing interconnected challenges such as pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss across landscapes that span multiple jurisdictions and land uses.
Rather than operating as regulatory bodies or single-purpose programs, ECOs are conceived as coordinating platforms. They would support collaborative planning, design, implementation and monitoring processes that align conservation initiatives and development activities with shared ecological and social objectives at local and ecoregional levels. Emphasis is placed on process—how priorities are identified, decisions are made, and actions are coordinated—rather than on prescribing specific outcomes.
In practice, activities associated with an ECO could include a wide range of conservation and land-use initiatives, depending on regional context and stakeholder priorities. Examples might include:
Afforestation and restoration of degraded habitats
Climate resilience and mitigation initiatives coordinated with regional innovation or technology partnerships
Indigenous-led conservation practices, such as prescribed fire or species restoration programs
Voluntary conservation projects on private lands
Regenerative agriculture initiatives
Renewable energy siting and development coordinated with landscape-scale planning
Tribal, federal, and state land protection or management efforts
These examples are illustrative rather than exhaustive. The ECO concept is intended to provide a flexible institutional framework capable of adapting to different ecological conditions, governance contexts, and stakeholder configurations.
The goal of Ecoregional Cooperatives is to support inclusive—multi-jurisdictional and multi-sector—and deliberative, science-informed decision-making processes that can operate at local and ecoregional scales. Through these processes, ECOs are intended to help align conservation and development activities with shared ecological objectives while supporting regionally appropriate economic activity.
What Are Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives?
Cooperatives have traditionally been organized around a single primary member group, such as producer cooperatives owned by producers, worker cooperatives owned by employees, or consumer cooperatives owned by customers. Multi-stakeholder cooperatives differ in that they are intentionally structured to include multiple categories of members within a single organization. These may include producers, workers, consumers, and community or supporting members who may not be directly involved in day-to-day operations.
The defining characteristic of multi-stakeholder cooperatives is not consensus or uniformity of interest, but the formal recognition of interdependence among distinct stakeholder groups. Governance and ownership structures are designed to accommodate differing roles, perspectives, and impacts while providing a shared institutional framework for decision-making.
In some jurisdictions, such as Quebec, these arrangements are referred to as solidarity cooperatives. The term reflects an organizational emphasis on structuring cooperation across difference, rather than assuming alignment of interests. In this context, “solidarity” functions as a governance principle rather than a normative claim—an approach to organizing participation, representation, and accountability across multiple stakeholder groups within a single enterprise.
Across contexts, multi-stakeholder cooperatives are best understood as one institutional form among many for managing complexity in settings where social, economic, and environmental interests intersect. Their effectiveness depends less on the label applied than on the specific rules, capacities, and decision-making processes through which participation is organized.
What is a Cooperative?
“A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”
A cooperative (co-op) is a member-owned enterprise formed to meet shared economic, social, or service-related needs through collective organization. Ownership is restricted to members of the cooperative, who hold equity interests according to the rules established in the cooperative’s bylaws. Governance is typically based on democratic principles, most commonly structured around one member, one vote, regardless of the amount of capital contributed.
Cooperative membership can encompass individuals from diverse backgrounds and circumstances, depending on the purpose and scope of the organization. Cooperatives have been established across a wide range of sectors to provide goods and services such as childcare, food distribution, agricultural production, housing, financial services, and other community-based needs. The specific form a cooperative takes reflects the context in which it operates and the functions it is designed to serve.
Cooperatives are often distinguished from other business entities by three defining features: member ownership, member control, and member benefit. In a cooperative, the same group of people holds ownership interests, participates in governance, and receives the benefits generated by the enterprise. How these elements are structured in practice varies across legal frameworks and organizational models, but together they define the cooperative as a distinct institutional form.
Democratic Control
In any business enterprise, owners exercise their rights through participation in governance and decision-making processes. In investor-owned firms, voting power is typically allocated in proportion to capital investment, meaning that decision-making authority increases with the number of shares held.
Cooperatives use a different governance structure. Decision-making authority is generally assigned on a per-member basis, rather than per share of capital. Under this model, each member participates in governance as an individual owner, most commonly through a one member, one vote system, regardless of the amount of equity contributed.
This approach to democratic control reflects an organizational choice about how authority is distributed within the enterprise. While it broadens participation in formal decision-making, it also requires clear rules, effective facilitation, and institutional capacity to function at scale. The specific mechanisms through which members exercise control—such as general assemblies, elected boards, or delegated representation—vary across cooperatives and legal contexts.
Joint Ownership
In a cooperative enterprise, members occupy multiple roles simultaneously: they are participants in the enterprise and collective owners of it. This distinguishes cooperatives from firms owned by external investors, where ownership and use are typically separated and decision-making authority is concentrated among capital holders.
Joint ownership in a cooperative links governance and use. Member-owners establish the enterprise to meet identified needs and retain ownership rights as long as they remain members. These needs may be primarily economic, such as access to employment, services, or markets, or they may extend to non-economic considerations, such as environmental stewardship or community well-being, depending on the cooperative’s purpose and bylaws.
Importantly, joint ownership does not eliminate tradeoffs or conflicts among members. Instead, it provides a governance framework in which competing priorities—financial performance, service provision, and broader social or environmental considerations—are addressed through collectively defined rules and decision-making processes. How those priorities are balanced varies by cooperative and context, but joint ownership establishes the institutional conditions under which such deliberation can occur.
Co-ops: A Long-Standing International Movement
“Equity. Equality. Self-help. Self-responsibility. Democracy. Solidarity. These are the values on which the modern cooperative movement was founded and the basis for the organization of every cooperative enterprise in the world today.”
Cooperative enterprises operate across a wide range of sectors and are not limited to any single industry or economic context. In the United States, cooperatives have historically played prominent roles in areas such as agriculture and finance, including farmer-owned processing and marketing cooperatives and member-owned credit unions. These arrangements emerged as practical responses to shared needs, allowing participants to pool resources, manage risk, and coordinate activities within specific economic and geographic contexts.
Cooperatives are also found in diverse forms internationally. In regions such as Quebec, Northern Italy, India, and Japan, cooperative organizations constitute a significant component of regional and national economies, operating under different legal frameworks and cultural conditions. Their structures and outcomes vary widely, reflecting differences in policy environments, market conditions, and governance capacity.
One frequently cited example is the Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque Country. Mondragon comprises a large association of cooperative enterprises spanning manufacturing, education, retail, and services. While often referenced for its scale and longevity, it represents one particular institutional configuration among many, shaped by specific historical, social, and political circumstances.
Taken together, these examples illustrate that cooperative enterprises are neither novel nor uniform. They constitute a broad family of organizational forms that have been adapted over time to meet different economic and social needs. Their relevance to contemporary challenges depends less on their historical pedigree than on how their governance structures and decision-making processes are designed and applied in specific contexts.