Women Cooperatives as Community Cooperatives in the Scope of the Multistakeholder Model of Governance: A Conceptual Approach

The relationship between cooperatives and their communities has progressively gained on legitimacy across the years. It has, therefore, become essential to take community into consideration when studying cooperatives, especially from a governance perspective. Effectively, women cooperatives in Morocco and in other countries continue to represent one of the major components of social economy and a dynamic motor for socio-economic growth of fragile groups within the community. However, despite their importance, they are still clearly lagging behind in comparison to cooperatives in Europe, for example; the question of governance is rarely tackled as a possible barrier to their growth and sustainability. Hence, this question of governance raises our interest as we look at women cooperatives as a specific type of coops which identity and mission slightly differs from other types of cooperative organizations. Accordingly, we shed the light on new models of governance, namely the multistakeholder model and we refer to social cooperatives in Italy which purpose is the integration of disadvantaged categories within the community, a mission that aligns with the core objective of women cooperatives. In this paper, we argue that the exquisite nature of women cooperatives requires a specific model of governance. In our work, we introduce a conceptual framework where we highlight the link of women coops to their community as we attempt to define women coops as community coops1 that strive for upgrading the socio-economic situation of women considered disadvantaged within their realities.