Climate change is undermining the importance and sustainability of cooperatives as important organizations in small holder agriculture in developing countries. To adapt, cooperatives could apply carbon farming practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance their business by increasing yields, economic returns and enhancing ecosystem services. This study aimed to identify carbon farming practices from literature and investigate the rate of application within cooperatives in Uganda. We reviewed scholarly literature and assed them based on their economic and ecological effects and trade-offs. Field research was done by through an online survey with smallholder farmers in 28 cooperatives across 19 districts in Uganda. We identified 11 and categorized them under three farming systems: organic farming, conservation farming and integrated farming. From the field survey we found that compost is the most applied CFP (54%), crop rotations (32%) and intercropping (50%) across the three categorizations. Dilemmas about right organic amendment quantities, consistent supplies and competing claims of residues for e.g. biochar production, types of inter crops need to be solved in order to further advance the application of CFPs amongst crop cooperatives in Uganda.
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Purpose: The main purpose of this thesis to explore the possible application of blockchain technology in solving issues and concerns of members and stakeholders in multi-stakeholder cooperatives, which prevent effective collaboration in governance.Design: This study is performed using an extensive literature study on blockchain technology, relevant business cases solving issues and concerns comparable to these in multi-stakeholder cooperatives and six semi-structured interviews with blockchain experts, using the business case of multi-stakeholder cooperative Gebiedscoöperatie Westerkwartier.Findings: Findings reveal blockchain-based solutions can contribute to solving existing issues and concerns in multi-stakeholder cooperatives, by implementing its main characteristics: creating transparency, immutability and distributed consensus. This results in increased trust, increased efficiency and accuracy in decision-making, decreased administrative costs due to self-executable smart contracts and enables product traceability in supply chains. However, information is retained in supply chains, preventing blockchain from reaching its full potential. In addition, smart contracts are not legally binding in all countries yet and blockchain, as most technologies, is subject to human or technical error.Value: Overall, this study contributes to understanding issues and concerns existing in multistakeholder cooperatives and the potential application and benefit of blockchain technology to solve existing issues preventing effective collaboration. Expert and participation: Jan Veuger
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What causes firms to behave the way they do when they face different investment opportunities? We argue that both people and processes are behind the decision-making of project implementation. Member and professional CEOs of cooperatives differ regarding their managerial vision towards upstream and downstream projects. Cooperatives with member CEOs are upstream focused and it is reflected by the cascading effect of negative vision bias towards downstream projects. When downstream activities become more important, cooperatives need to replace the member CEOs with professional CEOs. However, a cooperative with a professional CEO may still be in a disadvantageous position if the member-dominated Board of Directors' negative bias towards downstream projects is too strong, which may result in an investor owned firm being the efficient governance structure.
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Cooperatives are special because the members not only own the cooperative, but also patronize it. CEO’s decision has an impact on the overall members’ interests. Understanding how CEOs differ from members regarding their evaluations on cooperative performance and what causes the differences, is valuable for CEOs to best serve the members. This paper evaluates the difference between CEO and member evaluation regarding their cooperatives, and further examines the role of governance in predicting the evaluations and differences in evaluations, based on a set of first-hand data containing Chinese agricultural cooperatives (240 CEOs and 543 members). Cooperative performance is measured by three indicators: member profitability, social influence in the local community, and overall performance. The results show that members have higher scores than CEOs regarding member profitability and overall performance, while CEOs have a higher evaluation regarding social influence. “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in 'The Social Science Journal' on 27 Jan. 2020 available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.soscij.2019.01.006. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiao-peng-20466772/
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To facilitate energy transition, in several countries regulators have devised ‘regulatory sandboxes’ to create a participatory experimentation environment for exploring revision of energy law. These sandboxes allow for a two-way regulatory dialogue between an experimenter and an approachable regulator to innovate regulation and enable new socio-technical arrangements. We focus on the Dutch Energy Experimentation Decree (EED) that invites homeowners’ associations and energy cooperatives to propose projects prohibited by extant regulation. In order to localize, democratize and decentralize energy provision, local experimenters can, for instance, organise peer-to-peer supply and determine their own tariffs for energy transport.
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Energy cooperatives are beginning to expand their role from stimulating small-scale electricity production to developing local energy systems, including cooperatively owned energy storage solutions. However, many technical, social and financial obstacles are encountered in this process. It is as yet unclear how new roles of citizens, building owners, grid operators and energy cooperatives will develop. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess if a feasible business case is at all possible given present context conditions in the Netherlands.
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Why do cooperatives often pay a pooled price, despite the free-riding incentives it entails? In this paper, we highlight that a cooperative is an enterprise owned by a network of entrepreneurial members. By taking explicitly into account the social interactions among entrepreneurial members and the impact of social ties on members’ product quality provisions, we identify the circumstances when pooling is efficient. It is shown that social interactions mitigate the free-riding effect of pooling and that the amount of members’ social interactions depends upon, and increases with, the cooperative’s pooling ratio. We show that the complete pooling policy is not only economically efficient but also socially advantageous when the context of the cooperative is conducive to frequent social interactions among members.
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Lake Kivu is experiencing unprecedented decline in production of Tanganyika Sardine (Limnothrissa miodon). This study sought to characterise the value chain of this fish species so as to chart its sustainable utilisation. The study performed in 2015 found two chains; an informal chain that takes 30% of the production and a formal chain that handles 70%. The average catch of sardine was 30 kg/day in the high production season and <15 kg/day in the low season. Two thirds of the fishers were not aware of the governing law. Fishing malpractices included fishing in prohibited sites, beach seining and fishing during moratorium period. Majority of fishers were not satisfied with the price offered in the market as costs involved in fishing was 701 Rwanda Francs/kg caught. This is despite the shift in time since the study was performed. Therefore, there is need for re-training of value chain actors, increasinglake surveillance, strengthening internal controls of the Fishers’ Cooperatives and improving information sharing and communication among value chain actors.
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Far from being negligible in quantity, decentralized energy production delivers a considerable part of the renewable energy production in the Netherlands. Decentralized production takes place by individual households, companies as well as citizen groups. Grassroots initiatives have sprung up in the Netherlands in the last 5 years, in a recent inventory 313 formally instituted local energy cooperatives were found. Cooperatives’ aims are sustainability, strengthening local economy and promoting a democratic governance structure for energy production.The energy industry in the Netherlands has traditionally been dominated by large energy companies, and the Groningen gas field has resulted in a very high dependency on natural gas for both consumer and business households. The climate for grassroots initiatives has improved since the so-called Energy Covenant in 2013. This covenant pertains to an agreement between government, industry representatives, labor unions and non-governmental organizations to arrive at a substantial reduction of energy use, ambitious increase in the production of renewable energy, and new jobs in the renewable energy sector.The covenant also announced new policies to stimulate community energy activities, such as the Zip-code-rose policy . The governmental interest in new forms of energy transition, is also demonstrated by the ‘Experiments Electricity Law’ facility, which gives local business and community initiatives an opportunity to experiment with a local energy system. This policy is meant as a ‘learning facility’; experiences are expected to lead to adaptations in Dutch electricity law and regulation.
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