The international co-operative movement has seen a series of catastrophic failures of large scale co-operatives in recent decades, such as the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, retail co-ops in Germany, France and Atlantic Canada, banking in Austria and the near meltdown of the Co-operative Group in the UK. Yet our co-operative culture has not been one of seeking to understand the factors which are common in these events and which, if understood, could be used to prevent such collapses in the future.

When co-operatives gather from around the world, it tends to be a time of celebration. They celebrate their trading success and the impact that they have had on people’s lives across the globe.

All this is to be admired, but there is also an opportunity missed. Not all co-ops will have thrived between gatherings. Sadly, some will have hit major crises and no longer be there. When this happens the major unspoken issue is not so much an elephant in the room, but which elephants are no longer there.

A common problem

The starting point of this analysis was the similarity between the crisis experienced by the Co-operative Group in the UK and the collapse of the Canadian Wheat Pools. Two very different forms of co-ops in two very different cultures, but the analysis

of why one failed gave significant insights into the failings of the other.

To prepare we looked at a wider range of failures: French retail co-ops, Austrian banking, German retailing, Canadian wholesaling, Belgian retailing, British dairying and Austrian retailing, to name but a few. It is not the intention of this paper to provide a detailed history of these, but to ask two simple questions: