ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the construction of new mechanisms for creating autonomy at levels of aggregation that go beyond single peasant units of production. Central to the argument is the case of territorial co-operatives: an institutional innovation born more or less simultaneously in several places throughout the north-west of Europe at the beginning of the 1990s (although pleas for them were already voiced during the late 1970s and 1980s). Territorial co-operatives can be highly effective mechanisms of supporting repeasantization. They are also strategic in the attempt to overcome the current agricultural crisis (see Figure 1.4 in Chapter 1) because they involve new forms of selfregulation. They re-link the farming and rural population as active and knowledgeable participants to processes of rural development and agrarian transition. This is particularly important politically since the more conventional ways of expressing and negotiating interests through agrarian syndicates and corporatist frameworks have failed to produce cohesion and practical results (Frouws, 1993; Frouws et al, 1996; Hees, 2000).
