ABSTRACT
In Italy, community co-operatives have emerged as bottom-up initiatives for the management of commons, regeneration of community assets, management of quasi-public services, and production of goods. This innovative approach in local socio-economic development is able to improve local well-being by strengthening social cohesion and fostering community empowerment. Local social dynamics involve different stakeholders that can form a co-operative to manage economic activities for the general interest through a democratic process by creating a multi-stakeholdership structure. This new co-op model raises questions about community and economic development, namely, how do these enterprises create and manage their local networks? How do these networks contribute in enterprises’ work in terms of resources and inputs? The general idea is the importance of networks among organizations, both private and public, to fully comprehend local needs and opportunities. Italian community co-ops operate for residents’ general interests, and they develop these networks to collect adequate resources, promote advocacy of their activities, and gain benefits from their outcomes. The research in this chapter takes a qualitative approach to discover new features of this recent phenomenon using questionnaires as the main tool and provide a more complete and accurate description of ways in which community co-ops operate.
