ABSTRACT
This chapter wonders about deepening the international cooperative movement’s capacity to cooperate by engaging in practices that design, imagine, and embody ways of knowing, being, and doing as part of relational, ecological worlds. Using an anthropological lens, I trouble the ontological coordinates of Western modernity to consider how the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) that informs the global movement today is ontologically captured, and how this runs the risk of re/producing a modern world that extracts and exploits more-than-human worlds, which includes humans. I home in on Cooperative Principle #7, “Concern for Community”, to expand our ontological understanding of what is possible cooperatively by troubling how “community” and “sustainable development” is conceptualized and acted upon in dominant worlds. To show this in practice, I turn to examples of relational ontological orientations that come from Indigenous communities around the world, as well as recent research stemming from biological and ecological science. I do this to make “real” the ways communities across time–space cooperate in relational, ecological ways; to implode the ways Western modernity conceives of “community” and “sustainability”; and to aid in how the cooperative movement might move toward a worldview that sees all of life as entangled.
