About

My journey with the cooperative movement began in the late 1970s, and saw me living in Italy, China and France in contact with cooperatives, as well as the Netherlands, the Geneva region and Brussels, and doing field work in India, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Canada and Central-Eastern European countries.

In 1978, when still being quite young, I left the UK where i was working as an artisan. After a long trip across Africa, I settled down in Rome, where I launched in 1979 the Roman branch of Frères des Hommes, a European development NGO which was promoting a series of projects with cooperatives around the developing world, especially in agriculture and healthcare. In 1986, I moved to Beijing where i became project coordinator for Frères des Hommes in China, and I had the chance of meeting, just before he died, long time China resident Rewi Alley from New Zealand, cofounder of the historic Chinese cooperative movement Gung Ho 工合 (Chinese initials of “industrial cooperatives”) which disseminated across China between 1937 and 1952, and whose leaders successively promoted the birth of agricultural cooperatives (1952-1956), which were revived as of the early 1980s with the new period opened by Deng Xiaoping.

Gung Ho (or International Committee of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives – ICCIC), today an ICA member, was revived in 1987 as a Chinese NGO promoting cooperatives. This marked the start of my experience with Gung Ho, of which I am still a member today, with the launch of experimental projects in several parts of China under the guidance of old Gung Ho activists from the 1930s and 40s, the most significant of which being in Shandan county in Gansu province at the beginning of the Silk Road, in Hubei and Shandong provinces, and later in Shanghai.

In 1990, while living in China, I met Yves Regis, President of ICA Sectoral Organisation for industrial and service cooperatives CICOPA, in Paris, at the request of GungHo-ICCIC, who then became a CICOPA member. The same year, I visited the Mondragon cooperative group in the Basque region of Spain. In this first of many successive visits to Mondragon, I met Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, one of the five pioneers of the Mondragon experience, who helped me prepare the visits by Chinese cooperators which I organised in 1992 and 1993. With Gung Ho we then welcomed Regis and Gorroñogoitia at a conference in Beijing just after the 1992 ICA Tokyo Congress.

After organising a study visit by Chinese cooperators to India and being admitted as technical advisor to the CICOPA Executive Committee at the CICOPA Manchester Conference preceding the 1995 centennial ICA Congress, I worked between 1996 and 1999 as coordinator of the CICOPA China programme in Shanghai, through which 99 state and collective enterprises in difficulty were transformed into cooperatives, thereby saving a few thousand jobs, and of the CICOPA India programme in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, which provided scales to a few dozen artisanal cooperatives that had been weakened by the effects of India’s economic policy at the time, in particular handloom weavers.

In the late 1990s, back in Europe (first in Italy doing fieldwork on cooperatives, then in The Hague for a Master in Development focusing on cooperatives at the International Institute of Social Studies of Rotterdam University), I worked with CECOP CICOPA-Europe (the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives) as coordinator of projects in Central-Eastern Europe, and in particular the SCOPE (Strengthening Cooperatives in Central-Eastern Europe) project grouping 17 European countries between 2000 and 2005, contributing also to the Prague (2002) and Krakow (2004) European social economy conferences organised by CECOP. Simultaneously, I coordinated the European Cooperative Groups (ECG) three-year project with cooperative groups from Italy, France and Spain, Mondragon among others.

Between 2000 and 2002, having moved to the Geneva Region, I spent a large part of my time working on the preparation of ILO Recommendation 193 on the Promotion of Cooperatives and, as an accredited representative of the 3 Italian cooperative confederations, on the coordination of the group of cooperators accredited to be part of the negotiations on this Recommendation at the International Labour Conference in 2001 and 2002. Thanks to our presence in the negotiations, the final text corresponded almost entirely to the one we had submitted to the ICA Board for approval. Even more importantly, the whole ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity was included in the text with a mention to the ICA itself (a unique occurrence in ILO standards) through 11th hour negotiations, and thus became part of the international standards approved by the international community within the UN system. Twenty years on, ILO Recommendation 193 remains the most important international policy document on cooperatives. I am extremely grateful to ICA ex-Presidents Roberto Rodrigues (1997-2001) and Ivano Barberini (2001-2009) for having personally supported me in this endeavour.

I became Secretary General of CICOPA in 2002, then of CECOP CICOPA-Europe in 2006, both until the beginning of 2018. Between 2005 and 2008, I took part as the representative of the ICA Sectoral Organisations in the ICA statutory and institutional reform process through a series of ICA committees and in 2006, as CECOP Secretary General, in the foundation of Cooperative Europe.

Among the most significant outputs that were generated when i was CICOPA Secretary General, I should mention the elaboration and approval of international standards of worker cooperatives (2002-2005) and social cooperatives (2008-2011) complementary to the ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity; two world conferences (Oslo 2003 and Cartagena 2005), plus the special conference “Global Worker Cooperative Day” for the UN International Year of Cooperatives in Marseille in 2012; a significant advance in cooperative statistics which ushered in the statistical work of the UN committee for the promotion of cooperatives COPAC between 2015 and 2017 (which CICOPA took part in), then the ILO Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives delivered by the ILO Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2018; and the study “Cooperatives and Employment: a Global Report” presented at the Quebec International Summit of Cooperatives in 2014 after 15 months’ research and field work in 10 different countries around the world. It was followed by a second report three years later.

Among the most important outputs delivered in CECOP when I was its Secretary General, I should mention a 2012 report and documentary film on cooperatives’ resilience to the economic crisis that flared up in 2008; the European Parliament Report on the Contribution of Cooperatives to Overcoming the Crisis in 2013; a significant change in the 2014 version of the EU Public Procurement Directive indirectly promoting social cooperatives, after 7 years’ lobbying; and a series of publications on European industrial and service cooperatives: in particular  Cooperatives and Social Enterprises (2009) and Cooperatives, Territories and Jobs (2012).

During these years, I co-authored with Claudia Sanchez-Bajo, my wife and an academic researcher on cooperatives, the book Capital and the Debt Trap – learning from cooperatives in the global crisis (Palgrave 2011-2013), endorsed by Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, James Galbraith, Jean Ziegler, Paul Singer and others, and prefaced by Ian MacPherson, and did some lecturing in universities and training centres in Italy and Costa Rica.

I then became Director General of the ICA in April 2018. During my five years as ICA DG, the ICA membership increased from 306 members at the end of 2017 to 315 members in 2022, in spite of the pandemic.

Some of the most relevant outputs I have led and worked on as ICA DG and with the decisive contribution of the ICA Global Office team, include the following:

  • Leading the design of an ICA member survey in early 2018, which was the most in depth (59 questions) and most responded (62% response rate) ICA member survey on record, allowing the ICA to better understand its members’ needs and expectations. A detailed report was made available to all ICA members.
  • Based on the member survey, working with the ICA Board on elaborating the ICA 2020-2030 Strategic Plan, which had been requested by the 2017 ICA General Assembly in Kuala Lumpur and was approved by the 2019 General Assembly in Kigali.
  • Overseeing the multiannual programme under the ICA-EU Framework Partnership Agreement (2016-2021) with an intensification of activities as of 2018, successfully completed through a close collaboration between the Global Office and the Regional Offices of the ICA, with a very high level of appreciation by the European Commission: 28 policy events were organised, 7 studies published, 80 training sessions imparted, dozens of national reports on data and on legislation drafted, while the first cooperative Global Youth Forum was held in February 2020 under this programme, and prepared with the ICA Board the basic standards for a new programme, which was approved by the European Commission.
  • Leading the organisation and programming of the ICA Kigali conference “Cooperatives for Development” in 2019, where the whole ICA global team, as well as the ICA Regional and Sectoral Organisations, were involved; it was the second ICA global conference ever held in Africa and the first one fully dedicated to development, with around 1000 participants from 94 countries; it was also the largest event of the above-mentioned 2016-2021 ICA-EU Framework Partnership Agreement.
  • Overseeing the launch of a cooperative-to-cooperative trade project cycle with the international Trade Centre (ITC, the joint cooperation agency of UNCTAD and WTO for business aspects of trade development) through a first pilot project in 2021, with other projects now in preparation.
  • Promoting the birth of the ICA International Cooperative Entrepreneurship Think Tank (ICETT) gathering some of the largest cooperatives and cooperative groups in the world upon my proposal, as I considered that the cooperative movement needed a global think tank focusing on entrepreneurship, however small it may be at the beginning.
  • Promoting the creation of an ICA G20 Working Group which was inaugurated under the Italian G20 Presidency (2021); this working group has spurred a series of references to cooperatives in G20 documents.
  • As rotating Chair of the UN committee on cooperatives COPAC in 2021-2023 on behalf of ICA, launching a discussion on a new COPAC strategy, which was approved, and facilitating the entry into COPAC of two new members, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the UN Research Institute on Social Development (UNRISD).
  • Still as COPAC Chair, co-organising with UN DESA a Voluntary National Reviews (VNR) lab dedicated to cooperatives within the framework of the UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) taking place every year in early July, allowing to celebrate simultaneously in New York the UN International Day of Cooperatives, which takes place during the same period.
  • Leading the organisation and programming of the 2021 ICA 33rd World Cooperative Congress “Deepening our Cooperative Identity”, the first global cooperative event held in a hybrid form with around 1000 participants physically present and 500 online, still in the middle of the pandemic, analysing the international cooperative standards enshrined in the ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity from 24 different thematic angles. The Congress was preceded by an array of preparatory activities as of August 2020 with online seminars to celebrate the 125 years of the ICA and the 25 years of the Statement on the Cooperative Identity, and two academic conferences in Seoul immediately before the Congress.

In all three organisations I have led as chief executive since 2002, namely CICOPA, CECOP, and the ICA, I have been faced with an initial situation requiring either a launch from scratch (for CICOPA) or in-depth re-structuring (for CECOP and the ICA) of the staff of the organisation, with very limited financial resources: CECOP after the incubation of Cooperatives Europe in 2005-2006, and the ICA with the closure of the ICA Washington office.

Having maintained a trajectory coherent with my passion for cooperatives as a way to help solve our challenges for a more human and sustainable future has meant a great journey of learning and a constant source of strength. I am thankful for having had the chance to work for the cooperative movement both at the grassroots level in local development, and at the international level in policy areas.

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