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Co-ops are an idea whose time has come back 6 December 2009

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Michael Stephenson at the EP on 1 Dec 09

With 29 MPs, the Co-operative Party is the 4th-largest party at Westminster. (It is by the way the only co-operative party in the world, apart from the Cooperative NATCCO Network Party, which holds one seat in the Philippine House of Representatives). It was founded in 1917 and has had a Brussels branch since 1982. On 1st December its General Secretary, Michael Stephenson, came to the European Parliament to talk to us. And unwittingly we seem to have held the first meeting the Parliament has hosted on the subject of co-operatives for about 10 years.
He pointed to a renaissance of co-operativism in Britain; in the last decade NHS foundation trusts, co-operative trust schools and football supporter’s trusts have all brought consumer co-operation into new fields. Even the village shop in Ambridge is organising a community share issue! Two areas where a start has been made but much remains to be done are housing and energy.
The financial crisis has shown the strength of mutualism in housing finance – they tend not to freeze credit, they charge lower interest rates, and their structure is intrinsically more stable. Yet, incredibly, the city establishment seems locked in to its unsustainable greed-based model. Till now, the public seems to have naively retained its faith in the esoteric knowledge that financiers claim to have. But at last polls are showing that the RBS directors’ attempt at blackmail to preserve bonuses may be the straw that has broken the camel’s back. It may mark the downfall of the Tory claims to be the party of the poor.
In energy, a cluster of co-operative wind farms like Westmill shows that ethical investors are keen to do their bit against climate change, and the movment is running a well-thought-out campaign on climate change, ACT!.
The meeting chimed well with an initiative of Co-operatives Europe to launch a Network of Co-operative MEPs, whose first meeting takes place in Strasbourg on 14th December, part of a campaign to raise the co-operative movement’s profile in European politics. Two coming opportunities are the EU2020 consultation and the inaugural hearings of the new Commissioners.
Co-operatives have a unique political offer. They are in the lead on a number of issues with which the public engages, such as fair trade and climate change, but they haven’t got the best out of the system. The movement’s job is to put together the narrative and the evidence to create the impact they deserve to have. Right now the Labour Party is receptive to new ideas – so there is a real chance that co-operative solutions will be taken up.

A WISE way of Working 25 November 2009

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Yesterday I was privileged to do the summing-up of the Brussels dissemination seminar of the WISE project, which has been running for the past 2 years as part of PROGRESS. It is led by CGM, the leading consortium of Italian social co-operatives, and involved 8 countries: AT, BE, ES, FI, IT, MT, PL & RO, as well as key European partners like EAPN. These have radically different situations as regards work integration social enterprises, so the four pair/peer reviews the project held threw up some interesting contrasts.

The Brussels dissemination seminar on 24th November had as its centrepiece the launch of A WISE Way of Working, a booklet containing 10 sets of recommendations for policy-makers along with 10 examples of how WISEs contribute to different EU policies. Take a look at http://www.wiseproject.eu.

Key actions

Policy on WISEs has definitely evolved over the years. WISEs have been round for at least 30 years under various names, and we can trace the steady growth in the visibility of the idea through Community initiatives such as HORIZON and more recently EQUAL. It is time for more explicit recognition! We shouldn’t waste time on exact definitions, but we do need an umbrella concept to enable mutual learning and transfer.

For policy-makers I would pick out two super-important points:
a) Policy co-ordination: it is very welcome that this seminar has attracted 5 Commission officials from both the Employment and Enterprise DGs, but this togetherness is relatively rare. We need to find ways of avoiding ‘silo’ thinking, and there are various tools – interservice groups and the EP Intergroup to mention two. A number of member states have instituted high-level co-ordination systems: Poland with its Social Economy Working Group featured in the WISE Guidelines, Sweden with its national thematic group and the UK with its Office of the Third Sector. The European model which needs re-establishing is the EQUAL European Thematic Group (ETG). This is at present in pieces, although a new Learning Network is being restarted under the Learning for Change programme. We have lost two years as a result of EQUAL being scrapped. This shows that the Commission must show leadership where transnational collaboration is concerned.
(b) Use the resources that are there: WISEs grow and replicate fastest and most easily when they are supported by their own federal bodies such as consortia. They have values and they grow by sharing with each other. Yet the value of this network of home-grown support structures seems to be a blind spot for the European institutions. Consortia, federations, co-operative development agencies are not parasites or overheads; they are on the contrary he mechanisms that clarify goals, inspire motivation and give practical help. They are what makes a movement work. Public policies should recognise the added value that a movement style of operation brings.
It’s very heartening to see moves in this direction such as the Key Networks that the Employment DG supports at EU level. The WISE guidelines showcase the successful use of the Global Grant mechanism to do the same at national level.

For WISEs, we have to focus on opportunities, and here the Commission speakers have given us a number of clear pointers. We must feed them with the evidence and arguments they need to develop policy. We must:
- respond to the consultation on EU2020 – i.e. the post-Lisbon strategy
- make an input into the Innovation Action Plan – social innovation has to be part of this, not just technical or process innovation, and the social economy is the motor of social innovation
- make an input into local development strategies
- propose subjects for the Peer Review meetings in Social Protection & Social Inclusion, a key part of the mutual learning system among member states (in which Greek and Belgian WISEs have already featured)

I congratulate CGM and the partners on taking a significant step forward in raising the visibility of WISE where it matters. And I thank all the participants, the interpreters, and especially the project co-ordinator Dorotea Daniele and the DIESIS team

A note on energy consumers’ co-ops in Europe 21 November 2009

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The co-operative energy sector is developing fast but very disjointedly in Europe. There are several differen angles. Some countries are at the level of exhorting citizens to buy green, some have co-ops brokering electriticity from renewable sources, some have co-ops that generate power themselves, and others that hold shares colectively in large utilities.

They are big in the USA of course.

In Europe, an initiative has been taken to create a federation, and an event was held at the European Parliament on 30 April 09, at which co-ops presented good practice examples. Among others Bob Burlton and Ray Collins from the UK were involved.
http://www.coopseurope.coop/spip.php?article701&var_recherche=energy
Also Co-operatives Europe ACT! Co-ops addressing climate change:
http://www.actonclimate.coop/home.aspx

Belgium
http://www.enercoop.be/ – promotes renewables
http://www.emissions-zero.be/
Windmills are contentious: http://eoliennes-wallonie.energies-dyle.be/

France
www.enercoop.fr
founded as a reaction to state energy liberalisation and nuclear dominance in 2004 and incorporated as a SCIC in 2005. Admitted individuals from 2007. now has 4,500 customers, most of whom are also shareholding members.

Spain
www.enercoop.es
Cooperativa Eléctrica San Francisco de Asís, trading as Grupo Enercoop, is based in Crevillent near Alicante. It was founded in 1925 by textile industrialists and individuals, who wanted cheaper power than the big companies were providing. It is now one of Spain’s biggest energy co-ops. It has solar and photovoltaic generation.
The Comunidad Valenciana has 16 electricity co-ops that undecut private companies by 5-75 and serve 43,000 families and businesses. They have a facebook support page at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=60514432693&v=info#/group.php?v=info&gid=60514432693

Netherlands
www.windvogel.nl

Built its first mill in 1991 and now has a 2MW windmill at Oudekerk, plus a 600 kW and 2 x 80 kW. it has a share capital of €50 per member, and members’ money in excess of that is in the form of loans. They are currently (2008-9) piloting a ‘self-delivery’ model whereby members use power generated in their own mills, which is free of VAT and energy tax. Utility Eneco does the billing and deducts self-supplied power from their normal bill.
On the planning issue they point out that 1000 years ago Holland had 10,000 windmills, yet today a mere 2,000 will supply the entire population.

Germany
http://www.energie-in-buergerhand.de/

Meanwhile in October 2009 in Freiburg, Germany, they have started a co-op to by a large chunk of an energy company. They are taking advantage of the forced divestment by E.ON-Ruhrgas of its subsidiary Thüga to a consortium of 50 local authorities. The co-operative (EiB) aims to buy €100 million worth of Thuga shares so as to have a real influence. By the end of October over 4,000 investors had contributed €21.5 m.

Denmark
http://www.dkvind.dk/eng/faq/cooperatives.pdf

The first windmill co-op started near Aarhus in 1980 and was the fit of many, but latterly large companies have taken the lead. Today about 155 of turbines are co-ops. However legislation from January 2009 obliges them to give at last 20% ownership to local people, i.e. co-ops. (i.e. as with Kilbraur in Scotland).

Solidarity and conviviality in local development finance 26 October 2009

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Definition of 'tontine', Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK

On Sunday I went with Simon and Brigitte to a very convivial meeting of the SILO – Soutien aux Initiatives Locales - at the Tchop-Tchop restaurant in Ixelles. SILO was set up 18 months ago and supports local development initiatives in central Africa – Cameroon, Congo, and Rwanda – and its principles are refreshingly different.

- First of all, it only supports associations that already exist and are stable – it doesn’t try to set up new structures. (Research at ULB finds that such associations are relatively stable – around 60% are still in existence after 10 years.)

- It then tries to help these associations on their own terms – it doesn’t propose its own ideas. (So it might support pigs in one village, more land in another, or a health mutual in a third.)

- It doesn’t insist on formality – in a society with high illiteracy, written statutes are an irrelevance. Instead it looks for evidence of a strong social life – it likes to help associations that spend some of their effort just having a meal together.

One particularly interesting type of financial association is the tontine. In a tontine, a group of people each put a fixed amount into the kitty each month. The first month it is all lent to member A, the second month all to member B… and so on until all members have received a loan. This enables each of them to accomplish some major task. European tontines usually pay out to the last surviving member, leading Africans to brag that their tontines are for the living, not the dead.

The strange feature for me is that the clubs are dissolved each year, and this seems a limitation. It would seem to me to be more sustainable to set up permanent structures – credit unions – which could collect savings more broadly and finance investment over several years. But maybe that is over-ambitious and there is a vital place for these small-scale informal financial organisations.

Another initially shocking feature is the sky-high rates of interest that can result – as much as 20% a month. However this is not as usurious as it sounds as it is repaid to members when the ‘caisse ‘is ‘cassée’.

SILO, c/o Michel Romainville – mromainv@ulb.ac.be
Using tontines to run the economy by Alain Henri at http://ecole.org/seminaires/FS3/SEM105/VC190603-ENG.pdf

The social economy as an engine for social innovation 24 October 2009

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Reflections on the EESC seminar of 22nd October 2009

The European Economic and Social Committee held a seminar on 22nd October 2009 on the subject Getting to the End of the Tunnel: Creating the Right Environment for the Social Economy.

Social innovation was on the agenda and one of the speakers was Matteo Bonifacio from the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA), the Commission’s think tank on future policy that has taken over from the Future Studies Unit.

He noted that, today, economic and social challenges are becoming indistinguishable. This poses policy makers with a question: social issues can be addressed either as a separate complement to economic policy, or by viewing the two as inseparable. You can view the social economy as “the enterprises that do the rest” – what business enterprises don’t do – or you can take the view that all enterprises have a social responsibility. In other words, he posed the distinction between targeted policy – things like prizes and incubators for social entrepreneurs – and mainstreaming – making “social” a key word in all policies that make up the post-Lisbon strategy.

A number of Commission DGs are working on social innovation, and BEPA had held a seminar on the subject on 19-20 January 2009. A report will be published probably in February 2010, after consultation throughout the Commission.

Speaking from the floor, I argued two points:

1. Mainstreaming can go too far

The social economy, by definition, combines private and public resources. The main public source of financial support for its development has in practice been the European Social Fund (ESF). Its high point has been EQUAL, which had a €3 bn budget over 6 years. The social economy was the 3rd most popular theme, with 424 development partnerships in 18 member states accounting for about 9% of that sum.

The problem is that now EQUAL is over, there is now no Community Initiative in the ESF, and the momentum and visibility that had been built up has been lost. Where is the follow-up?

What has survived is a six-country learning network led by Poland, which is part of the Learning for Change programme, and is designed to build the capacity of the public administrations and key stakeholders to manage the ESF better. It will be addressing the key European issues for the social economy – public procurement, impact measurement, state aid, SSGIs, finance and social franchising. But it has a relatively small budget – about half a million euros.

It’s not true that all has been lost – the Swedish and Spanish examples presented at the conference show that progress is still being made – but work on the ground is now fragmented and incoherent. The social economy and inclusive entrepreneurship is explicitly mentioned in about 30% of the 117 new ESF operational programmes but it’s very difficult to get an overview of what’s happening. The “brain” of the innovation system in the ESF has been disconnected.

So, the policy of transferring the learning of EQUAL into the mainstream ESF seems to have backfired. There is still an important place for targeted policy, especially where innovation is concerned.

2. The social economy as social innovator

Mr Bonifacio wondered whether the distinction between the social economy and CSR was negligible. I think it is very far from that. The BEPA seminar on social innovation did include “citizen” representatives from the Social Platform (for instance from the European Anti-Poverty Network), and it did include individual examples of social economy initiatives (such as San Patrignano). But it did not include the social economy as an organised sector or movement, and this is symptomatic of what seems to be a persistent blind spot in EU policy.

Social innovation is about meeting people’s needs in new ways, and in order to do that it needs to connect with citizens and find out what those changing needs are. This relies on stimulating the participation of citizens. And it is the social economy that is the way of organising citizen participation in the economy. Therefore, the social economy must be involved in systematic efforts to promote social innovation. To overlook this means that you waste the capacity of the social economy to network, to spread new ideas and transfer expertise. It is folly to ignore the strength of the social economy as a mutual support system.

Holland in miniature 17 October 2009

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A fortnight ago, in perfect autumn weather, we visited the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum near Arnhem. it has everything: a tramline to get around on, a brewery and even its complement, a street urinal.

Of course it covers all the Dutch stereotypes: it is dotted with windmills of various types, and has a steam-driven dairy where they will sell you various sorts of gouda. It has a reconstituted pond out of the Zaanstreek (strangely out of place up there in the Veluwe), with a green weatherboard house from Marken and a white drawbridge and a hand-hauled rope-guided ferry. You can shop in the bakery and the cavernous sweetshop, and sit and eat poffertjes or try riding a penny-farthing.

There’s an appelstroop manufactory, a piggy-bank collection, an Indonesian house, a maze…

The whole thing strikes exactly the right balance between its high-minded educational mission, national nostalgia and commerce. You can even get there by trolleybus. It makes a perfect day out.

Hypertrophy 17 October 2009

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I have joined the incredible 51 million people who are reputed to have started ploughing, seeding and harvesting virtual crops in Farmville. I have a small herd of pink cows that moo, chew and produce strawberry milk. I plant a biodiverse and photogenic range of crops, from pumpkins to red peppers, and I am not going for prairie-style monoculture just to get to the next level faster. Though it would be nice to have some more land, I have to wait 7 more levels for that.

Why and how has the game become so incredibly popular since its launch only 4 months ago? Because it combines a high number of attractive traits:
- cute graphics: you can look at your ‘farm’ as a sort of animated dolls’ house;
- the tamagochi effect: it’s something to care for. You have to harvest your crops befoere they wilt, and when you pet your animals they love you back. Sweet!
- the business model: there’s a trade-off between the cost of the seed, the time is takes to mature and there selling price off the crop that makes it more than just decorative;
- competition: your neighbours can see your wealth and the level you’ve reached, so if you like yoou can race them;
- social networking: the only reason I started was because my children-in-law invited me to (just so they can show off their flashy new crops all the time);
- identity: you can plant various national flags (indeed there was a minor diplomatic crisis after India’s flag was omitted);
- topical relevance: every so often special one-off items appear, like spooky trees to mark halloween.

Apparently 11 million virtual farmers go down to their fields every day. how long can it last?

Raven Mad – pub co-op owes its birth to TV 8 October 2009

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Amazing to see the media industry creating the “reality” it is more conventionally supposed to report on – but this time with a result we can approve of. In February this year, production company TwoFour announced that it would like to film a series about a community saving its own pub. “Twofour will work with the current owners to encourage the local community to muck in and run the pub for one month, with support from our expert landlord and presenter, Jay Smith, who owns a number of successful bars in the north of England. Everyone involved will be trained in all the necessary skills to run their pub,” it said.

And hey presto by September, the inhabitants of Llanarmon-yn-Ial, near Mold, Denbighshire, had bought the Raven and formed a co-operative guarantee company – Raven Mad – to run it.

A TwoFour spokesman quoted in the pub trade newspaper The Morning Advertiser, said: “With so many rural pubs closing around the country, Twofour is delighted to have the opportunity to help save some of them. The precedent of community run pubs has proved successful, and hopefully this show will encourage more to go down this route. We wish The Raven every success.”

After standing empty for three months, the historic pub was auctioned in July, but no one would bid the £250,000 guide price. However Raven Mad has now secured a six-year lease. The pub reopened on 30th August.

Co-operative spokesman Doug Macpherson recognised the encouragement the TV company had given: “The village is one of few remaining with a shop, post office, school and pub. Villagers were very saddened to see the pub close but, like many other communities, felt powerless to do anything about it. The offer from the television company has enabled the community to come together with the support of an experienced mentor to re-open the pub.”

Tram plans for Antalya 29 August 2009

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Antalya rail system projects til 2020

Originally uploaded by bana Onur de – needs pro – 35, 10½, 16, 34 comin

I see they’ve opened the first modern tramline in antalya, connecting the dusty NE suburbs to the centre. Last time I visited I rode the line round the old town to the archaeology museum, in an ex-Nürnberg Düwag.

There’s no alternative to good public sector management 3 July 2009

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Ken Livingston points out a nice irony in today’s Guardian:

“Part of the problem is that civil servants are taken to the cleaners in the construction of the privatisation contracts by the private companies’ sharper legal teams. One of the rationales for the tube’s PPP was that it made no sense to hand billions of pounds of public money for tube upgrades over to London Underground management and civil servants who had such a poor record of delivering. Yet, these same civil servants were left to draw up the detail of the PPP contracts. They were completely turned over by the private sector.”

There are two indissoluble aspects to the solution:
- appoint good public servants, and have faith in them (but have good appraisal and accountability systems too)
- regain a sense of ethics among contractors, who will always be necessary (after all I am one myself, to declare my interest)