Cooperative Law and Regulation Initiative

About CLARITY

CLARITY, Cooperative Law and Regulation Initiative, is an ongoing collaboration of Overseas Cooperative Development Council, its eight cooperative development organizations, and the United States Agency for International Development. The aim of the project is to formulate and promote principles for legal and regulatory environments for cooperatives. The project was initiated in recognition of the important role of laws and regulations in constituting a framework for successful cooperative businesses.
        In the first year of the project, CLARITY partnered with the law firm of Spiegel & McDiarmid to publish this report and create an extensive annotated bibliography of cooperative laws, regulations, analytical documents, and other information pertaining to legal and regulatory enabling environments for cooperative development. For more information, visit www.clarity.coop.

About CLARITY’S environment-changing report:
Enabling Cooperative Development: Principles for Legal Reform

With a set of nine core principles set forth in a new report, cooperative movements around the world now have a valuable tool to evaluate and reform counterproductive cooperative laws and regulations. The report, entitled Enabling Cooperative Development: Principles for Legal Reform, was commissioned by Overseas Cooperative Development Council.
        Cooperatives – businesses owned and democratically controlled by their members – serve nearly 800 million people in every part of the world. In many countries, co-ops are recognized as public-sector institutions rather than private sector-enterprises. The laws that govern them often are overly prescriptive and fail to address critical factors for safety and growth of cooperatives.
        In Ghana, for example, co-ops were subjected to a six-month probationary period during formation, which could stretch into years. A Zambian law granted the government registrar of cooperatives the power to appoint special officers to manage the affairs of co-ops. And in Nicaragua, people must attend 40 hours of training just to become co-op members.
        "The new consensus [by cooperative development organizations]," reads the report, "emphasizes autonomy from governments and the removal of barriers to cooperative enterprise in all sectors of the economy." The report stresses the importance of involvement from local cooperative movements to promote context-specific approaches to legal reform rather than a blind adoption of model laws.
        The nine CLARITY core principles for consideration by local movements in analyzing their situations, developing laws or advocating for legislative reform are:

        "Cooperation among cooperatives is a key principle of the international cooperative movement," said Rob Nooter, OCDC’s executive director. "The CLARITY initiative has been a fruitful and rewarding way for us to share our collective experiences as development practitioners working with a wide variety of types of cooperatives."
        The involvement of U.S. cooperative organizations in overseas activities grew out of the conviction that cooperative techniques, which have helped millions of American families, could be adapted to help poor and low-income people in developing countries achieve a better way of life. OCDC members have been development partners of the U.S. government for 50 years. Grants funding the CLARITY report were awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Read the CLARITY report
English (pdf)
Spanish (pdf)
Arabic (pdf)
Mongolian (pdf)
Kiswahili (pdf)
Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (pdf)
Portuguese (pdf)