Sustainable Practice? An Examination of Canada’s Agricultural and Energy Cooperatives

Cooperatives are member-run organizations focused on combined social and economic goals. Based on surveys and interviews with agricultural and energy cooperatives in Canada, we explore the range of cooperatives’ ethical orientations and trajectories within the context of environmental sustainability. We develop a new typology of environmental performance and identify market, institutional, and strategic drivers that underscore the typology. Our findings suggest that whereas younger and smaller cooperatives are the most inclined to embrace integrated environmental principles, other outlier cooperatives have resisted ethical dilution by cultivating a progressive localism rather than focusing on broadening and widening their markets.