ISTR Fifth International Conference Cape Town, South Africa / July 7-10, 2002 Transforming Civil Society, Citizenship and Governance: The Third Sector in an Era of Global (Dis)Order

Marietta Bucheli email

In 1960 the Catholic Church created more than fifty peasant cooperatives in the Santander province, Colombia, as an economic development alternative different from the ideas proposed by the Marxist guerrilla, and the American-led Alliance for Progress. The literature on the Third Sector argues that peasant cooperatives can not be economically successful, nor they can contribute for the economic development of the community they belong to. These arguments have been made without doing a systematic analysis of the cooperatives as a business unit. In this study of the peasant cooperatives of Santander I show that these organizations had a sustained economic success for more than forty years and made a significant contribution to the regions economic development. This study also uses the analytical tools provided by the business administration discipline. Furthermore, I use as primary sources the internal archives of these cooperatives. These sources have not been used by any other scholar. My study makes it necessary to re-think the accepted assumptions on peasant cooperatives developed by the Third Sector literature.

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