By Joana Dias Pereira, Instituto de História Contemporânea, FCSH-UNL

As in other contexts, Portugal developed over centuries forms of collective organisation that long preceded modern concepts of the social economy. Understanding this trajectory requires going back to medieval rural communities, traversing the reformist movements of the nineteenth century, confronting decades of dictatorship, and arriving at the democratic construction that began in 1974.

Pre-Modern Roots of Cooperation and Reciprocity

In medieval rural communities, neighbourhood councils collectively managed common lands, pastures, water sources and shared ovens. Some of these practices survived until the twentieth century in remote villages such as Vilarinho das Furnas or Rio de Onor, where much of the territory remained communal, administered by assemblies in which each family had a voice. Community management already included the mutualisation of risks, such as the loss of livestock, which provided the impetus for the first voluntary associations based on reciprocity in the eighteenth century.

From the twelfth century onwards, religious confraternities flourished, numbering more than eight thousand across Portuguese territory by 1861. Although acts of worship constituted their ostensible function, these institutions performed crucial social functions: assistance in poverty, care during illness, and the guarantee of a dignified funeral. The charter of the Confraternity of the Good Men of Beja, dated 1297, established that if any member became infirm, aged, or fell into great poverty, the remaining brethren would sustain him amongst themselves.

Trade guilds completed this picture in urban centres, regulating access to professions and providing assistance to artisans in difficulty. In fishing communities, specific forms of solidarity developed from the twelfth century: collective funds to aid the shipwrecked, widows and orphans, credit for vessel repairs, and contributions proportional to the earnings of the fishing crews.



In Vilarinho das Furnas, representatives of the families met once a week in general assemblies, which they called Juntas or Ajuntas, and, among them, elected a group of six men, appointed by the Six of the Agreement, nominating among all the married voters, marriage order. There was also an elected judge, the janitor.

António Campos (1971) Vilarinho das Furnas. Documentary film available on line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrBbdmUDulg



The Nineteenth Century and the Emergence of Modern Associativism

The Enlightenment and liberalism profoundly transformed these traditional practices. Secularisation, internal democratisation and the principle of voluntary membership distinguished the new associations from the old confraternities and guilds. In 1838, the Society of Lisbon Artisans inaugurated modern mutualism in Portugal. From 1850 onwards, trade associations multiplied in Lisbon and Porto, followed by similar institutions in smaller localities.

Utopian socialism, disseminated by thinkers such as Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira, brought a holistic vision of associativism. His Project of Association for the Improvement of the Industrious Classes, published in 1840, combined credit, mutual aid, education and recreation in a synthesis that would leave a lasting mark on the Portuguese associative movement. In 1850, the founding of the newspaper Ecco dos Operarios and, two years later, of the Centre for the Promotion of Improvements for the Labouring Classes provided for the first time spaces where workers themselves could articulate demands and debate proposals for social reform.

The foundational law of cooperativism, enacted in 1867, officially recognised this form of economic organisation. From the last decade of the nineteenth century, associative congresses proliferated, demanding freedom of association and representation in political decision-making bodies.



Ecco dos Operarios : revista social artística e litteraria. - Nº 1 (28 abr. 1850) - s.2, nº 52 (25 out. 1851). - Lisboa : [Typ. de Manoel José Mendes Leite], 1850-1851. Available online: https://purl.pt/13464

Jornal do Centro Promotor dos Melhoramentos das Classes Laboriosas. - N. 1 (12 Fev. 1853)-n. 32 (29 Out. 1853); s. 2, n. 1(16 Maio 1854)-n. 3 (1 Jul. 1854). - Lisboa : C.P.M.C.L., 1853-1854. Available online: https://purl.pt/17413


Republican Social Reforms and the Conservative Reaction

The establishment of the Republic in 1910 opened new possibilities. The National Congress of Mutualities in 1911 approved an ambitious programme of social welfare, envisaging management mediated by associativism, contributions from the State and employers to disability funds, and the creation of pension funds with mandatory contributions. The Republican Constitution of 1911 enshrined the right to public assistance as a duty of the State.

The mutualist congress of 1916 clearly advocated state subsidies for associations, arguing that Portugal lagged behind other European countries in the protection of social welfare institutions. In the immediate post-war period, mutualism reached more than half a million members, whilst cooperativism attempted its first national and international integration with the founding of the National Federation of Cooperatives in 1921 and accession to the International Cooperative Alliance.

This reformist movement was precisely the target of the military coup of 28 May 1926. The conservatives who seized power had a clear project: to reverse the process of social mobilisation that marked the post-war period in Portugal and Europe, where populations organised in associations were demanding rights and proposing reforms. The historian Fernando Rosas summarised the essence of the regime that followed — Salazar's Estado Novo — as the "depoliticisation and political demobilisation" of Portuguese society.



Presidential visit to the school of the Catraeiros (crew members, owners, or boatmen who operate a catraia, a small sailing, rowing, or motorized boat traditionally used to transport passengers in port areas or rivers) cooperative, O século, March 7, 1926.

Four Decades of Repression

The regime did not attack associativism by chance. It understood that decades of associative practice had created spaces of real democracy, trained thousands of activists with experience of collective management, and built networks of solidarity incompatible with an authoritarian state.

The corporatist Constitution of 1933 abandoned the republican notion of the right to public assistance, limiting the State's role to "promoting" solidarity institutions — a gracious concession, not a right. The Institute of Compulsory Social Insurance, created during the Republic, was abolished. In its place, a corporatist architecture of employers' guilds, regime-controlled trade unions and casas do povo (people's houses) was constructed, with welfare funds under State tutelage.

Pedro Teotonio Pereira, the architect of corporatist social policy, clearly expressed his opposition to republican reforms: parliamentary democracies had embarked on "adventures in social insurance" to court the proletariat, through "bureaucratic organisations" that demonstrated "the unviability of the statistical and socialising method".

The strangulation of free associativism operated through multiple mechanisms: permanent oversight with the power to dismiss boards; discriminatory taxation; the creation of competing corporatist institutions; and legal facilitation of the forced merger of associations into corporatist welfare funds. The results were devastating: mutual societies, which had 586,000 members in 1930, maintained practically the same number in 1973, during a period of significant urban and industrial growth.

Cooperativism suffered a similar attack. Decree 22513 of 1933, which the leader Tamagnini Barbosa dubbed the "garrotte law", restricted tax exemptions to cooperatives that traded only with their members, rendering them economically unviable. Agricultural cooperatives were transformed into institutions annexed to the guilds, with government delegates required to attend meetings.

Despite the repression, associativism resisted. As early as 1931, Mutualism Week was organised, with hundreds of lectures throughout the country. Antonio Sergio, an intellectual and cooperativist who never accepted corporatism, created the Central Council of Lisbon Cooperatives in 1947 and founded UNICOOPE in 1955, working patiently to keep the cooperative ideal alive. The implementation of the Ames Plan — developed with Swedish support — gave rise to the first modern cooperative supermarkets in the early 1970s. Cultural and recreational associations became, in the words of the historian Daniel Melo, "subterfuges for the survival of pockets of political resistance", maintaining under the guise of cultural activities a democratic culture that nourished opposition to the regime.



Propaganda poster for the week of Mutualism, December 26, 1932. ANTT

The 1974 Revolution and Democratic Construction

The revolution of 25 April 1974 released decades of pent-up energy. The organisational explosion was immediate: as early as 2 May, UNICOOPE was addressing the new government with articulated demands. In just four years, grassroots popular organisations created 317 social facilities — creches, care homes, community centres — serving around 20,000 people, concentrated in the urban areas of Lisbon, Porto and Setubal.

The 1976 Constitution enshrined unprecedented achievements. Cooperativism was recognised as one of three sectors of ownership of the means of production, alongside the public and private sectors. The right to social security was established as universal. And the existence of non-profit private social solidarity institutions was guaranteed, with a formal role of partnership in the provision of social services.

Cooperativism expanded rapidly in multiple directions. Housing cooperativism, driven by the SAAL programme that linked local government, central government and popular initiative, grew from practically zero in 1974 to 46,500 cooperative members in 1978, spread across 257 cooperatives. The Cooperatives for the Education and Rehabilitation of Maladjusted Children (CERCI), created by parents who could not find an adequate response in the existing system, reached 52 units across all districts in the 1980s. Consumer cooperativism reorganised with the creation of FENACOOP in 1978.

In 1976, Decree-Law 902/76 created the Antonio Sergio Institute for the Cooperative Sector (INSCOOP), honouring the intellectual who had kept the cooperative ideal alive for decades under the dictatorship. The Institute, initially under the tutelage of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, had as its mission to support and promote the cooperative movement. It created a Department of Studies and Planning, launched a National Cooperative Training Programme with support from the United Nations Development Programme, and established bilateral cooperation agreements with Sweden. In 1980, the first democratic Cooperative Code consolidated the sector's legal framework.

The Instituicoes Particulares de Solidariedade Social (IPSS — Private Social Solidarity Institutions) multiplied extraordinarily: from around 1,300 in 1986 to approximately 4,000 in 2006. Revealing data indicate that 80% of the IPSS existing in 1999 had been created after 1974. This vast network of social facilities — care homes for the elderly, nursery schools, day centres, creches, home support services — grew from around 4,400 units in 1998 to approximately 6,500 in 2011, serving more than 620,000 people.

The path was not linear. Accession to the European Economic Community in 1986 entailed the adoption of market policies frequently hostile to cooperative logic. The constitutional revision of 1989 eliminated references to the three sectors of ownership. INSCOOP was progressively hollowed out, being abolished in 2009 and replaced by the Antonio Sergio Cooperative for the Social Economy.

Nevertheless, the Portuguese third sector consolidated institutionally. In 2013, the Framework Law on the Social Economy formally integrated cooperatives, mutual societies, misericordias, foundations, IPSS and associations with altruistic purposes. In 2018, the Portuguese Confederation for the Social Economy was established, articulating demands for greater political recognition of the sector.

This history reveals a permanent tension between the capacity for self-organisation of populations and the political projects that seek to control or suppress it. From medieval neighbourhood assemblies to contemporary cooperatives, through confraternities, mutual societies and IPSS, the Portuguese third sector has demonstrated remarkable resilience — surviving four decades of dictatorship to reinvent itself in democracy.



Sticker of the Cooperative for Teaching and Rehabilitation of Disabled Children of Leiria, sd

Over the past fifty years, Portugal’s third sector has grown substantially and continues to expand and diversify. However, its trajectory has been far from linear. Following forty-eight years of dictatorship (1926–1974), associational life only began to develop in the final phase of the regime during the so-called Marcelista Spring. It was not until after 1974 that civil society emerged in full force, making the transition period particularly dynamic. As historians such as Pedro Ramos Pinto have demonstrated, the vibrant grassroots movements of that time were swiftly followed by a process of democratic normalization that helped shape what is now referred to as a society of mild manners.

Specific legal frameworks gradually emerged, resulting in the wide array of organizational types seen today: women’s associations, youth and family associations, development and environmental NGOs, private social solidarity institutions, sports clubs, foundations, cooperatives, and many more. This gradual proliferation of tailored legal statuses has shaped an inherently fragmented field.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Portugal participated in a global study coordinated by Johns Hopkins University, which concluded that the third sector was a significant economic force (as documented in the work led by Raquel Campos Franco). At that time, expenditure amounted to over 4% of GDP, with nearly half of all funding coming from own-generated revenues, and around 250,000 people involved, of whom almost half worked in social services.

Nevertheless, despite the emergence of various initiatives at the turn of the century to promote volunteering, such as Law 71/1998 and the establishment of the Portuguese Volunteer Confederation in 2007, Portugal was ranked among the European countries with the lowest rates of volunteer engagement according to comparative data. Data from Europe in 2022 confirms this trend: only around 7% of the population participates in formal or informal volunteering activities, placing Portugal just above countries such as Albania, Romania, and Turkey. There is also a striking gender imbalance, with women representing around three-quarters of all volunteers.

While various studies (including the National Statistics Office’s Satellite Account of the Social Economy) have collected valuable data on volunteering and the sector more broadly, information remains sporadic and lacks a systematic focus. While Portugal still retains forms of societal providence (visible, for example, in parental support networks or community mobilization during social crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic), these practices often escape scholarly attention. Similarly, public policies tend to overlook the impact of urban gentrification on long-standing community associations and resilient neighborhood cultural groups. This broader societal context may partly explain the lack of commitment, availability, and skills identified in a national survey conducted by CASES in 2026.

In 2026, Lisbon will host a leading international conference dedicated to the third sector, bringing together researchers from dozens of countries across all continents. It will provide an opportunity to discuss the Portuguese case, informed by comparative perspectives and international experience. The event also aims to strengthen collaboration between academia and the sector to foster joint projects and specialized training, both of which have significant growth potential. All interested participants are warmly invited to attend the 17th International Conference of the International Society for Third-Sector Research, to be held at Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa from 14 to 17 July 2026.