The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management

In 2015 the United Nations (UN) proposed its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The agenda specified seventeen interlinked Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. They balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the relationship between the presence of worker cooperatives and the diffusion of environmental awareness. The starting point is that worker cooperatives, by providing institutions in which employees control most aspects of their job and firm strategy, internalise the SDGs more than the traditional firms. In particular, in worker cooperatives, productive choices are made by workers that generally are part of the community where is located the firm. In this perspective they provide sustainable and local employment starting by their governance model and are likely to have a number of positive effects on their communities’ economies and health. Furthermore, the intergenerational nature of cooperatives is a stronger guarantee of sustainable development if compared with traditional capitalistic firms not only in environmental terms, but also by a social and economic point of view.