It doesn't seem easy, but I have good news, the time comes for the Public Cooperatives, there are projects and they come new. Organising an economy in our neighbourhoods, villages and districts that makes a living life possible for all has become an inescapable and civic initiative. Be it with the resources of the municipal transformative activity, with the vision of the organized agents of urbanism or with the impulse of territorial cooperativism. However, the organisation of the local economy in response to the needs of citizens is an essential element: an independent development strategy and transformative collective working instruments. Elements difficult to find in the current neoliberal model of local development.
"The Public Cooperative sews the community by federating or integrating into a single tool, if necessary, and entering with cooperatives from other countries"
I frame the line of creation of Public Cooperatives in legal work tools, the work that we who are in cooperative social entrepreneurship consider necessary (https://etzi.pm/herri-kooperatibak).This is a popular structure that offers the services necessary for a neighborhood, town or region, through the Community public-cooperative cooperation, and that can adopt different legal forms. The legal structure that is created will have a Community momentum, and in order to carry out the project must drive different people and agents, weaving community relations along the way, through multiple partners and offering resources to strengthen the community with the result. To this end, the cooperative will ensure the organization of different needs, through independent work and collective ownership, through agri-ecological feeding, renewable energies, free and safe communications, collective care or cultural creation. The Public Cooperative will unite the community by federating or integrating, where appropriate, different instruments, and entering with cooperatives from other countries, creating new relationships for territorial cohesion and the development of new routes of solidarity between communities.
In the Northern Basque Country we have a good model, the SCIC or Cooperative Society of Collective Interest, a legal tool that is being developed through projects of interest. But we are also surrounded by hail clouds, with the form of mercantilist appropriation of concepts, or with the scarcity of cooperative laws that we need to walk the way in the South.
The legal proposals for the development of Public Cooperatives can be included in the Transformative Economy Laws for the integration, representation and creation of the territory, solidarity and vital future in the economy.