Cooperation against the odds: A study on the political economy of local development in a country with small firms and small farms

How is it possible to get economic actors to cooperate in order to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes in settings that are unfavourable to cooperation? This is the key question that I address in my thesis and that I would focus on in a range of publications and events as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow.

Established theories of cooperation suggest that overcoming the obstacles to cooperation requires either a robust framework of formal institutions or a long-established culture of trust. Many places in the world are endowed with neither of those characteristics. Yet, when ownership structures are fragmented, sustained cooperation among economic actors is important for processes of economic development, with major implications for both local economic outcomes and domestic political dynamics.

I approach the puzzle of the emergence of cooperation in unfavourable settings by drawing on qualitative empirical evidence collected through fieldwork in four pairs of case study areas in Greece. I compare four cases where specific types of cooperation among economic actors emerged in the last 30 years with four otherwise similar (matching) cases where such patterns of cooperation failed to occur. In total, my project relies on 86 semi-structured interviews as well as on documentary evidence, grey literature and the local press. A part of the argument is also tested quantitatively, using nation-wide statistical data about the degree of cooperation and relevant place-based characteristics in each municipality of Greece.

I argue that for cooperation to emerge against the odds, two elements are necessary. The first one is leadership. A small group of boundary-spanning leading actors can trigger a process of creating local-level cooperative institutions by performing three specific types of difficult and costly activities. Despite the frequent association of cooperation with homogeneity in a community, I find that successful leaders tend to be translocally embedded, highly skilled, well connected actors, who are in some way outsiders to the area in question.

The work of a small group of local-level leading actors can only catalyse broad-based, sustained cooperation if it is nested within a framework of facilitative macro-level institutions. This is the second necessary condition for the emergence of cooperation that I identify in my work. Crucially, supranational actors, such as the EU, can provide such facilitative macro-level institutions. Using Ostrom's (1990) concept of "facilitative political regimes", I argue that, indeed, the EU's agricultural and regional policies have played an important enabling role for the emergence of cooperation in the Greek agricultural and tourism sectors, to an extent compensating for deficiencies in the national institutional framework.

The aim of my ESRC Podstdoctoral Fellowship would be to maximise the impact of the findings of my PhD project through:
* Publishing my findings in peer-reviewed journal articles and submitting a book proposal to an academic publisher
* Publishing a 20-page summary report highlighting the policy implications of my analysis and presenting best practices from my high-cooperation case study areas
* Organising an interdisciplinary workshop on "the political economy of local development" and submitting a proposal for a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal
* Presenting my policy-relevant conclusions at public events that will be organised in collaboration with research institutions or sectoral/ local associations in both the UK and Greece
* Presenting my research output in three international academic conferences
* Linking my findings to the broader literature on institutional resilience in times of crisis by conducting a small additional research project with my mentor, Waltraud Schelkle, building on my PhD project.