ICA’s Bruno Roelants’ passionate message as he says bye to global cooperative movement

KAMPALA-Since January 12, 2023, the International Cooperative Alliance [ICA] has been calling for candidates to apply for the position of ICA Director General.  The successful candidate will succeed Bruno Roelants, who, after serving five years in that position and 16 years as International Organisation of Industrial and Service Cooperatives [CICOPA] Secretary General will retire next month as he confirms in his passionate departure message.

Roelants in his message talks of his achievements among other issues in the global cooperative movement, mentioning that he will remain active in the cooperative movement. Below is his full message in which he also thanks ICA staff:

Dear all,

Next week, on 28 February, I will conclude my five-year mandate as Director General of the International Cooperative Alliance. As of 1^st March, I will continue my journey with the cooperative movement in other roles, and you can contact me at roelantsbruno@yahoo.fr . This journey began in the late 1970s, and saw me living in Italy, China, and France in contact with cooperatives, as well as the Netherlands, the Geneva region and Brussels, with fieldwork also in India, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Canada and Central-Eastern European countries. Below, let me briefly share my journey with cooperatives around the world, with the humble hope of transmitting my passion for the cooperative movement.

After leaving the UK and a long trip across Africa, I settled down in Rome in 1978, where I launched the Roman branch of Frères des Hommes, a European development NGO which promoted a series of projects with cooperatives around the developing world, especially in agriculture and healthcare. In 1986, I moved to Beijing as project coordinator for Frères des Hommes in China, and I had the chance of meeting, just before he died, long time China resident Rewi Alley from New Zealand, cofounder of the historic Chinese cooperative movement Gung Ho [industrial cooperatives] which disseminated across China between 1937 and 1952. Gung Ho [or International Committee of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives [ICCIC], today an ICA member, had just been revived in 1987 as a Chinese NGO promoting cooperatives. This marked the start of my experience with Gung Ho, of which I am still a member, with the launch of experimental projects in several parts of China under the guidance of old Gung Ho activists from the 1930s and 40s, the most significant ones being in Shandan county in Gansu province at the beginning of the Silk Road, and later in Shanghai.

In 1990, while living in China, I met Yves Regis, President of ICA Sectoral Organisation for industrial and service cooperatives CICOPA, in Paris, at the request of GungHo-ICCIC, who then became a CICOPA member. The same year, I visited the Mondragon cooperative group in the Basque region of Spain. In this first of many successive visits to Mondragon, I met Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, one of the five pioneers of the Mondragon experience, who helped me prepare the visits by Chinese cooperators which I organised in 1992 and 1993. We then welcomed Regis and Gorroñogoitia at a conference in Beijing just after the 1992 ICA Tokyo Congress. Yves Regis and Alfonso Gorroñoitia, as well as Rewi Alley, were three truly exceptional human beings and great masters in cooperatives.

After organising a study visit by Chinese cooperators to India and being admitted as technical advisor to the CICOPA Executive Committee at the CICOPA Manchester Conference preceding the 1995 ICA Congress, I worked  between 1996 and 1999 as coordinator of the CICOPA China programme in Shanghai, with the cooperativisation of 99 state and collective enterprises in difficulty and the salvation of a few thousand jobs, and of the CICOPA India programme in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, which provided scales to a few dozen artisanal cooperatives that had been weakened by the effects of India’s economic policy at the time, in particular handloom weavers.

In the late 1990s, back in Europe [first in Italy doing fieldwork on cooperatives, then in The Hague for a Master in Development focusing on cooperatives at the International Institute of Social Studies], I worked with CECOP CICOPA-Europe [the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives) as coordinator of projects in Central-Eastern Europe, and in particular, the SCOPE [Strengthening Cooperatives in Central-Eastern Europe] project grouping 17 European countries between 2000 and 2005, contributing also to the Prague [2002] and Krakow [2004] European social economy conferences organised by CECOP.  Simultaneously, I coordinated the European Cooperative Groups [ECG] three-year project gathering cooperative groups from Italy, France and Spain, Mondragon among others.

Between 2000 and 2002, having moved to the Geneva Region, I spent a large part of my time working on the preparation of ILO Recommendation 193 on the Promotion of Cooperatives and, as an accredited representative of the 3 Italian cooperative confederations, on the coordination of the group of cooperators accredited to be part of the negotiations on this Recommendation at the International Labour Conference in 2001 and 2002. Thanks to our presence in the negotiations, the final text corresponded almost entirely to the one we had submitted to the ICA Board for approval. Even more importantly, the whole ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity was included in the text with a mention to the ICA itself (a unique occurrence in ILO standards) through 11^th hour negotiations, and thus became part of the international standards approved by the international community within the UN system. Twenty years on, ILO Recommendation 193 remains the most important international policy document on cooperatives. I am grateful to ICA ex-Presidents Roberto Rodrigues [1997-2001] and Ivano Barberini [2001-2009] for having personally supported me in this endeavour.

I became Secretary General of CICOPA in 2002, then of CECOP CICOPA-Europe in 2005, both until the beginning of 2018. Between 2005 and 2008, from CICOPA, I took part as the representative of the ICA Sectoral Organisations in the ICA statutory and institutional reform process and in 2006, from CECOP, in the foundation of Cooperative Europe.

As CICOPA Secretary General, among the most significant outputs I should mention the elaboration and approval of international standards of worker cooperatives [2002-2005] and social cooperatives [2008-2011] complementary to the ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity; two world conferences [Oslo 2003 and Cartagena 2005] plus the special conference “Global Worker Cooperative Day” for the UN International Year of Cooperatives in Marseille in 2012; a significant advance in cooperative statistics which ushered in the statistical work of the UN committee for the promotion of cooperatives COPAC between 2015 and 2017 [which CICOPA took part in], then the ILO Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives delivered by the ILO Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2018; and the study “Cooperatives and Employment: a Global Report” presented at the Quebec International Summit of Cooperatives in 2014 after 15 months’ research and fieldwork in 10 different places around the world. It was followed by a second report three years later.

Among the most important outputs delivered in CECOP when I was Secretary General, I should mention the European Parliament Report on the Contribution of Cooperatives to Overcoming the Crisis in 2013; a significant change in the 2014 version of the EU Public Procurement Directive indirectly promoting social cooperatives, after 7 years’ lobbying; a 2012 report and documentary film on cooperatives’ resilience to the economic crisis that flared up in 2008; and a series of books and publications on European industrial and service cooperatives.

During these years, I co-authored with my wife Claudia Sanchez-Bajo, an academic researcher on cooperatives, the book Capital and the Debt Trap – learning from cooperatives in the global crisis [Palgrave 2011-2013], endorsed by Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, James Galbraith and Jean Ziegler, and prefaced by Ian MacPherson, and did some lecturing in universities and training centres in Italy and Costa Rica.

I became Director General of the ICA in April 2018. Over the last five years, during which the ICA membership increased from 306 members at the end of 2017 to 315 members today in spite of the pandemic, some of the most relevant outputs I have led and worked on, under the supervision of the ICA Board and with the decisive contribution of the ICA Global Office team, include the following:

1. Leading the design of an ICA member surveying early 2018, which was the most in-depth (59 questions) and most responded [62% response rate] ICA member survey on record, allowing us at the Global Office, and the ICA Board, to better understand ICA members’ needs and expectations.
2. Based on the member survey just mentioned, I worked with the ICA Board in elaborating for more than a year the ICA 2020-2030 Strategic Plan, which had been requested by the 2017 ICA General Assembly in Kuala Lumpur and was approved by the 2019 General Assembly in Kigali, and is presently guiding the ICA activities year after year.
3. The multiannual programme under the ICA-EU Framework Partnership Agreement[2016-2021] with an intensification of activities as of 2018, was successfully completed through a close collaboration between the Global Office and the Regional Offices of the ICA, with a very high level of appreciation by the European Commission: 28 policy events were organised, 7 studies published, 80 training sessions imparted, dozens of national reports on data and on legislation drafted, while the first cooperative Global Youth Forum was held in February 2020 under this programme.
4. In 2019, I led the organisation and programming of the ICA Kigali conference “Cooperatives for Development” where the whole ICA global team, as well as the ICA Regional and Sectoral Organisations, were involved; it was the second ICA global conference ever held in Africa and the first one fully dedicated to development, with around 1000 participants from 94 countries; it was also the largest event of the above-mentioned 2016-2021 ICA-EU Framework Partnership Agreement.
5. I oversaw the launch of a cooperative-to-cooperative trade project cycle with the International Trade Centre [ITC, the joint cooperation agency of UNCTAD and WTO for business aspects of trade development] through a first pilot project in 2021, with other projects now in preparation.
6. The ICA International Cooperative Entrepreneurship Think Tank[ICETT] gathering some of the largest cooperatives and cooperative groups in the world (15 to date) was launched, upon my proposal, as I considered that the cooperative movement needed a global think tank focusing on entrepreneurship, however small it may be at the beginning; ICETT has just finalised its work plan for the next two years;
7. I made a proposal for an ICA G20 Working Group which was inaugurated under the Italian G20 Presidency [2021] and whose coordination I consequently supervised; this working group has spurred a series of references to cooperatives in G20 documents.
8. I co-organized the ILO-ICA Conference on the Future of Workconvened in June 2019 at the ILO premises in Geneva, where the book Cooperatives and the World of Work previously edited by CICOPA in collaboration with the ILO and the ICA Committee on Cooperative Research, was presented, after I got it published at Routledge.
9. I spearheaded the insertion of a reference to cooperatives in the ILO Centenary Declaration on the Future of Work, one of the key ILO documents, through my two-week lobbying in Geneva at the International Labour Conference [ILC] in 2019.
10. After having proposed the creation of the International Coalition on Social and Solidarity Economy [ICSSE], which was established in September 2021 with ICMIF, AIM, GSEF and SSEIF, I took an active part in the discussion in Geneva at the ILC in 2022 for two weeks on the ILO Resolution Concerning Decent Work and the Social and Solidarity Economy, in close coordination with ICSSE.
11. To strengthen ICA’s cooperation with the United Nations, I supervised the ICA’s co-organisation, for the first time and upon the request of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UN DESA], of the UN Expert Group Meeting which, every two years, provides the basis for the UN Secretary General’s recurrent report Cooperatives in Social Development [and this should be repeated in 2023].
12. As Chair of UN committee on cooperatives COPACover the last two years on behalf of ICA, I launched a discussion on a new COPAC strategy, which was approved, and facilitated the entry into COPAC of two new members, the International Trade Centre [ITC] and the UN Research Institute on Social Development [UNRISD]. In addition, upon UN DESA’s suggestion, COPAC started in 2022 co-organising with UN DESA a cycle of Voluntary National Reviews (VNR) labs dedicated to cooperatives within the framework of the UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development [HLPF] taking place every year in early July, allowing to celebrate simultaneously in New York the UN International Day of Cooperatives, which takes place during the same period.
13. I led the organisation and programming of the 2021 ICA 33rd World Cooperative Congress “Deepening our Cooperative Identity”, the first global cooperative event held in a hybrid form (due mainly to the pandemic, but representing an important organisational innovation) under the supervision of the Congress Task Force and with the key support of the ICA global team and experts in logistics, moderation and communication; around 1000 participants were physically present and 500 online. The Congress was preceded by an array of preparatory activities as of August 2020, including two academic conferences immediately before. I sincerely thank the German cooperative movement and the Raiffeisen Society for having handed over to the ICA, within the framework of the Congress and in relation with the cooperative identity, one of the two copies of the certificate issued in 2016 by the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage inscribing the“Idea and practice of organizing shared interests in cooperatives on the Representation List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity upon the proposal of Germany”. This copy is now displayed at the ICA DG’s office. We eventually disseminated this UNESCO recognition in a hybrid event called “Cooperatives are Key Stakeholders in advancing SDGs through the culture and creative sector”, organised in 2022 in the framework of the UNESCO Mondiacult Conference in collaboration with CICOPA and Cooperatives of the Americas.
14. l spearheaded the organisation and programming of the first ever ICA Global Roundtable of Government Authorities for Developing just after the Congress, with the presence of public authorities from 22 countries, 4 UN agencies and the EU.

In all three organisations I have led as chief executive since 2002, namely CECOP, CICOPA and the ICA, I have been faced with an initial situation requiring either a launch from scratch [for CICOPA] or in-depth re-structuring (for CECOP and the ICA) of the staff of the organisation, with very limited financial resources: CECOP after the spin-off due to the establishment of Cooperatives Europe in 2005-2006, and the ICA with the closure of the ICA Washington office.

I am deeply grateful to all my colleagues, first at CECOP and CICOPA, then at the ICA, who have shown full dedication to their work, and without whom all the outputs I mentioned under these three organisations would have been impossible. I also wish to thank the executives and the staff of the ICA Regional and Sectoral Organisations for their dedication during these years. I am thankful to the successive Presidents whom I have worked with, at CECOP, CICOPA and the ICA, for the fruitful collaboration.

I thank the ICA Board members for their trust in the implementation of the ICA activities over the last five years, the ICA Thematic Committees and working groups [ICETT, G20 WG and CIAG] for their inputs and expertise, the Board, Director and staff of Dotcoop for having opened to me a brand new field of knowledge, and all ICA members, whose support has given me the strength to lead the implementation of the ICA mission as the organisation that “unites, represents and serves cooperatives worldwide” [ICA Bylaws, Art 1 Mission Statement].

I thank all the authorities and officials in international organisations, regional institutions and in particular the EU, and governments, whom I have worked with for the constructive relations we have established and strengthened. I am grateful to all the technical partners [in IT, translation and interpretation, graphic design, audio-visual etc] for their professionalism. Last but not least, I am grateful to my wife Claudia for having both advised me and stood by me during the last five years, which have required full time dedication, including weekends and holidays.

Having maintained a trajectory coherent with my passion for cooperatives as a way to help solve our challenges for a more human and sustainable future has meant a great journey of learning and a constant source of strength. I am thankful for having had the chance to work for the cooperative movement both at the grassroots level in local development, and at the international level in policy areas.

As mentioned above, I will continue working on cooperatives in other roles, and hope to remain in contact with you in the future.

In cooperation,

Bruno Roelants

ICA Director General.

https://thecooperator.news/icett-hold-plenary-meeting-five-years-after-its-creation/

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