Abstract

"Contextualizing Cooperative Ownership in Energy Transitions"

Abby Spinak, Harvard Graduate School of Design (spinak@fas.harvard.edu)

Over the last ten years, there has been a resurgence of interest in institutions of collective ownership such as cooperatives, credit unions, and land trusts. Scholarship on these institutions has lauded them not just for the democratic alternative they pose to corporate capitalism, but also as a promising path to climate reform. Collective ownership, many have claimed, is less exploitative of both people and nature, especially in energy industries. This paper asks how the relationship between cooperative ownership and environmental performance has fared empirically. Drawing on a case study of a national network of “rural electric cooperatives” in the United States that were financed by a New Deal program in the 1930s, the paper explores how ownership is an important but not deterministic aspect of business culture and the relationship of businesses to their environments. As of 2019, American electric cooperatives represent a wide spectrum of environmental behaviors across a huge diversity of socioeconomic and ecological landscapes. Some electric cooperatives have in recent years switched to renewable energy generation, invested in local small-scale hydro and biofuel businesses, coordinated with community solar cooperatives, and launched progressive energy efficiency programs for low-income communities. Other co-ops have coordinated to lobby against environmental bills in Congress and demanded exemptions from states’ renewable portfolio standards. This wide diversity challenges both theory about cooperatives and the primacy of business ownership in environmental impact. Discarding this dichotomy, the paper will examine how cooperative ownership has intersected with professional utility networks, financing, urban and industrial development, and local ecology and geology over the past eighty years to create a national landscape of dramatically different institutions that all run under the name “cooperative” and espouse democratic values of business ownership.