Cooperative values and principles, legal principles and law

Cooperatives of all types the world over have been guided by a set of identity shaping principles (cooperative principles) ever since the foundation of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) in 1895, These principles are... [ view full abstract ]

Cooperatives of all types the world over have been guided by a set of identity shaping principles (cooperative principles) ever since the foundation of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) in 1895, These principles are now laid down in the 1995 ICA Statement on the co-operative identity (ICA Statement), i.e. in a document of a non-governmental organization. The fact of having such a list of principles sets cooperatives apart from other enterprise types.
This presentation attempts to find an answer to the question in which way legislators are bound by these principles. This question leads to a number of preliminary basic questions of legal theory, such as the interrelationship between various sets of norms (internormativity), the relationship between (legal) principles and rules (Dworkin; Alexy), and the place of standards set by private actors in legislation in times of the globalization induced reshaping of political, economic, social and societal spaces.
By embedding the ICA Statement into the wider framework of public international/ transnational and global law and by situating the question within the paradigm of sustainable development, the presentation concludes that for legal reasons legislators must translate the cooperative principles into law, for political reasons they ought to do so.

*University of Helsinki