Greek Financial Cooperatives and Inclusiveness: A Social Operating System for Local Societies to recover from the crises

In Greece, the sovereign debt crisis has evolved to main street economy disfunction and challenges in civil society. Consequently, a broad rethinking about the tools of local policy and development strategies is an increasing... [ view full abstract ]

In Greece, the sovereign debt crisis has evolved to main street economy disfunction and challenges in civil society. Consequently, a broad rethinking about the tools of local policy and development strategies is an increasing necessity. This paper builds on the premise that development should be regarded as a cultural as well as an economic phenomenon since the criteria, objectives, productive forces, and the impact of development must also be considered. A sustainable development process begins with immunization against the crisis and should take into account positive and negative externalities that affect the overall objectives of development, with an understanding of their valorisation.
Financial Co-operatives in the Greek periphery survived in various market conditions, mainly because of their adoptability to address end-user needs and their capacity to scale-up to cover networked societies. Greek financial cooperatives underpin local communities: cooperative banking that shares a tradition of mutuality and deals with day-to-day operation offers banking decentralization, cultivates financial literacy, encourages access to liquidity funds, and formulates the micro-economic climate. In the two case studies examined (Cooperative Bank of Chania, Crete and Cooperative Bank of Karditsa, Thessaly) doing business is another facet of the social networking coin. Social cohesion grounded on homo dictyous is the novel legacy that persists overtime for the continuity and resilience of Greek society, as a whole, and for self-sufficiency and sustainability in its local communities.
Their efficiency is considered to rest among the co-operative’s capacity to attach important functions and characteristics to the opposite side of the market. However, gradually, more formal characteristics of a financial intermediary were added into the organizational and operational character of co-operative banks. In any case and regardless their status, the determinant between a co-operative’s presence in a market and a meaningful intervention to a market, lies within the quality and the strength of the links that the co-operative maintains with its members; i.e. that successful co-operatives are business ventures that create value for their dispersed owners, their members. Exogenous concepts of “value” or “success” maybe less important than endogenous “values” and “sustainability” or the measure of what members think of their co-operative, how do they value its performance and in which ways they understand that it meets their needs, especially in the crisis era.