Antigonish Movement - Legacy

Legacy

The study club successfully addressed one of the enduring challenges of co-operative development. Co-operative enterprises address the principal–agent problem by making all users of an enterprise into owners. When users accept the duties of owners, this structure results in strong governance and control systems. However, the assets in co-operative enterprises are vulnerable when the users aren’t prepared to accept the duties of ownership. In a paper for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1962, Alexander Laidlaw, a co-operative leader who served as a director at the Extension Department, wrote that:

"… such concepts as group responsibility, reaching decisions by majority vote, delegating authority to responsible officers, observing rules agreed upon by the group, exerting self-discipline for the welfare of the group cannot be taught or learned in the abstract. They must become part of the personality of the individual and the experience of the group through actual situations."

Antigonish-style study clubs, unlike traditional seminars or workshops, require all members to collectively manage a group process even before they launch a co-operative. Members can take a hard look at each other’s capabilities and weigh their collective prospects with a clear head while they learn the skills they need to launch community ventures.

By the end of World War II a series of leaders from Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen to Edward Filene to Alphonse Desjardins to Moses Coady had shown that cooperative movements could reach and empower poor populations in a way that deepened the economic gains of capitalism while alleviating some of its undesirable social effects. This prepared the way for a wave of ‘anti-communist’ co-operative development led by the US government in the developing world in the 1940-60s. For precisely the reasons just noted, however, the results of this 'state-led' credit union development were mixed at best.

The philosophy and techniques of Antigonish anticipated some of the key ideas of rural development, including the emancipatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and the philosophy of Robert Chambers/participatory rural assessment. However, the Antigonish approach runs into significant problems in oral communities and those with anti-democratic traditions. This has limited the replicability of the movement, and led to significant off-shoots, such as the self-help group movement in India, village banking and the ASCA movement in parts of Africa.