Keywords

1 Transformation and Repurposing the Enterprise

It is common knowledge that the prevailing economic system and corporate business form at its core contribute to unsustainable systems on our finite planet. Calls for readjustment, restructuring, and repurposing the economic activity have been made for over half a century, at least since the formation of the Club of Rome and the publication of the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) when systemic issues and interconnections were brought to the fore. It took years of increasingly unsustainable practices to arrive at the consensus behind the United Nations (UN) efforts shedding light on the complexity of inter-related issues (see the Bruntland Report, UNWCED, 1987) and providing leadership on a global scale resulting in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGsFootnote 1) 15 years later. Sets of goals, targets, and indicators in the MDG and SDG projects have been an attempt to redirect economic activity toward a sustainable planetary system. In doing so, the SDGs shifted focus from a “less developed” world to the responsibility of the global actors to deliver change on all fronts—from environmental to social, economic to governance concerns.

However, neither the game nor its rules and structures have changed, regardless of some important efforts on the global scale to instigate change and transform the economy.

Businesses as critical agents of economic activity have been recognized as culprits in unsustainable practices, but the problem is systemic. Corporate behavior reflects the “rules of the game” where profit and growth fuel the economy built on capital ownership, accumulation, and tendency to market concentration and monopolization. Coupled with more recent policy decisions to bail out (financial) institutions, which became too big to fail, it has become apparent that more dramatic changes are required to redirect the course.

With this backdrop, alternatives to the corporate business model have been given a new lease on life. Many new enterprise forms have been emerging, and all enterprises have been made aware of the need to consider their impact on the planet through regulation, industry, and investor pressures to disclose their impact, or consumer and civil society pressures to change how they conduct their operations.

In this context, the cooperative enterprise form offers a viable model with clarity on the purpose of the enterprise to provide for and increase people’s welfare as “users”Footnote 2 of the enterprise rather than absentee investors. The importance of doing so within the planetary boundaries (see Raworth, 2017) has entered the discourse more recently, regardless of more than half a century of collective knowledge about the planetary limits.

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 8.2 revisits the Limits to Growth (1972, 2005) and Donella (Dana) Meadows’s follow-up publication Leverage Points (1999) to frame pressure points for the cooperative model’s contributions to system change. Section 8.3 takes a closer look at the cooperative model, debunking some of the “stylized facts” about cooperatives in the economics literature and presenting the model from the perspective of the Statement on the Cooperative Identity (ICA, 1995). Section 8.4 identifies the potential impact cooperative type of enterprise and associated “radical imagination” may have from the systems perspective, while Sect. 8.5 examines the contribution of cooperatives to context-based sustainability indicators as a tool for transformative impact. Section 8.6 concludes.

2 Places to Intervene in the System

To look at the future of the cooperative model we must consider its contributions to sustainability as the most pressing issue facing every individual, organization, and decision maker. To set the stage, this section outlines the work of Donella Meadows and her colleagues on unsustainable practices and a required system transformation.

The 30-year update to the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 2005), originally published in 1972, lays out three ways to respond to signals that resource use and pollution have exceeded the sustainable planetary limits: “muddy the waters” and hide it; relieve the pressure by economic or technical means; or change the system (p. 236). While the first kind of response dominated the political economy of the twentieth century, under the supremacy of the neoliberal economic paradigm, the second kind of response took over in the past few decades. In hopes that disclosure will change behavior, the business world engaged with corporate social responsibility (CSR practices), and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines were launched in 2000; carbon trade and markets have put blind trust in the price mechanism to solve the pollution problem; while carbon capture and green growth proponents bet on the ever-changing technology. All this effort so far did not change the course of the economy, society, and the shrinking planetary capacity to sustain life.

The third option—a system change—seems inevitable:

The third way to respond is to work on the underlying causes, to step back and acknowledge that the human socioeconomic system as currently structured is unmanageable, has overshot its limits, and is headed for collapse, and, therefore, seek to change the structure of the systemFootnote 3 (Meadows et al. 2005, p. 236)

Meadows et al. (ibid., p. 238) conclude that exponential growth in population and capital are the main structural causes of the overshoot of the planetary boundaries and point to the required change in expectations, goals, pressures, norms, costs, and incentives. Poverty is correlated with population growth, as is the lack of education. Further, beliefs and practices “that cause natural resources to be used more wastefully than money, that distribute income and wealth inequitably, that make people see themselves primarily as consumers and producers, that associate social status with material or financial accumulation, and that define goals in terms of getting more rather than giving more or having enough” (ibid. p. 238) are guiding daily lives but also business operations and policy frameworks. Goals and aspirations that drive the quest for growth in the economy, accept inequality and poverty, as well as the commodification of labor and the commons are ingrained in the “mental models” (Meadows et al., 2005, p. 254), so much so that the radical imagination necessary for meaningful change is hard to come by.

According to Meadows et al., a sustainable society is a dynamic society pursuing qualitative development instead of physical expansion while agnostic to growth. “Neither for nor against growth, it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and purposes for growth” (p. 254).

The increasing rate of resource exploitation is the key factor contributing to unsustainability. It is reflected in the pursuit of growth and extractive technology, producing a higher exploitation rate than a renewable resource needs to regenerate; coupled with market signals reinforcing unsustainable cycles and misplaced policies (Meadows, n.d.).

Inspired by limited action to change the system, Meadows (1999) identified 12 points for intervention in the system, which would catalyze transformation. These “places to intervene in the system” are ordered backward—from the least effective to the most effective leverage point.

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).

11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.

10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, and population age structures).

9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.

8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.

7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.

6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information).

5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).

4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.

3. The goals of the system.

2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises.

1. The power to transcend paradigms (Meadows, 1999, p. 3).

I will return to these leverage points in Sect. 8.4 in connection with cooperative points of impact. Let me first turn to the key characteristics of the cooperative enterprise form, as embodied in the Statement on the Cooperative Identity by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA, 1995).

3 The Cooperative Difference

The cooperative enterprise model is characterized by three fundamental properties implied in the Statement on the Cooperative Identity (ICA, 1995) which consists of an agreed-upon definition, a set of values, and operational principles: cooperatives are people-centered, rather than capital-centric; jointly-owned and controlled by their members; and democratically governed (see Chap. 2). These three properties supported by the values and principles of cooperation form the building blocks of the unique cooperative model (Novkovic & Miner, 2015; Miner & Novkovic, 2020). People-centeredness assumes that people are intrinsically motivated social beings, balancing their personal and group interests in accordance with general moral principles. Joint ownership and control (distributed rather than concentrated) is a hallmark of cooperative organizations, and it is intertwined with members as owners, controllers, and beneficiaries (Dunn, 1988). Although typically operating under private property regimes, cooperatives distribute ownership rights equally among their members and may hold some of their assets in indivisible reserves (ICA Guidance Notes, 2015; Navarra, 2016; Tortia, 2018). Democratic governance is a personal right rather than a property right (Ellerman, 1990); in primary cooperatives decisions are based on one member-one vote, rather than wealth-based, with self-governance as the underlying engine of autonomous cooperative enterprises and a vital component in democratic decision-making by their members. Members typically engage with the cooperative enterprise as contributors to its operations as producers, consumers, or workers (Novkovic et al., 2023), while they also jointly own and democratically control it to enable such engagement. This sets the member-owned enterprise model apart from the investor-owned, with implications for governance and, in particular, the purpose of the cooperative enterprise; its raison d’être.

Cooperatives as collective, values-based enterprises (MacPherson, 2002; Novkovic et al., 2022) are a means of collective action to promote human dignity, democratic decision-making, engagement (empowerment) of employees and other stakeholders, and, often, decommodification of necessities (such as food or housing) and the commons, as well as protection of members from market fluctuations and impact of market power (Novkovic et al., 2023). Cooperatives, therefore, internalize social “externalities” by definition, and environmental externalities increasingly in recent decades either as new cooperative startups or by changing the focus of governance and operations to environmental issues.

Cooperatives engage in market exchanges, but they also resort to reciprocity and relational exchanges among their members, as well as with other organizations through inter-cooperation as a principle. This is reinforced by intergenerational stewardship since cooperative members are concerned about the longevity of the enterprise instead of short-term financial gain for the current generation of members (see Lund & Hancock, 2020).

Well-governed co-ops also tend to evolve nested and networked governance structures as a means to develop and grow, as they strive to practice and uphold the values and principles that all co-ops subscribe to—e.g., member participation, democratic decision-making, solidarity, and cooperation among cooperatives, among other. The types of networks defined by the purpose of their formation (Table 8.1) include regional and national associations (or federations), supply chains, consortia, and diverse (complex) network formation to achieve a particular, more complex, goal of broader societal interest.

Table 8.1 Typology of cooperative networks by their purpose
Full size table

In summary, cooperatives are democratic member organizations with associational and mutualist character, networked inter-cooperative structures, and a direct relationship through members’ use of the enterprise (Borgen, 2004) for a particular need-satisfying purpose, rather than a purely financial investment. With these characteristics, there is evidence that they have the potential to impact on system change.

4 The Cooperative Model and Its Potential as a Leverage for System Transformation

4.1 The Leverage Points

At the top of Donella Meadows’ (1999) list of places to intervene in the system lie a few characteristics of cooperative enterprise form which, if sufficiently spread, may influence change. Cooperatives have a different purpose and structure, which address the core of the underlying cause of unsustainability highlighted by Meadows et al. (2005). Created to use the enterprise for work, access to necessities, markets, ethical consumption, or pool risk and resources, the cooperative model contrasts investor-owned enterprises in most fundamental ways.Footnote 4

The following points (#2–#6) are extracted from the Meadows’ list to make a case for cooperative relevance and impact in the coming years in these five areas.

  • #2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises.

I start from #2 on the list, since cooperatives, too, belong to a paradigm. Awareness about the way of knowing (#1 on Meadow’s list of pressure points) is a challenge beyond organizational design and a matter of broad education.

However, a different mindset (framing; point of view) is the most valuable contribution a cooperative enterprise and the associated nature of economic activity can bring to the structure of an economic system. This mindset has been marginalized and pushed aside in mainstream economics and business theory and practice to the point that the model itself became under threat in some regions due to the inability of its members to picture a different way of organizing economic institutions or a different way of life.

That cooperatives are prone to isomorphism is a matter of some elaborations in the literature (Bager, 1994; Borgen, 2004; Novkovic & Gordon Nembhard, 2023), but the underlying systemic reasons have been difficult to engage with due to the dominant framing of the economy and accompanying institutions. The momentum seems to be shifting as the newest wave of crises—financial in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020—put a new spotlight on systemic issues facing the planet. It is no surprise, then, that credit unions were seen as an alternative to bank failures by the Occupy movement; or that worker cooperatives are on the rise in the platform economy.

  • #3. The goals of the system.

The goals of cooperative enterprises and their networked systems vary depending on their context (see also Chap. 4). Still, they typically take the role of stabilizers to counterbalance the outcomes of systemic fluctuations and market inequities. Examples include increased cooperative entry in recessions, providing jobs and stability (Perotin, 2016; Eum, 2012); ensuring a living wage; use of indivisible reserves to buffer the impact of crises on the workers and members (Navarra, 2016; Tortia, 2018); relying on social networks to increase resilience (Billiet et al., 2021; Merrien et al., 2021), etc. In that sense, cooperatives can also impact the system through #8 on Meadow’s list—negative feedback loops as stabilizers—although their size relative to the problem they are trying to correct for may not always be sufficient to instigate a ripple effect. The networked nature of the model assists in scaling up impact.

This self-correction of structural fluctuations and business cycles is the reason for calls to support cooperative development in many regions. As self-help enterprises, cooperatives also address multiple areas highlighted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; see Beishenaly & Eum, 2021).

  • #4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.

The cooperative system is about self-help, by definition. Democratically governed cooperatives evolve with their members whose needs are changing with new generations of members and the changing technology and the environment. A system change is potentially slowerFootnote 5 in democratic enterprises and their nested networks, but the uptake is faster once a decision is agreed on (Eckart, 2009). The mindset of members may hinder a system change. If they have a poor understanding of the purpose of their enterprise model, their behavior may be influenced by the dominant institutional setting, often hostile to cooperatives.

  • #5. The system’s rules (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).

Members of cooperatives set the rules, change them, and evolve them as the environment and membership evolve as well. While cooperative enterprises can change the rules within the cooperative system, this power is limited by their density in the broader context. Within the boundaries of a cooperative system, organizations can impact both points #4 and #5 in Meadow’s list of leverage points. However, cooperative density has to be significant to influence an industry or a regional system, or they have to strike broad networks and partnerships with other values-based organizations. This power to change the system is best showcased within the social solidarity economy in Quebec or in various pockets in Spain, France, Italy, and other regional economies.

  • #6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information).

Cooperatives are known for transparency, openness, and information sharing. In worker cooperatives, these values are more readily realized because members are insiders in close proximity to the relevant information. Small cooperatives also tend to share information very quickly among the members. However, large (consumer or producer) cooperatives face a challenge because strategic decisions are often delegated to the leadership group and can be lost on the members. Good indicators may serve the information purpose, although often not in real time. Therefore, the lag between data collection and the ability to change the course may be significant.

In summary, cooperatives are born out of a different mindset—as self-help enterprise by a group of people who satisfy their needs through means of collective action, instead of the typical “hero entrepreneur” setting up a company to cash out on the IPO. Capital in cooperatives is instrumental—a necessary input but a means to a different end. This mindset and a different purpose can impact the system, which is destabilized by the quest for growth and capital accumulation (Meadows et al., 1972, 2005). Democratic decision-making ensures that rules and the structure of the organization and its networks evolve over time.

4.2 Transformative Power of Cooperatives

In Meadow’s terms, the structural causes of overshoot are norms, incentives, and goals that add pressure to capital accumulation and exponential growth. In that sense, cooperatives provide negative feedback loops that keep the system in check. They are known to correct for market failures, internalize the externalities, and are laboratories for social innovation (Novkovic, 2008). The counterbalancing logic and purpose of cooperatives fall into the following categories (Novkovic, 2020, 2021):

Promoting Human Dignity: Impacting Workers, Consumers, Producers, and the Community

As Meadows infers in her writing, one of the imbalances of the current system is that people are treated as a cost in production, so layoffs are profitable. In contrast, losses due to layoffs are externalized to the households and to public finance. Pursuing growth and profitability demands cutting costs, which often implies violating the rights of consumers, workers, or other stakeholders. By definition, cooperatives internalize the externalities as self-help enterprises whose members and decision-makers are the stakeholders impacted by their operations.

Decommodification of Fictitious Commodities (Land, Labor, Money; Housing, Food, Health, Enterprise, Knowledge)

Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) termed land, labor, and money as fictitious commodities whose provision cannot be left to market self-regulation through the price mechanism (Paton, 2010). The commodification of natural resources, work, or money creates monopolies, prevents access, and produces negative externalities.

An embedded system failure most notably captured by Hyman Minsky (1986), the commodification of money and financialization of the economy have produced multiple crises. On the other hand, cooperative finance tends to be conservative in that it creates liquidity using members’ assets to invest in the real economy. Moreover, financial market fluctuations do not directly impact cooperatives since their shares are not traded, and financial capital is a tool for a different purpose, yielding limited return.

Worker cooperatives decommodify labor; they are set up to provide meaningful work and protection from commodification, thereby also promoting human dignity (Navarra & Tortia, 2014; Burdin & Dean, 2012; Burdin, 2014; Perotin, 2016; Stocki & Hough, 2016).

Natural resources are treated as commons and collectivized in some cooperatives. Cases of community management of the commons (Sanchez Bajo & Roelants, 2011) or the formation of land trusts to collectivize and decommodify land are also present in many contexts. But overall, it is fair to say that natural resources have been neglected by all types of enterprises, including cooperatives, as the information about the planetary boundaries was scarce in the economic sphere, by ignorance or by design.

Other aspects of human activity not meant for market exchange should also be added to Polanyi’s list (see Novkovic, 2021). They certainly include the enterprise itself, and is reflected in its purpose. While cooperatives are designed to stay in operation as long as they provide use-value and address a socio-economic need of their members, investor-owned enterprises are designed to grow and accumulate financial wealth, contributing to system failures.

Distributed Power (Democratic Decision-Making)

Democracy is a cooperative value and a principle; it is the hallmark of the cooperative enterprise model. Different cooperative types practice different forms of democracy (Novkovic et al., 2023), but it is important to note that democratic vote in cooperatives is a non-transferable personal right, rather than a property right (Ellerman, 2016), and it cannot be equated to a shareholder vote in corporations (Tortia, 2018).

Worker cooperatives are particularly concerned about concentration of managerial power (Cannell, 2015), but oligarchic tendencies are even more pronounced in consumer cooperatives since members are more distanced from decision-making. Various institutional structures are created by the cooperative members to ensure that power is not concentrated in a few hands, and they may include committees (as in OAS Federal Credit Union, McMahon et al., 2020), sociocracy circles (Unicorn worker co-op; McMahon et al., 2021), or social councils (see the Mondragon case, Imaz et al., 2023), for example.

Fair Distribution of Income

Income inequality is a systemic issue and a source of unsustainability. It has a negative impact on welfare, child poverty, population wellbeing, happiness, and increasing social problems such as crime and teen pregnancy, for example (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010, 2014).

The perception of fairness is also important for wellbeing. Cooperatives have a role to play when it comes to income dispersion and income inequality. Stemming from values such as equity, equality, and solidarity, cooperatives often pay attention to fair income distribution with respect to gender, type of work, paying a living wage, income distribution based on patronage (hours worked in case of labor), social needs, and the like. The highest to lowest pay ratio in cooperatives is hundreds of times lower than in comparable investor-owned businesses.

Besides addressing pay equity, cooperatives distribute income fairly to their members, according to their contributions to revenue stream through hours worked, or patronage. Members decide on the division of surplus to indivisible reserves, which serve as intergenerational transfer of wealth, and to member patronage or to reinvestment.

Longevity and Resilience (Purpose to Serve Future Generations)

Organizational resilience increases with shorter supply chains, networked systems of decision-making, embeddedness in the local community, and reduced exposure to speculative market price fluctuations. The unique features of cooperatives result in non-market responses to address human needs, asset lock since capital is non-transferable, and member participation in decision-making. Operationalization of co-op values such as solidarity and mutual self-help (MacPherson, 2002), and the principle of cooperation among cooperatives lead to the formation of networks—associations, federations, consortia, and supply chain networks. Networked structure, economic democracy, and indivisible reserves have proven to be some of the key factors securing cooperative resilience and longevity (see Merrien et al., 2021 for a review). Employment stability is a key factor contributing to a significantly greater rate of survival of worker cooperatives compared to investor-owned enterprises (Arando et al., 2010; Burdin, 2014; Smith & Rothbaum, 2014).

Economic Justice

Economic justice is often the reason for cooperative market entry. It includes decent work and a living income to labor; fair price to suppliers (e.g., mitigating monopsony pricing); not engaging in predatory pricing; paying fair taxes; affordable housing prices, and the like. Not treating labor as a commodity secures self-determination at work, and fair wages with equitable income distribution.

The commitment to growth driving unsustainability comes from the persistent “poverty, unemployment and unmet needs” (Meadows et al., 2005, p. 261). The authors call for a new way of thinking in order to resolve these issues. To resolve poverty, they propose a reliance on sharing, rather than accumulating wealth, and call for “solidarity and sufficiency.” While this may sound idealistic to some, the cooperative economy has always worked on these principles (see Chap. 5). Unemployment is a result of commodification of labor in the current system, separating work from the human being, and treating labor as a cost which needs to be cut to satisfy investors’ quest for profit. Such focus is behind the “‘working poor” phenomenon when even those who have jobs are unable to satisfy their basic needs. Labor market price signals have never internalized the externalities, and that is where (worker) cooperatives play a corrective role.

As associations of members who self-define the economic activity which will address their needs, and the rules of democratic engagement with the enterprise, cooperatives have the ability to change the mindset and awaken the radical imagination of their members and communities. The challenges they face are many—from isomorphic (regulatory and other) pressures to align with mainstream institutional logic, to heterogeneity of members and strategic misalignment (Borgen, 2004).

Also important from a systems point of view is their relatively limited reach when it comes to impact on policy and feedback loops which would trigger transformative practices. Measures and indicators developed with the cooperative mindset may provide a tool for greater impact.

5 The Mindset, Goals, Measures, and Transformation

The UN’s efforts to shift focus on sustainable development include the advancement of goals, targets, and indicators (SDGs) intended to serve as traffic lights that direct the global system toward a sustainable path.

Indicators can be impactful if they affect other leverage points with higher impact on the system (Meadows, 1999). The GRI and other similar tools have not succeeded to do that, since they focused on disclosure as a measure of success; their indicators have mostly been incremental and have not induced the needed behavior change. Meadows (1998) and GRI founder Allan White in subsequent years, understood that indicators need to be contextualized—placed in time, or limited by thresholds—in order to produce meaningful impact.

“Sustainability indicators must be more than environmental indicators; they must be about time and/or thresholds” (Meadows, 1998, p. viii).

Inspired by these works, Baue (2019) argues that context-based sustainability indicators with associated thresholds and allocations can influence the mindset and possibly a paradigm shift.

Context-based environmental indicators need a norm as a benchmark for comparison, which represents the threshold of a resource allocated to a particular use, in order to be sustainable. McElroy (2008) calls it “Sustainability quotient” where an actual value (impact) of an indicator is divided by the normative value allocated to this particular use (see Baue, 2019, p. 9). The norms are established by the scientific community assessing the planetary boundaries in nine critical areas of impact of human activity, such as air pollution and biodiversity loss, for example (see Steffen et al., 2015; Raworth, 2017).

When it comes to social indicators, a time component can contextualize progress, but norms are a matter of some debate—what is sustainable when it comes to inequality or unemployment; poverty, or gender equity? Cooperative mindset, purpose, and logic can contribute to setting these benchmarks (Novkovic, 2020, 2021), marking an important role the cooperative sector and the broader social solidarity economy can play in shifting toward sustainability and required transformation. By measuring and reporting on the purpose of cooperative organizing, cooperative indicators can exhibit their transformative nature while they perform as the yardstick (benchmark) by which to address structural problems in the economy and expose unsustainable practices (Novkovic, 2021).

The UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) developed the first comprehensive—and evolving—set of Sustainable Development Performance Indicators based on context-based accounting, with benchmarks and allocations (see Baue, 2019; Yi et al., 2022). In contrast to ESG metrics which assess the environmental, social, and governance risk to the enterprise, the SDPI turns this logic on its head to assess sustainability of the enterprise with respect to its impact on the social and natural ecosystems (Yi et al., 2022).

6 Conclusion

The collective, people-centered nature of the cooperative enterprise model, as defined by the ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity, carries some inherent features which may provide the leverage points for intervention in the system. Meadows (1999) highlights that the most important points of intervention include changing the mindset, goals, and incentives in the economy. This chapter extends the argument that cooperative purpose and structure offer a different point of view, departing from the quest for profit and capital accumulation identified by Meadows as the systemic flaw: an embedded source of unsustainable outcomes due to misplaced incentives and inadequate cost accounting.

The cooperative economy has the potential to impact the socio-economic transformation required for a sustainable system operating within the planetary boundaries. Importantly, the cooperative model offers radical imagination needed for system transformation, with a different mindset regarding the role of the enterprise as a socio-economic entity that provides meaningful work and serves as a vehicle to meet the needs of its members and community.

The issue with cooperative economy as a vehicle for change is that, while significant, it is still relatively small compared to the mainstream capitalist giants. Yet, change in complex systems is known to come from small impacts and ripple effects. One way to speed up the shift in the mindset is to contribute to indicators and measures used by the regulators and by rating agencies, but indicators that drive the change toward sustainable social, ecological, and economic practices rather than assist in “greenwashing.” Sustainable Development Performance Indicators by UNRISD provide a mindset-shifting approach to measurement, by introducing the thresholds and allocations, as well as social norms inspired by cooperative values which may move us closer to a sustainable future.