Waking the Asian Pacific Co-operative Potential

Replete with case studies, Waking the Asian Pacific Cooperative Potential applies a novel theoretical framework to aid in understanding meaningful change in cooperative firms, mutual firms, collectives, and communes, focusing in particular on the underexamined Asia Pacific region. It explores the common, albeit competing, objectives of transformational cooperatives that deliver a range of social benefits and corporative coops where the cooperative exhibits the characteristics of a competitive investor firm. The book provides examples of successful cooperatives in eleven countries across the Asia Pacific and reviews the theoretical framework of cooperatives, including issues pertaining to socio-economic, politico-legal, and domestic and international factors.

Waking the Asian Pacific Co-operative Potential provides early-career researchers and graduate students with a systematic resource of cooperatives in the Asia Pacific, highlighting core lessons from case studies regarding the ideal role of cooperatives in a modern economy and on the enabling factors of the role of the state, the market potential for scale-up, the mitigation of poverty, and civil society.

Morris Altman is Chair Professor of Behavioural and Institutional Economics and Co-operatives at the University of Dundee, United Kingdom, and former Inaugural Dean of Dundee University Business School. He has previously served as Dean at the University of Newcastle, Australia, Head of School at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Head of Department at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Morris was a former visiting scholar at Cambridge, Canterbury, New Zealand, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Hebrew, Stirling, and Stanford University. He has published more than 130 refereed articles and 20 books in behavioural economics, institutional economics, cooperative studies, governance, and sustainable development. Professor Altman is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Behavioural Economics and has held leadership roles in numerous international academic and professional organizations, including Association for Social Economics the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics. He also served on research committees of the International Co-operative Alliance.

Anthony Jensen is an academic, teacher, and activist with a focus on worker co-operatives as institutions inspiring an equal distribution of wealth, democracy, and opportunity. He is a conjoint lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia, where he was involved in the launch of the Graduate Certificate in Co-operative Management and Organisation, and where he taught business ethics, corporate governance, and social responsibility. He is also the founder of the Asia Pacific Cooperative Research Partnership in 2014. Dr. Jensen's role as a catalyst for societal change and advocate to reform insolvency law took him to Spain, Italy, and the United States to study the worker takeover of insolvent companies, leading to the report "Insolvency, Employee Rights and Employee Buyouts." This was launched at a function at the House of Commons, London, United Kingdom in 2006 and was published in Economic and Industrial Democracy in 2011. It became a foundation document by the Greek Government for the conference on worker buyouts in 2012. Dr. Jensen received his PhD from the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, and his theoretical approach was published in Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labour Managed Firms in 2013. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney and a visiting professor at Mysore University, Mysore, India. Adopting a learning by praxis approach, he has written and worked in the community to form co-operatives, presented papers at conferences, as well as edited, and contributed to books and journals including Waking the Asia Pacific Co-operative Potential in 2020.

Akira Kurimoto is a Senior Fellow of the Japan Cooperative Alliance. He studied law at the University of Tokyo and has held senior positions in both academia and the cooperative sector, including Professor of Cooperative Programs at Hosei University's Institute for Solidarity-based Society and Manager of the Japanese Consumer Co-operative Union. Since 1998, he has served as Board Member and Chief Researcher of the Consumer Cooperative Institute of Japan. Professor Kurimoto has played a prominent international leadership role within the cooperative movement, serving as Chair of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) Research Committee, a member of the ICA Principles Committee, and currently Chair of the ICA Asia-Pacific Research Committee. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Cooperative Monitor. A founding member of the Asia Pacific Cooperative Research Partnership, he co-edited Waking the Asian Pacific Co-operative Potential (2020).

Robby Tulus is an internationally respected cooperative leader, development practitioner, and policy advisor. He is currently Special Advisor to the Indonesian-Canadian Congress (ICC) and is widely recognized as a pioneer of the modern credit union movement in Indonesia, having co-founded the movement in the late 1960s. He also founded the National Association of Socio-Economic Cadres and the INKUR Federation of Indonesia. Throughout his distinguished career, Mr. Tulus has held senior leadership positions with major international cooperative organizations, including the Asian Confederation of Credit Unions, the Canadian Co-operative Association, and the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), where he served as Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific. He has also advised international organizations including CIDA, ILO, UNDP, and the Asian Development Bank, and was appointed ICA Special Envoy to oversee cooperative reconstruction initiatives following the Indian Ocean tsunami. His work has focused on cooperative development, capacity building, community resilience, and international cooperation.

Yashavantha Dongre, currently serving as Vice Chancellor of Chanakya University in Bengaluru, India, is a former Professor and Dean of Faculty of Commerce at the University of Mysore, India. He has been a researcher on cooperatives as well as a trainer and consultant supporting local cooperatives in India. He served as a member of the Committee to formulate the National Cooperative Policy in India in 2025. Recent publications to which he contributed chapters and served as editor/associate editor include Waking the Asian Pacific Cooperative Potential by Morris Altman, Anthony Jensen, Akira Kurimoto, Robby Tulus, Yashavantha Dongre & Seungkwon Jang (Elsevier 2020), and Exploring Asian Pacific Cooperatives in Theory and Practice by Morris Altman & Akira Kurimoto (Elsevier 2026).