Governance, innovation and sustainability performance in agricultural co-ops. The case of French wine co-ops – INNOGOUV

Agricultural co-ops are a specific form of governance, democraticly shaped, with a relevant contribution to sustainability. In France, the existing 2,300 co-ops generate 190,000 jobs. They are main actors in the agricultural sector, namely in the wine sector (45% of the production). But some signs indicate a disparity in their performances. Their intrinsic features, as their ways of governance, can inhibit or accelerate technological or organizational innovations. Governance, innovation and sustainability are considered to be the main challenges for the future of the wine co-ops (FranceAgriMer, 2017). This is why our central research question is: what is the impact of agricultural co-op governance on their innovation and sustainability performance, applied to the wine sector? Agricultural co-op governance and performance have been widely studied (Chaddad and Iliopoulos, 2013, Grashuis ans Su, 2019). New approaches on the complex co-op governance and performance (Cornforth, 2004 ; Grashuis and Su, 2019; Saïsset and Codron, 2019) and the influence of governance and innovation on co-op performance (Reboud et al., 2016), from a sustainable standpoint (Marcis et al., 2018), are needed. Our project is pluridisciplinary and primarily anchored in economics and management. Its practical objective is to help farmers and their co-ops to meet the challenge of innovative agriculture to significantly achieve sustainability in the wine sector. Our scientific objective is to understand how wine co-op governance are likely to contribute to more technological and organisational innovative practices, and how they can influence sustainability performance. The analysis and data collection plan includes building a strong conceptual framework (WP1), an exploratory and qualitative approach of wine co-op governance and innovation, using semi-directive interviews (WP2), and a quantitative study, assessing governance, innovation and sustainability performance and their links (WP3).