From 4-6 July, five Dutch universities, the Dutch Council for Cooperatives (NCR) and the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) Committee on Co-operative Research Europe co-organized the 2018 ICA European Research Conference in Wageningen, the Netherlands with the theme “Cooperatives in a rapidly changing world: Innovation in enterprise and community”. The conference plenaries and parallel sessions addressed a range of topics including resilience and sustainability of the cooperative model, statistics on cooperatives, changing labour relations in cooperatives, cooperatives in global supply chains, use and management of big data and online platforms by cooperatives. The annual conference brought together more than 150 participants including scholars, cooperative leaders and policy makers from Europe and other regions.

ILO officials engaged in these sessions as speakers, panel organizers and participants. On the second day, the Head of the ILO Cooperatives Unit, Ms Simel Esim, made a key note speech on the role of cooperatives in addressing emerging challenges in the future of work . She highlighted the four forces transforming the world of work, namely technology, demographics, climate change and the economy. She reflected on cooperative engagement in response to these forces of change and presented research questions that would be of interest to the ILO in understanding the nature and extent of these responses as it relates to the world of work. She emphasized the need for comparative research on cooperatives across sectors and countries and beyond individual business case studies. She underlined the importance of statistics to be able to conduct analysis that is comparable and harmonized across countries, sectors and categories. She called for more research on the quality of jobs created by cooperatives and tracking how cooperatives contribute toward achieving the SDG targets and indicators.

Following Ms Esim’s keynote speech, experts from the Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Cooperatives (COPAC) Technical Working Group on statistics of cooperatives, Dr Marie Bouchard, Dr Damien Rousseliere and Mr Hyungsik Eum, presented their work with the ILO and COPAC on classification and economic contribution of cooperatives and employment in cooperatives.

The ILO also held a session on cooperative training and capacity building in collaboration with Agriterra, focusing on three tools:

• My.Coop: a training package and programme on the management of agricultural cooperatives, launched in 2012 through a partnership of several organizations including the ILO , the FAO , the International Training Centre of the ILO , Agriterra , KIT Royal Tropical Institute and the Wageningen University and Research Centre ;
• ApexFinCoop : a training and strategic planning programme that aims to empower financial cooperative apex organizations and other support institutions to advance the scale and effectiveness of financial cooperatives; and
• Accelerate.Coop: a low-cost, easy to implement training programme for those interested in using the cooperative model to advance their businesses and activities, consisting of three modules: Think.Coop , Start.Coop (forthcoming) and Manage.Coop (forthcoming).

During this interactive session participants from different countries and backgrounds provided their feedback in small groups and shared ideas on target groups, countries, dissemination strategies, and monitoring and follow-up actions needed for tracking progress and impact.