Bruno Roelants retires from the post of ICA DG

Bruno Roelants, the high-profile Director General of International Cooperative Alliance has retired from his post on Tuesday. He sends a touching parting message on the occasion

Excerpts

On 28 February, I concluded my five-year mandate as Director General of the International Cooperative Alliance. As of 1^st March, I will continue my journey with the cooperative movement in other roles, and you can contact me at roelantsbruno@yahoo.fr . This journey began in the late 1970s, and saw me living in Italy, China, and France in contact with cooperatives, as well as the Netherlands, the Geneva region and Brussels, with field work also in India, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Canada and Central-Eastern European countries. Below, let me briefly share my journey with cooperatives around the world, with the humble hope of transmitting my passion for the cooperative movement.

During these years, I co-authored with my wife Claudia Sanchez-Bajo, an academic researcher on cooperatives, the book Capital and the Debt Trap – learning from cooperatives in the global crisis (Palgrave 2011-2013), endorsed by Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, James Galbraith and Jean Ziegler, and prefaced by Ian MacPherson, and did some lecturing in universities and training centres in Italy and Costa Rica.

I became Director General of the ICA in April 2018. Over the last five years, during which the ICA membership increased from 306 members at the end of 2017 to 315 members today in spite of the pandemic, some of the most relevant outputs I have led and worked on, under the supervision of the ICA Board and with the decisive contribution of the ICA Global Office team, include the following:

1. I led the design of an ICA member survey in early 2018, which was the most in depth (59 questions) and most responded (62% response rate) ICA member survey on record, allowing us at the Global Office, and the ICA Board, to better understand ICA members’ needs and expectations.
2. Based on the member survey just mentioned, I worked with the ICA Board in elaborating for more than a year the ICA 2020-2030 Strategic Plan, which had been requested by the 2017 ICA General Assembly in Kuala Lumpur and was approved by the 2019 General Assembly in Kigali, and is presently guiding the ICA activities year after year.
3. The multiannual programme under the ICA-EU Framework Partnership Agreement (2016-2021) with an intensification of activities as of 2018, was successfully completed through a close collaboration between the Global Office and the Regional Offices of the ICA, with a very high level of appreciation by the European Commission: 28 policy events were organised, 7 studies published, 80 training sessions imparted, dozens of national reports on data and on legislation drafted, while the first cooperative Global Youth Forum was held in February 2020 under this programme.
4. In 2019, I led the organisation and programming of the ICA Kigali conference “Cooperatives for Development” where the whole ICA global team, as well as the ICA Regional and Sectoral Organisations, were involved; it was the second ICA global conference ever held in Africa and the first one fully dedicated to development, with around 1000 participants from 94 countries; it was also the largest event of the above-mentioned 2016-2021 ICA-EU Framework Partnership Agreement.
5. I oversaw the launch of a cooperative-to-cooperative trade project cycle with the international Trade Centre (ITC, the joint cooperation agency of UNCTAD and WTO for business aspects of trade development) through a first pilot project in 2021, with other projects now in preparation.
6. The ICA International Cooperative Entrepreneurship Think Tank (ICETT) gathering some of the largest cooperatives and cooperative groups in the world (15 to date) was launched, upon my proposal, as I considered that the cooperative movement needed a global think tank focusing on entrepreneurship, however small it may be at the beginning; ICETT has just finalised its work plan for the next two years;
7. I made a proposal for an ICA G20 Working Group which was inaugurated under the Italian G20 Presidency (2021) and whose coordination I consequently supervised; this working group has spurred a series of references to cooperatives in G20 documents.
8. I co-organized the ILO-ICA Conference on the Future of Work convened in June 2019 at the ILO premises in Geneva, where the book Cooperatives and the World of Work previously edited by CICOPA in collaboration with the ILO and the ICA Committee on Cooperative Research, was presented, after I got it published at Routledge.
9. I spearheaded the insertion of a reference to cooperatives in the ILO Centenary Declaration on the Future of Work, one of the key ILO documents, through my two-week lobbying in Geneva at the International Labour Conference (ILC) in 2019.
10. After having proposed the creation of the International Coalition on Social and Solidarity Economy (ICSSE), which was established in September 2021 with ICMIF, AIM, GSEF and SSEIF, I took an active part in the discussion in Geneva at the ILC in 2022 for two weeks on the ILO Resolution Concerning Decent Work and the Social and Solidarity Economy, in close coordination with ICSSE.
11. To strengthen ICA’s cooperation with the United Nations, I supervised the ICA’s co-organisation, for the first time and upon the request of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), of the UN Expert Group Meeting which, every two years, provides the basis for the UN Secretary General’s recurrent report Cooperatives in Social Development (and this should be repeated in 2023).
12. As Chair of UN committee on cooperatives COPAC over the last two years on behalf of ICA, I launched a discussion on a new COPAC strategy, which was approved, and facilitated the entry into COPAC of two new members, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the UN Research Institute on Social Development (UNRISD). In addition, upon UN DESA’s suggestion, COPAC started in 2022 co-organising with UN DESA a cycle of Voluntary National Reviews (VNR) labs dedicated to cooperatives within the framework of the UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) taking place every year in early July, allowing to celebrate simultaneously in New York the UN International Day of Cooperatives, which takes place during the same period.
13. I led the organisation and programming of the 2021 ICA 33rd World Cooperative Congress “Deepening our Cooperative Identity”, the first global cooperative event held in a hybrid form (due mainly to the pandemic, but representing an important organisational innovation) under the supervision of the Congress Task Force and with the key support of the ICA global team and experts in logistics, moderation and communication; around 1000 participants were physically present and 500 online. The Congress was preceded by an array of preparatory activities as of August 2020, including two academic conferences immediately before. I sincerely thank the German cooperative movement and the Raiffeisen Society for having handed over to the ICA, within the framework of the Congress and in relation with the cooperative identity, one of the two copies of the certificate issued in 2016 by the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage inscribing the “Idea and practice of organizing shared interests in cooperatives on the Representation List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity upon the proposal of Germany”. This copy is now displayed at the ICA DG’s office. We eventually disseminated this UNESCO recognition in a hybrid event called “Cooperatives are Key Stakeholders in advancing SDGs through the culture and creative sector”, organised in 2022 in the framework of the UNESCO Mondiacult Conference in collaboration with CICOPA and Cooperatives of the Americas.
14. l spearheaded the organisation and programming of the first ever ICA Global Roundtable of Government Authorities for Developing Cooperatives just after the Congress, with the presence of public authorities from 22 countries, 4 UN agencies and the EU.

In all three organisations I have led as chief executive since 2002, namely CECOP, CICOPA and the ICA, I have been faced with an initial situation requiring either a launch from scratch (for CICOPA) or in-depth restructuring (for CECOP and the ICA) of the staff of the organisation, with very limited financial resources: CECOP after the spin-off due to the establishment of Cooperatives Europe in 2005-2006, and the ICA with the closure of the ICA Washington office.

Having maintained a trajectory coherent with my passion for cooperatives as a way to help solve our challenges for a more human and sustainable future has meant a great journey of learning and a constant source of strength. I am thankful for having had the chance to work for the cooperative movement both at the grassroots level in local development, and at the international level in policy areas.

As mentioned above, I will continue working on cooperatives in other roles, and hope to remain in contact with you in the future.

In cooperation,

Bruno Roelants