Le bilan sociétal dans la coopération agricole : une démarche participative pour s’ouvrir au territoire

Following the work of the Confédération des jeunes dirigeants de l’économie sociale (CJDES), the Confédération française de la coopération agricole (CFCA) has been experimenting with the social audit, a tool in sustainable development approaches which has been used to assess and explain the overall performance of agricultural cooperatives. The author looks at the experiments with the social audit in two cooperatives –a dairy cooperative in Western France and a cooperative supplier in the Lot region. The implementation of a social audit according to the CFCA’s guidelines was accompanied by a survey of the cooperative’s directors and employees as well as local elected officials. The survey, which was conducted by the directors themselves in one of the cooperatives as a way of getting more involved in the process, revealed the coexistence of different conceptions of the cooperative held by four types of directors. It also revealed an ambiguous relationship with the local community which could have a strategic importance for cooperatives.