Fostering Dialogue, Shared Learning, and Collaboration around the Future of Cooperation: The 57th UK Society for Co-operative Studies Conference

The 57th annual conference of the UK Society for Co-operative Studies was held on 8-9 May 2026 in Birmingham, hosted by Birmingham Business School at the University of Birmingham. Under the broad theme “Fostering Dialogue, Shared Learning, and Collaboration around the Future of Cooperation”, the conference brought together scholars, practitioners, cooperative developers, policy actors, and members of cooperative organisations at a moment of renewed political attention. The timing was significant. The 2025 International Year of Cooperatives had strengthened the visibility of cooperatives, while in the UK the Labour government’s commitment to double the size of the cooperative and mutual economy by 2035 provided a concrete political horizon. Yet the conference repeatedly showed that recognition does not automatically become institutional capacity. Participants returned to a common set of questions: what kind of growth should the movement pursue, which infrastructures are required to sustain it, and how can cooperation become visible to those who may benefit from it? Rather than reproducing the programme chronologically, this conference letter reconstructs the principal tensions that emerged across the two days: the gap between political ambition and institutional fragility; democracy as a practice rather than a structure; education and visibility as conditions for renewal; the tension between identity and flexibility; and the need to understand cooperative growth ecologically, as the development of a diverse organisational landscape rather than the expansion of a few large organisations.