Cooperative Governance

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Christian Picker
• Subject Area: Private Law
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410208294

The German registered cooperative (“eingetragene Genossenschaft”, eG) is insufficiently regulated. The eG is also not in the focus of jurisprudence. This legal indifference is in contrast to the actual economic and social importance of cooperatives.Therefore, it was the purpose of my studies to create a functional cooperative governance, which is conforming to our legal system and our economic and social conditions. Corporate governance is generally defined as a legal and factual framework for the management and supervision of companies. Its function is to develop an efficient system of corporate decision-making, control and protection mechanisms. From a functional perspective, these governance mechanisms shall avoid or resolve conflicts of interest in corporations in order to achieve the relevant (autonomously chosen or heteronomously determined) purpose of the corporation.Accordingly, eGs are to be organized in such a way that they are able to realize their legally prescribed and statutorily defined specific purpose – i. e. the purpose to promote their members. Due to the fact that the principle of cooperative member promotion is not well-defined and still very controversial, I put a strong emphasis on interpreting and determining this basic and constitutive characteristic of German cooperative law. According to this principle, cooperatives have to promote their members (and not non-members), and – moreover – they have to promote their members primarily user-related as customers. This legally binding special purpose of cooperatives is also compatible to our liberal legal and economic system: it protects the autonomous decision of its members, who have deliberately opted for the eG as a user-related self-help institution. My conception of a good cooperative governance is not limited to analyzing the existing law in a descriptive way. It also tries to determine a fundamental legal form for cooperatives within a basic, interdisciplinary and comparative law oriented research. As it is only a consistent cooperative idea that can meet the challenges of an inconsistent and insecure cooperative self-understanding – in Germany as well as in Europe.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants