Democracy, Labor, and Gender Relations in Cooperatives and Associations
France and the Brazilian Amazon
This international research project investigates how gender relations, workplace democracy and organizational structures shape women’s participation, voice and decision-making power in cooperatives and productive associations. Developed through scientific cooperation between the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA) and the Université de Strasbourg, the project connects research in the Brazilian Amazon with the European WE-COOP — Shifting Perspectives: Visibility and Voice of Women in Worker Cooperatives project.
Period: 2026–2027
Institutions: Universidade Federal do Pará · Université de Strasbourg
Brazilian Coordinator: Cilene Sebastiana da Conceição Braga
WE-COOP Principal Investigator: Ada Reichhart
Role: Researcher, Brazilian research team
Research Focus
Cooperatives are often associated with democratic governance, collective participation and greater autonomy at work. Yet formal commitments to equality do not necessarily eliminate inequalities within organizations.
The project examines this tension by asking how organizational practices and institutional arrangements influence women's participation, leadership and decision-making power. Particular attention is given to the relationship between productive and reproductive work, the sexual division of labour, organizational governance and unequal access to voice and authority.
The comparative design brings together two different organizational and territorial contexts: worker cooperatives in France and cooperatives and productive associations in the Brazilian Amazon.
Rather than assuming that cooperative organization automatically produces democratic or emancipatory outcomes, the research investigates the conditions under which collective organizations can either reduce or reproduce existing inequalities.
France–Brazil Research Cooperation
The project is connected to WE-COOP — Shifting Perspectives: Visibility and Voice of Women in Worker Cooperatives, an ERC-funded research project based at the Université de Strasbourg.
WE-COOP investigates women's experiences in worker cooperatives and challenges predominantly androcentric perspectives in research on workplace democracy. The Brazilian research extends this comparative perspective to Amazonian forms of cooperativism and associativism operating under very different socioeconomic, institutional and territorial conditions.
The cooperation combines methodological exchange, comparative analysis, joint scientific publications and research missions between Brazil and France.
Amazonian Research Strand
Women, Cooperatives and Extractivism in the Caeté-Taperaçu Marine Extractive Reserve
A major Brazilian research strand focuses on the Caeté-Taperaçu Marine Extractive Reserve (RESEX) in Bragança, Pará.
The study examines how gender relations structure women's participation in associations, cooperatives and value chains associated with extractive activities and asks whether these organizations expand women's autonomy or reproduce economic, political and territorial forms of subordination.
The research currently examines three organizational settings:
ASSUREMACATA — Associação dos Usuários da Reserva Extrativista Marinha Caeté-Taperaçu
The association participates in the governance of the extractive reserve and provides an important setting for studying the relationship between high levels of women's participation and their actual representation and decision-making authority.
COOMAC — Cooperativa Mista dos Agricultores Familiares e Extrativistas dos Caetés
The cooperative connects family agriculture and forest extraction with the processing and commercialization of products such as vegetable oils. It provides a particularly relevant case for examining how women's extractive labour becomes connected to formalized markets even when the producers themselves are not necessarily cooperative members.
COOCABEPE — Cooperativa dos Catadores, Beneficiadores, Pescadores de Crustáceos da Vila do Treme
The organization provides a case for investigating the relationship between women's labour in crab processing, cooperative membership and control over commercialization and organizational decision-making.
Research Questions
The Amazonian research investigates a broader question:
How do gender relations influence the ways territories are constituted, governed and integrated into markets?
This question connects workplace relations inside organizations with broader processes of territorial governance and market integration.
Three working hypotheses guide the empirical research.
Care work and value creation.
The research examines how care work and social reproduction support productive activities while frequently remaining insufficiently recognized in formal systems of economic valuation.
Cooperatives as organizational interfaces.
Cooperatives can translate locally embedded and partly informal production practices into standardized forms compatible with markets. This translation is selective: some products, activities and actors become visible and market-compatible while others remain outside formal systems of recognition.
Gendered control of market interfaces.
Women may participate extensively in production and processing while having less control over strategic interfaces connecting production, transformation, standardization, commercialization and organizational decision-making.
Together, these mechanisms allow the research to examine potential asymmetries between value creation and institutional authority.
Theoretical Development
The research also contributes to my broader work on Regional Development in World Society.
The Caeté-Taperaçu case provides an empirical setting for investigating how global economic, political and environmental processes become selectively territorialized through organizations.
From this perspective, a region is not treated simply as a geographical container. The research examines how heterogeneous societal processes become selectively connected and consequential within historically evolving regional configurations.
The project therefore explores a particularly important theoretical question:
How do organizations mediate between locally embedded practices and the differentiated structures of world society?
Cooperatives and associations can be investigated as organizational interfaces connecting extractive production, environmental governance, markets, public institutions and local communities.
Gender adds another dimension to this problem. Territorial and market integration may be highly selective: participation in production does not necessarily imply equivalent access to organizational authority, standard-setting, commercialization or value capture. The RESEX research therefore provides an empirical basis for examining gendered selective territorialization.
Methods
The project combines quantitative, qualitative, comparative and participatory research methods.
The Brazilian research design combines institutional and organizational mapping, socioeconomic data collection, narrative interviews, participant observation, analysis of assemblies and decision-making processes, documentary analysis, participatory workshops and participatory cartography.
Field research is designed to connect individual experiences with organizational structures and territorial processes. Interviews and observations examine everyday labour and decision-making, while participatory mapping can reveal spatial dimensions such as mobility, multiple work routines and networks of support.
Comparative analysis with the French research provides a means of identifying both common mechanisms and context-specific configurations of workplace democracy, gender inequality and collective organization.
Expected Outcomes
The project is expected to produce comparative scientific publications, a bilingual research report, participatory research activities, international research exchanges and accessible forms of scientific communication.
An additional objective is the construction of systematic empirical knowledge about cooperatives and productive associations in Pará and the organizational conditions affecting women's participation in them.
Beyond the individual case studies, the project contributes to a broader research agenda concerned with the relationships between gender, organizations, territorialization, value chains and regional development in world society.
Research areas: Gender · Labor · Cooperatives · Workplace Democracy · Social Reproduction · Extractivism · Amazonia · Regional Development · World Society
Related Research
Extractive Communities & Territorial Relations →
Resource-dependent livelihoods, organizations, gender relations, participation and differentiated access, particularly in coastal Amazonia.
Society–Nature & Climate →
Research on society–nature relations, environmental change, knowledge and the regional consequences of ecological transformations.
Amazonia as a Comparative Observation Field →
Amazonia as a field for examining how global economic, environmental and political processes become connected to heterogeneous regional configurations.
Regional Development in World Society →
The current theoretical programme examining how heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected and consequential within historically evolving regional configurations.