A Mesoeconomic Reading of Cooperative Ecosystems, as a Levers for Social Innovation and Institutional Change

From a historical and contemporary perspective, this article analyses the process of social innovation towards institutional change produced by cooperative ecosystems: these regroupings of cooperatives that organise themselves collectively in a perspective of social transformation. Two French cases are studied: the "Federation nationale des cooperatives de consommation" in the 20th century and the "Licoornes" grouping cooperative societies of collective interests today. By bringing together the fields of social innovation and regulationist mesoeconomics, the aim is to assess the capacity of mesocritical spaces -in this case cooperative ecosystems -to produce institutional changes within a logic of social transformation. Following a systemic, bottom-up and intentional reading of social innovation, in which the environment and governance are key elements of social transformation, this article highlights the regularities that are favourable and unfavourable to this process of institutional change, based on five channels of differentiation -innovation (futurity, work, product-competition, governance and environment).