A review of economic, relational, social and environmental measures of agricultural cooperatives performance: Trends, sectoral, and geographical association

There is increasing interest in the performance of agricultural cooperatives. However, there is little consensus on what measures are most appropriate to use or how best to capture the social and environmental impact of these organisations. Despite this, to date, there are no studies that review the literature on agricultural cooperative performance to establish how the most used performance measures have evolved over time and any relationship between the sectors and locations of agricultural cooperatives. Thus, this paper seeks to address this gap by (i) identifying the foremost measures that have been used to evaluate the performance of agricultural cooperatives; and (ii) exploring the trends, sectoral and geographical association with the use of these performance measures. A multistage analytical framework, comprising a journal article network analysis and a qualitative meta-analysis is used to extract relevant information from 124 journal articles and perform content analysis. Subsequently, a non-parametric test is used to examine the association between the year of publication, sector and geographical location of agricultural cooperatives and the performance measures. The results highlight a diverse list of indicators utilised to assess the performance of agricultural cooperatives. However, there is a narrow focus and dominant use of short-term economic metrics, and limited use of environmental and sustainability measures. Also, the results show a significant increase in the use of liquidity indicators in more recent publications. There exists a significant association between the sector of the agricultural cooperative and the most used performance measures but no association with the geographical location. The findings highlight the need to develop performance measures that evaluate the positive spill-over effects of agricultural cooperative activities on non-members, communities, and the natural environment. Also, the findings provide a rubric for benchmarking the performance and identifying best practices that can be shared across different cooperatives.