From Collectivization to Cooperation: Rebuilding the Social Economy in Romania on the Mondragon Model

Romania's social economy is formally active but structurally failing. Despite a dedicated legal framework, significant European Union funding, and thousands of registered social enterprises, the sector remains fragmented, grant-dependent, and incapable of producing the kind of durable economic inclusion it was designed to deliver. We argue that the failure is not incidental but structural, rooted in the absence of a well-defined cooperative structure and a cross-enterprise framework that makes genuine social enterprise ecosystems viable. Drawing on a comparative institutional analysis of the Mondragon cooperative corporation in the Basque Country and a scoping review of the Romanian social enterprise literature, we propose a staged social cooperativization framework adapted to Romanian conditions, addressing each of the preconditions the Mondragon literature identifies as necessary for a social cooperative ecosystem to take hold. We also present an ethnographic case study of a small community in southern Romania that has, without theoretical guidance or institutional support, built a functioning proto-cooperative network through informal mechanisms of solidarity, shared labour, and internal capital circulation. The case study demonstrates that the cultural and relational preconditions for social, community-oriented cooperativism are present in Romania, and that what is missing is not the will but the institutional framework to make a Mondragon-style cooperative ecosystem self-sustainable. We argue that voluntary democratic cooperation, far from a relic of the communist past, remains an available and morally serious response to the social problems that Romania's dependent market economy model is failing to address.