Cooperatives are gaining new topicality under the needs of eco-social transformation. Regarding their structure and normative base, they represent the potential of democratic, hybrid organizations embedded in communities. This allows the generation of a resilient space, not only driven by cost - win considerations. The Italian cooperative movement from its origins opens opportunities to disadvantaged groups and regions. The recognition of the social function anchored in article 45 of the Italian constitution of 1947, brings out mutuality and the exclusion of private speculation. The vitality, extent and transformative power of the Italian cooperative movement and its evolution within the last decades is remarkable. Social cooperatives, defined by law (381/1991), follow social objectives through economic means. As a specific economic culture, they foster education and social development and organize economic activities following democratic, integrative and participative rules. Recently, new social cooperatives often arise in remote rural areas where young people with migration backgrounds combine artistic and agricultural production or in urban contexts where new jobs emerge in the field of repair, re-use and recycling or where urban agriculture becomes an aspect of migrant integration (Lintner & Elsen 2018). From the beginning of the new millennium, in response to austerity policies and privatization of public services, infrastructure and life-goods, a new type of cooperative in Italy has been responding to contemporary social needs. They have emerged to safeguard the commons, to develop public infrastructure, and to satisfy complex community needs in forms of multi-stakeholder cooperatives, involving natural and corporate members. Although filling a gap left by the state, these new cooperatives, by bundling forces, offer a way to prevent purely commercial privatization of services in favor of organizational models controlled by citizens with open access to all. In August 2015, the Italian government passed a law about the promotion of social agriculture (141/2015). It recommends the development of integrative and community-based approaches of social agriculture, especially in remote rural areas. This can offer the possibility to unlock social and economic capacities and to generate synergistic effects, for both users and suppliers, and for the community in general. Combining agriculture with eco-social objectives, the cooperative development of gainful employment, the revitalization of arts and crafts or ecological restoration, can become the basis for sustainable development based on circular economy (Douthwaite 1996).

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