Abstract
Given the fact that the war-ravaged country of Afghanistan has committed itself to sustainable rural and agricultural development through the cooperative route, the present dissertation, seeing lackluster performance of agricultural cooperatives in the post-conflict era, decided to attempt to reverse this trend at least in terms of intellectual discourse. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze, both theoretically and empirically, the condition of governance structure in Afghan agricultural cooperatives, to understand the cooperatives from the viewpoint of their stakeholders and also to study the role of foreign aid into the cooperatives in the current context of Afghan agriculture. Accordingly, attempts are made to achieve a better governance of the Afghan agricultural cooperatives, which will make them robust thus avoiding large-scale failure of such organizations. The core issues addressed are: ascertain suitability of cooperatives, requirements in terms of governance structure, stakeholder cooperation and effective utilization of foreign aid so as to achieve cooperative success, and factors that constrain smooth functioning of agricultural cooperatives and evolving appropriate strategy to strengthen agriculture cooperative in Afghanistan.The conceptual framework of this dissertation hinges on building a bridge between stakeholder cooperation and cooperative governance through a collective action route, so as to make cooperatives operational and effective in reality. So, the essential contribution of this dissertation is to provide this linkage between stakeholder and collective action theories to evolve an appropriate governance structure. The recommendations for strengthening and activating the cooperative governance structure are provided within a framework of demand for and supply of required institutional changes for comprehensive cooperative sector reforms.While elaborating on the relevance of cooperative governance, this dissertation highlights the importance of combining several perspectives: collective action theory, stakeholder theory, institutional economics - all are now-a-days parts of the modern organizational economics. From the analysis of agricultural sector, basic weaknesses in the availability of physical as well as institutional infrastructure comes to the fore, thus necessitating building up of grass root cooperatives becomes the mainstay of the Afghan development strategy in the eyes of the national government as well as its international supporters. A few important observations emanated from analysis of primary and secondary data and case studies can be summarized under 5 broad areas. First, cooperatives being a special type of business organization demanding perfect synchronization between attributes of a democratic association and those of a business enterprise, both these attributes need to be promoted carefully while maintaining the necessary balance. Second, involvement of too many Ministries and even too many Departments within the same Ministry seems to be implicitly pauperizing the Afghan agricultural cooperatives. Third, the Cooperative Institute Department of Directorate of Agriculture Cooperative Development (DACD) being under pressure with no support other than grant of mere salaries to its faculty and staff, who are again recruited often without the necessary qualification, experience and skills, has further weakened the system. Fourth, while foreign aid became absolutely necessary at the beginning of the new Republic after the prolonged Civil War and conflict, in the absence of a well thought out plan and coordination for its use, its full potential is hardly being realized. Fifth, the idea of establishment of single commodity cooperatives favored under the Draft Law of 2013 has a serious limitation in the absence of suitable scale and scope economies.