Abstract
From 2000 onwards, both in the EU and Mercosur, cooperatives have received more attention: the first specific public regional norm after 50 years in the former, a specialized regional public policy entity in the latter. While the challenges are shared by both regions, the frameworks of their debates and the solutions sought, as well as their alliances with other social movements, seem different. These differences are marked in a table in the final section of this paper. This chapter is a conference paper, peer reviewed, selected and published in France, focusing on the institutional framework and policies that are directly related to cooperatives, in the context of the most important regional events and policy in the European Union as well as in MERCOSUR. The focus rests between 2000 and 2005. First, the chapter deals with the institutional context surrounding cooperatives, and then a comparison of policies and norms within their respective regionalism. The differences observed globally and in stylized manner are shown in a table.