Why did the British Co-operative Movement suddenly abandon its historic commitment to political neutrality in 1917? Recent research suggests that the debate over co-operative political representation should be seen in the wider context of consumer politics, and conflicts over the supply and distribution of important commodities. The first part of this paper re-examines these debates in the cont...

The paper models co-operative engagement under varying environmental constraints giving rise to different forms of collective action problems, specifically focussing on water management in pre-industrial societies. I show that societies where water availability is strongly seasonal develop no mechanism to encourage society-wide cooperative behaviour because the benefits of water storage are ful...