Sustainability performance evaluation of agricultural cooperatives’ operations: a systemic review of the literature

Abstract

The article proposes to construct and analyze the research landscape on the sustainability performance evaluation of agricultural cooperatives’ operations. The research was characterized as a systematic review of the literature, carried out through the ProKnow-C structured process, complemented by a procedure known as Snowball to form the portfolio of articles, theses and dissertations to be studied. The research results highlight models for the evaluation of the sustainability of agricultural cooperatives’ operations that are still under construction. There are few studies that explain what a performance evaluation is, and there are no authors who have stood out in the research on this theme. Most sustainability assessment models for cooperatives do not address the three dimensions of sustainability in an integrated way, and the uniqueness of the decision maker is not proposed, since there is a predominance of Normativistic and Descriptive approaches. Mapping and organizing the body of knowledge on the theme of sustainability in agricultural cooperatives in the topic of performance evaluation is the main contribution of the article, since many previous studies did not address this. To that end, a conceptual map that outlines the thematic categories of sustainability performance evaluation of agricultural cooperatives’ operations was constructed, identifying where future research is needed, both for the construction of new theories and models and for the execution of empirical studies.