The role of cooperatives in sustainable development goals: A discussion about the current resource curse

Abstract

The recent development of new technologies has enabled the global enhancement of production in numerous industries. This has caused changes in society on the cultural, economic and sociological levels. In 2015, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were formulated by the United Nations (UN), aiming to be achieved by the year 2030. There are a total of 17 SDGs that are concerned with such important areas as poverty, hunger and well-being, gender equality, sustainability or climate change, among others. In this context, the present study explores the role of business associations known as cooperatives in the SDGs and discusses its role in the current resource curse. To this end, a bibliometric analysis using VOSViewer is applied to the dataset of scientific contributions (n = 874 studies) published between 2015 and 2022 in Web of Sciences (WoS). The analysis focuses on co-citation of references and authors, bibliographic coupling and occurrence of keywords in the dataset. The results show and link 8 types of cooperatives with their influence on each of the 17 SDGs. These links are then discussed and analyzed with the main contributions made to date in the literature linked to the current resource curse and future solutions. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the study in relation to the state-of-the-art in this field of research are presented.