Mediated Access and Bounded Agency in Lebanon’s Cooperative Sector: The Case of Women-Led Agricultural Cooperatives

Abstract

This project examines Lebanon’s cooperative sector as a system characterized by fragmented governance, limited institutional capacity, and mediated access to resources and markets, using women-led agricultural cooperatives as an analytical lens. While donor support enables cooperative formation and activity, its outcomes are shaped by the political and institutional environments in which cooperatives operate. Using a qualitative, desk-based policy analysis supported by three semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes how access is structured through a mediated access regime, alongside core–periphery positioning and bounded agency. The findings show that cooperatives operate within systems where access to resources, recognition, and market opportunities is negotiated through brokerage and patronage networks. Women-led cooperatives occupy a structurally peripheral position, operating under more constrained conditions of access while remaining central to food production and local economic activity. As a result, similar forms of participation produce uneven outcomes, and donor investments facilitate activity without ensuring sustainable or transformative change. The project argues that cooperative development in Lebanon is best understood as adaptive survival within a mediated system of access, where outcomes are shaped by positioning within networks of power rather than by formal organizational design. Its policy contribution is to guide donors and local authorities in sequencing short-term stabilization, medium-term coordination, and longer-term institutional support.