From 8 to 10 July 2026, the 23rd biennial Conference of the International Association for the Economics of Participation (IAFEP) was held at Mondragon University in Oñati, in Spain's Basque Country. The conference brought together scholars from across Europe, North America, Asia, and other regions to discuss current research and future directions in the study of democratic and participatory organizations.

Founded to advance research on the economics of participation, IAFEP provides an international forum for the study of labor-managed firms, cooperatives, employee-owned companies, profit-sharing systems, worker participation, and democratic nonprofit, community, and social enterprises. Its biennial conferences have become an important meeting point for researchers working on organizational forms that combine economic activity with democratic governance and stakeholder participation.

The choice of Mondragon as the conference venue was particularly significant. The Mondragon cooperative experience is internationally recognized as one of the most important examples of cooperative entrepreneurship and industrial democracy. Established in the Basque Country in the 1950s, the Mondragon Corporation has grown into the world's largest industrial cooperative group, bringing together worker cooperatives operating across manufacturing, finance, retail, education, and knowledge-intensive services. The conference was hosted at the Mondragon University in Oñati, and this context offered participants the opportunity to discuss contemporary research within a setting that has played a central role in the development of cooperative thought and practice.

Over three days, the conference addressed a broad range of topics concerning democratic enterprises and participatory economic organizations. Presentations examined governance, ownership structures, employee participation, community-based organizations, institutional innovation, and the role of cooperative enterprises in addressing contemporary social and economic challenges. The program reflected the growing interest in democratic forms of enterprise as responses to issues such as regional development, sustainability, social cohesion and economic resilience.

The keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Sonja Novkovic (Saint Mary's University, Canada), one of the leading international scholars in cooperative economics. Her address offered a comprehensive socio-economic perspective on cooperative enterprises, highlighting the distinctive institutional characteristics of cooperatives and their contribution to building resilient, participatory and community-oriented economies. The keynote also emphasized the importance of continuing interdisciplinary research on democratic organizations in a rapidly changing economic environment.

The Competence Center of Management of Cooperatives at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano was represented by Alessandro Narduzzo, who presented the paper Community Cooperatives as Institutional Innovation, co-authored with Jerome Warren.

The paper examined the emergence of community cooperatives as a distinct organizational form, exploring how these organizations extend the traditional cooperative model by combining member participation with a broader orientation towards community development. The study contributes to the growing literature on institutional innovation and community-based economic organizations, a research area of increasing relevance within the international cooperative movement.