Prosperity in the fossil-free economy : how cooperatives are designing sustainable businesses

"Investor-owned corporations dominate today's political economy, and are designed primarily to optimize profit. This solely financial focus sidelines the equally important goals of protecting the environment, paying living wages, and being responsible community members. However, as Melissa K. Scanlan demonstrates in Prosperity and the Fossil-Free Economy: How Cooperatives are Designing Sustainable Businesses, there are other paths forward to create sustainable and profitable business. Drawing on her extensive experience founding and directing social enterprises, Scanlan provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations, with an emphasis on cooperatives. This volume is divided in two main parts. In Part I, Scanlan reveals how the legal design of enterprises can either incentivize or impede decarbonization and sustainable goals, and suggests alternative designs for social enterprises. In Part II, she translates international recommendations for decarbonization into manageable concepts for implementation, providing case study research as relatable examples. Prosperity and the Fossil-Free Economy reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise for triple bottom line results: for society, the environment, and finances."