Perceptions of Social Justice within Producer Organizations: Case of Village Cotton Producers Cooperatives in Benin

Perceptions of Social Justice within Producer Organizations: Case of Village Cotton Producers Cooperatives in Benin Ammadou Soule Alassane Manne, Latifou Idrissou, Ismail Moumouni Abstract The Village Cotton Producers' Groups, which have become Village Cotton Production Cooperatives (CVPC), play an important role for member producers and the entire cotton sector. However, many governance issues have undermined the functioning of these CVPCs, resulting in the erosion of cooperative principles such as social justice practices. OHADA's 9th Uniform Act of Cooperative Society Rights has become the organizational regulatory framework to promote CVPCs as genuine, well-governed and efficient economic units. This study aims to describe perceptions of social justice at the level of CVPC as well as to analyze their determinants. The data were collected from 242 CVPC in the six communes of the Alibori department using the simple random sampling method. The data collected relates in particular to the socio-economic characteristics of CVPC as well as members' perceptions of the different types of social justice. The results show that at the CVPC level, we observe an average procedural justice while the distributive and interactional justice are weak. The results also showed that the structural factors (size and gender) of the characteristics of cooperative societies and this influence is particularly exerted by the size dimension. The larger the size, the better the perceptions of justice. The results suggest that the good perception of social justice (distributive and interactional) is promoted within cooperative societies. It is in the interest of obtaining sustainable cooperatives because of their growing membership. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jpbs.v9n2a4