From Silent to Salient Stakeholders

What is it about?

This research draws from a case study of small coffee producers in Southern Mexico who formed a cooperative and developed salience within their stakeholder network after a long history of diverse individual, organizational, and institutional arrangements.

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Why is it important?

This study of an indigenous coffee farmers’ cooperative association, which was once isolated and then began to compete on the fair-trade global market, notes that the “silence” of stakeholders is the result of an unequal relationship that is not focused on satisfying their needs. Since 1940, the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Isthmus Region (UCIRI, in Spanish), made up of small, independent farmers from the Tehuantepec Isthmus region (state of Oaxaca), had worked in government programs that promoted the coffee industry. However, it was not until they created a formal cooperative association in 1983 that UCIRI started to gain salience as a stakeholder of government agencies and fair-trade organizations.