Cecosesola: Self-Management Through Consensus

The flat, consensus-based, anti-hierarchical operating principles of Cecosesola, a Venezuelan federation of around 50 cooperatives serving 100,000 families, awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2022.

Cecosesola was founded in 1967 in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, originally as a cooperative funeral service. It has grown over more than five decades into a federation of around 50 cooperatives serving roughly 100,000 families with food markets, healthcare, agricultural production, and community services. In 2022 it was awarded the Right Livelihood Award.

In 1983 the workers abolished the cooperative's internal hierarchy and established a system of workers' self-management that has run on three principles: consensus decision-making, regular job rotation, and equal pay for equal work. Almost all administrative and managerial decisions are made in meetings, by the consensus of everyone involved.

The constitutional commitments most often named by Cecosesola members:

• Mutuality, respect, and transparency as the three relationship-building values.
• Full and open participation, with respect for religious, ideological, and political plurality.
• Care for almost all realms of life, described in the community's own phrase as from the cradle to the grave.
• Replacing competition with cooperation, efficiency with resilience, short-term thinking with sustainability, and profit-centred approaches with a needs-centred outlook.

What is structurally unusual about Cecosesola is the assertion that participation in decisions creates responsibility for outcomes, and that this fact removes the need for a central administrative apparatus. Those who decide own the consequences. The federation has run for more than four decades on this principle and has documented its functioning carefully through papers, interviews, and the books published by long-time member Gustavo Salas Romer and others.

For a researcher, Cecosesola is the empirical case that disputes the common claim that consensus and self-management cannot scale. The federation's serving population (around 100,000 families) makes it one of the largest sustained experiments in flat governance in the literature.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your organization is asking what radical self-management looks like at scale, and whether rotating leadership and weekly assemblies can actually function across tens of thousands of members, Cecosesola in Venezuela is one of the few long-term answers in the record.

Cecosesola itself is the primary living example, and the numbers are worth holding. The Mercado Popular cooperative grocery in Barquisimeto serves roughly 35,000 families every week. Their health clinics (operating under the ASIC network) provide care to community members outside the traditional Venezuelan health system. Their funeral cooperative has operated for decades. All of this runs without permanent leadership, through rotating coordination and weekly assemblies, with full internal salary transparency. They have maintained this model through hyperinflation, political upheaval, and economic crisis that would have dissolved most organizations.

Mondragon in the Basque Country is an adjacent case worth comparing specifically because it made different choices at similar scale. Mondragon also started from cooperative principles and also grew to serve tens of thousands of members, but it developed a more hierarchical management structure over time. Comparing Mondragon and Cecosesola gives you a picture of what the tradeoffs look like when a cooperative organization scales.

Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi draws on similar principles of economic self-management in a very different political and demographic context, connecting cooperative economics to community self-determination in a majority-Black city.

Where the door is:

• The documentary "Cecosesola: Buen Vivir" is available online and is probably the most accessible starting point in English.
• Gustavo Salas Romer and other Cecosesola members have given interviews and written pieces that have been translated into English in cooperative economics literature; searching those out gives you members' own accounts of how the model works from the inside.
• The question worth sitting with before you try to draw on Cecosesola's model: what would a weekly assembly at your organization's scale actually look like, and what decisions would it need to make? Not as an abstract question, but practically: who comes, how long does it take, what happens with people who miss it?

One caution that is worth naming plainly: researchers and visitors who spend time with Cecosesola consistently report the same thing: what looks like simple consensus governance from outside is held together by decades of shared practice, relationship, and organizational culture that is very difficult to see and nearly impossible to replicate quickly. The Cecosesola members themselves are the first to say this. The model is real and it works. The replication path is not simple, and organizations that try to import the structures without the depth of practice beneath them tend to find the structures hollow.