Cooperatives began contributing to the modernisation of European agriculture in the late nineteenth century but the rate at which they developed varied according to countries, regions, and crops. In Spain a large number were set up before the 1936−9 Civil War but few actually became consolidated entities. This paper analyses the Spanish case in an attempt to find the keys to the success or failure of cooperation. It focuses especially on the role played by the state and on the attitude shown by the different segments of farmers towards cooperatives.

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In the nineteenth century, Spanish irrigation was studied by a number of British and French engineers, who sought to acquire knowledge that could be applied to India and Algeria. In their reports, they said that Spanish irrigation communities were run by the irrigators themselves in a totally democratic way, which was not true. Although such ideas had hardly any practical consequences in colonial India and Algeria, they did have important repercussions in Spain, where the irrigation institutions came to resemble the image they had been given by the reporters, with the best results. Through the work of Elinor Ostrom, the myth created by the nineteenth‐century reporters has also eventually become an argument in favour of irrigation projects in today's developing countries being managed by water users’ associations.

It is usually taken for granted that the existence of water markets allows economic efficiency gains to be achieved at the expense of equity losses. This paper addresses the issue by analysing the functioning of the irrigation communities in pre-1950s eastern Spain. While in some of them the water inhered in the land and could not be sold, in others there were tradable water rights. In the paper it is shown that in the former not only was equity greater, but in fact the resource was also used more efficiently.

Cooperative wineries have always produced mostly low-quality wine. Since they began to receive abundant state subsidies in the period following the Second World War, they have produced a substantial part of all European wine, but prior to that their market share was low. This paper discusses whether both the specialisation of the first Spanish cooperative wineries in the production of ordinary wine and its poor market penetration were a result of their inability to prevent members from carrying out opportunistic behaviours. It contends that cooperative wineries were in fact capable of fighting opportunism and that producing ordinary wine was the best option for the vast majority of them, even though they did not manage to offer winegrowers advantages that were significant enough to offset the inconveniences of being members.