Plenary speakers

SONJA NOVKOVIC, PhD

Sonja Novkovic, Ph.D. is the Professor Emerita in Economics and the Academic Director of the International Centre for Co-operative Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. She is a visiting scholar at IICADD in Montreal, contributing to a research network on cooperatives and circular economy. She is former Chair (2013-2021) and current member of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) Committee on Co-operative Research. She serves on the Co-ops and Mutuals Canada Council of Economists, NCBA-CLUSA Cooperative Economics Council and the Cooperative Identity Advisory Group of the ICA.

Sonja’s research interests include theory of worker and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, humanistic governance and cooperative management, and measures of socio-economic sustainability performance in democratic organizations. She contributed to the development of the UNRISD Sustainable Development Performance Indicators, co-edited numerous books on the social economy, cooperative governance and cooperative economics, and is currently involved in research on cooperatives and the circular economy and cooperative networks. Her more recent publications include Humanistic governance of democratic organizations: The cooperative difference (2023, with McMahon and Miner), Palgrave McMillan https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-17403-2; Changing the mindset: Cooperatives and complexity; Looking into the future (2025) in Ambühl M., S. Brusoni, A. Niedworok and M. Gutmann (eds.) Cooperatives in an Uncertain World, Springer; Ziegler, R., J. Rey-Sierro, S. Novkovic, I. Buendía-Martínez, J. Ballon, S. Teasdale, M. Roy (2025) How cooperatives embed circularity in their business models and governance - results from an international survey. Business Strategy and the Environment:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.70045; Novkovic, S. and J. Martins Rodrigues (2025). Cooperative network governance innovations for circular economy. Journal of Cooperative Organization and Management; McMahon, C. and S. Novkovic (2025). Humanistic governance in worker cooperatives: unlocking collective capacities. Economic and Industrial Democracy https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X251353003 and Cooperative identity as a yardstick for transformative change (2021). Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics: 313-336. https://doi.org/10.1111/apce.12362.