Sri Lanka, Feb. 5 -- For close to a decade and a half I have been studying co-operatives, particularly as I was preoccupied with questions about the post-war reconstruction of Jaffna. As I watched the failure of development policies that prioritised building transport and urban infrastructure over rural livelihoods, supported the proliferation of financial institutions leading to indebtedness, and grand claims about the private sector generating employment that did not materialize, I became more and more involved with the co-operative movement. Drawing on the institutional memory of the co-operative movement and the vast network of co-operatives that survived the war, some of us began to see an alternative for social and economic revival ...