At the Origins of a Multi-Stakeholder Non-Profit Organisational Model: Comizi Agrari in Post-Unification Romagna

In the field of business administration, the management practices adopted by Third sector organisations have made economic associations a topic of growing interest for several years now. The origins of this heterogeneous group of entities can actually be traced far back in time. The main associative form of post-unification Italy’s farming class was comizi agrari, which were private organizations with public functions. By redefining their nature as multistakeholder non-profit organizations, this research takes on the task of re-examining historiography’s negative evaluation of comizi’s effectiveness. Out of the analysis regarding the comizi operating in Romagna, it is evident the nature of some successful comizi is characterised by certain key factors such as the value of organisational, institutional, and technical leadership, the ability to develop strategic services for stakeholders that were not effectively provided by enterprises or the public sector, an attention to financial sustainability, a careful orientation towards building institutional networks.