Social enterprise and their eco-system: A European mapping report of Montenegro

This fiche is part of the study “Social enterprises and their ecosystems in Europe” and it provides an overview of the social enterprise landscape in Montenegro based on available information as of May 2018. It describes the roots and drivers of social enterprises in the country as well as their conceptual and legal evolution.

The predecessors of social enterprises in Montenegro emerged before World War II in the form of cooperatives, although the social function they performed was rather weak. They mainly served the interests of a small circle of individuals instead of the interests of the wider community. Later on, during the Communist period, cooperatives in Montenegro and throughout former Yugoslavia became an instrument for controlling and exploiting peasants, following the Soviet model of collectivisation and development of agricultural cooperatives based on coercion and compulsory collectivisation of land, livestock and labour resources…