Management and Development Process

The cooperative sector, alongside with the public and private sectors, stands as one of the country’s economy bases and that’s why the Cooperatives Development Document has predicted that this sector should take over 25 percent of the country’s economy. However, while only one year of the Fifth Development Plan is left, only 6% of this 25% share has been realized. This article aims to take on a qualitative research method to investigate the reasons behind this gap and to detect the obstacles of cooperatives development with an emphasis on frontiers’, agricultural, credit and education personnel’s housing, and consumer cooperatives. Using purposive sampling, the documents in the Ministry of Cooperatives were studied through thematic analysis. The results indicate that economic, social, legal and international problems are among the obstacles. Social problems can intensify other obstacles. Furthermore, findings show that we can divide economic, social, legal and international obstacles of the cooperatives into internal and external problems. Internal obstacles have priority over the external ones in order to achieve the 25% share of cooperatives.