Why does agricultural cooperation remain fragile in post-socialist settings, despite its potential to reduce transaction costs and improve market access? Explanations usually stress institutional voids and the legacy of distrust. This paper advances a different view: farmers cooperate when the services offered are economically salient. Adapting Ostrom’s SES framework, we reinterpret “resource importance” for club goods, specifically cooperation services such as marketing, certification, and input procurement. Using survey data from Albanian farmers in a context-specific export-oriented smallholder setting, we develop validated measures of service salience and buyer power. Logistic regression indicate that perceived benefits, compliance costs, and buyer dominance all increase cooperation, while satisfaction with buyers reduces it. Socio-demographics have little effect. The study contributes by extending SES theory to club goods, providing robust constructs for empirical research, and identifying a mechanism through which cooperation emerges as a rational response to market imperfections in similar value-chain contexts. JEL Codes: C38; D7; J54; P32; P2

Friedrich Hayek distinguished the small-group logic of local norms, interpersonal trust, and reciprocity from the impersonal rules of the Great Society. In transition settings, however, these forms of governance may coexist rather than follow a simple sequence of replacement. Using a cross-sectional Albanian orchard farm survey, we estimate OLS models, bootstrapped product-of-coefficients paths, and an exploratory interaction to examine associations among local informal-rule enforcement, interpersonal trust, reciprocity, institutional trust, and willingness to cooperate. Stronger perceived local-rule enforcement is positively associated with interpersonal trust and willingness to cooperate; interpersonal trust is strongly associated with reciprocity, and reciprocity with willingness to cooperate. Institutional trust has no statistically significant direct association with willingness to cooperate in the fully specified model, although the local-rules/cooperation association is modestly stronger at higher levels of institutional trust. Indirect-path estimates are consistent with a sequence linking local rules, trust, reciprocity, and cooperation, but the cross-sectional design cannot establish temporal or causal ordering. The study therefore provides exploratory, single-setting evidence compatible with complementarity between informal and broader institutional governance.