For the past fifteen years, and especially since the law on cooperatives in 2012, there has been a very interesting revival of the cooperative model in Korea. For a long time seen as a sort of public agency like the traditional cooperatives set up by the government in the primary and banking sectors in the 1960s, cooperatives are now recognised as an independent firm model with certain advantages, particularly in terms of job creation and local development. This article analyses the new interest in the cooperative model by showing how it gradually developed starting from the pioneering experiences in the late 1980s of public policies aimed at promoting social enterprise through to the 2012 law which produced a cooperative boom.