Coffee cooperatives in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia support smallholders and shape SDG-relevant outcomes, yet existing studies on cooperatives essentially treat relationships as context and hardly measure network structures. For the first time, the review synthesizes seven thematic areas spanning the previous five decades (1974–2024): performance, governance, certification, social capital, gender inclusion, innovation, and value chains. Building on this synthesis, a multilevel social network analysis framework is proposed that defines three analytical boundaries (within cooperatives, between cooperatives, and across the broader coffee ecosystem) and links each boundary to whole-network and node-level metrics. The framework translates under-measured mechanisms (coordination, brokerage, segmentation, dependency, and closure) into tie definitions, metric choices (e.g., density, centralization, modularity, clustering/transitivity; degree, betweenness, eigenvector or closeness centralities; structural hole), and model-selection guidance for future empirical studies. This roadmap enables comparable empirical tests of how network structures and cooperatives’ positions condition Sustainable Development in coffee systems.
