Thirty years ago I became the director the Charles Léopold Mayer for the Progress of Humankind and carried out this role until my retirement in 2010. What an exciting adventure. I had previously spent nearly twenty years working for the French State and everything had to be invented in this new Foundation. In 1990, the Foundation's Council came to three conclusions:

  • 1. The funding of specific projects selected on the basis of set criteria did not allow us to make the most of freedom of action, which is the advantage of a foundation. We had a duty to be more ambitious by playing a role, modest as it may be, in addressing humanity's great challenges;
  • 2. Humanity's impact on the planet has made globalisation irreversible, summoning it to face challenges of a radically new scale and character, which institutions of the past are ill-equipped to tackle.
  • 3. Relations between peoples and nations once resembled relations between inhabitants of neighbouring villages, trading, cooperating and quarrelling, but ultimately returning home to their respective villages; they now resemble relations between flatmates who share the same apartment, and have to share the same fridge and even the same toilet! This requires inventing new forms of dialogue so that which unites societies – the common challenges they face – becomes more important than that which divides them – cultural differences, the degree of material development, and all the resentment handed down from the past.

The quest for new forms of action and international dialogue led us to create, in 1994, the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World (www.alliance21.org), which represented a new way to build international dialogue based on common challenges. And in 2001, the World Citizens' Assembly, held in Lille, France, was an initiative unlike any other (www.alliance21.org/lille). We discovered that once we overlooked our differences, we were able to agree on four major challenges that would enable us to shift towards sustainable societies:

  • Contribute to the emergence of a global community united by a common destiny;
  • Promote a common ethical principle of responsibility on which decisions are based, whether they be related to personal choice or international legislation, as a way to manage the interdependent nature of our world;
  • Initiate a revolution in governance, i.e., invent ways to manage societies that are adapted to the nature and the scale of the problems at hand;
  • Undertake a“shift back to the future” and re-establish oeconomics over economics – as our development processes must now reconcile the well-being of everyone with the limits of the biosphere. This was the very definition of oeconomics until the 18th century and the industrial revolution when economics replaced oeconomics, establishing the notion of an autonomous science based on the incessant creation of new needs and new products, at the expense of the planet.

Since 2001, all my institutional and personal commitments have been driven by these four challenges for change. I have worked towards them using the intellectual and material resources available to me, with an ever-increasing conviction that if we don't change the way we think and our form of international dialogue, the wonderful initiatives that we have seen flourish, will never succeed in changing the system, the need for which we are all well aware of.

It was with this mind that I was driven to: create with the China-Europa Forum (www.china-europa-forum.net), a new form of “cross-cultural” dialogue; promote, in collaboration with the Alliance for Responsible and Sustainable Societies (www.ethica-respons.net), a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities; create, with CITEGO (www.citego.info), new forms of dialogue based on the experiences of towns and regions and their governance processes.

Since I became Chairman Emeritus of the Foundation in 2014, and thus liberated of institutional responsibilities, I began to write a blog around once a month, drawing on what is happening in the world – European Parliament elections, the run-up to COP21, etc – and link these events to more general thoughts, often just offering a short summary along with a more in-depth analysis. These documents are all under« creative commons » licence, that means that they can be freely reproduced and spread, totally or partly, without permission, in other networks and journals.

The positive feedback I have received has inspired me to take it a step further and send a monthly letter (in French, English and Spanish) out to the great number of partners from all over the world that I met through these various initiatives. With COP21 approaching and the many initiatives taking place around it, these letters will temporarily increase in frequency over the coming month.

You read this message on my blog. If you would be interested to receive my periodic letter, please suscribe: www.forums.pierre-calame.fr/sympa/subscribe/blog-en