History of the Alliance

Since the end of the 1980s, different actors of society from a broad range of spheres in various regions of the world have taken a large number of initiatives to contribute to and organize a huge world movement capable of participating in the quest for values, proposals, and rules to overcome the new challenges humanity is facing.

At the beginning of the 1990s, several partners of the FPH (Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind) organized continental, thematic, and socioprofessional meetings to extend the work they had already started to other initiatives, actors, places, and cultures. In 1993, this impetus resulted in the drafting of the Platform for a Responsible and United World. This text was the starting point for focusing very different contexts on common challenges. The issues were approached from three angles simultaneously: by theme, by world region, and by socioprofessional sphere.

1994-95

This was the period of circulation and translation the Platform, giving birth to the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World. The first work groups (workshops) were set up. At the same time, Allies took up with the first communication tools and methods for working together.

1996-97

In 1996, the first meeting of workshop facilitators was held and a common calendar was adopted, which focused work for the end of the century on formulating proposals: proposals for strategies and actions involving decisive changes in our lifestyles and our management systems, applied from the local to the global levels. The workshops became international and were further developed.
In 1997, a number of continental and regional meetings were held, as was an international meeting at Bertioga, São Paulo (Brazil). The different workshops used these occasions to give shape to the results of their work and formulate their initial proposals.

1998-99

The workshops intensified their exchanges and compared their proposals. The Alliance’s collective organization was debated, resulting in the election of an International Facilitation Team (IFT). The preliminary forms of the assemblies that were to take place in 2001 were debated by all.

2000-01

The years 2000 and 2001 were used to benefit from the wealth and experiences accumulated by all the work groups while forming links with converging movements in order to formulate concrete proposals collectively.
This process took the form of :
 international thematic and socioprofessional meetings, open to other existing groups
 four simultaneous Continental Meetings (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe) and a regional meeting in the Middle East, in June 2001
 a World Citizens Assembly in Lille (France) in December 2001
 the publication in several languages and different countries of the Proposal Papers for the Twenty-first Century and the formulation of a Charter for Human Responsibilities.

2002-03

While the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind (FPH), the main and practically exclusive financial support of the Alliance, retreated into a sabbatical for an internal evaluation of its past ten years’ actions, the Alliance, still strongly financed by the FPH, continued its own activities.

The Proposal Papers were widely circulated, this Web site was reorganized, the Charter of Human Responsibilities was given a international committee for its diffusion throughout the world and its "translation" into different world cultures, and opened an independent Web site, and the Alliance organized a number of open debate forums, two on general future-oriented themes and several for self-evaluation and projections for the future. These included:
 a six-month worldwide, open, public Internet-based debate on how to build a culture of peace following the 9/11 attacks in New York City (December 2001 - June 2002);
 a two-year-long worldwide, open, public Internet-based debate on the possibility of setting up a World Parliament for the Twenty-first Century (October 2002 - October 2004);
 an internal cross-evaluation of the Proposal Papers using the Internet-based Delibera participatory process (October 2002 - July 2003];
 an internal debate on the Allies’ own evaluation, visions, proposals and projects for the future (April 2003).

2004-07

For the World Social Forum (WSF) 2004 in Mumbai, India, and the WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Allies and Allied networks coordinated their activities for greater impact and also attempted to introduce into the WSF some methodological approaches to record and further exploit the wealth of this global civil-society yearly event. For this, it opened a special Web site and associated working lists.

At the outcome of its sabbatical period, the FPH had defined a new strategy to implement through 2010, and one of its decisions was to break out of its costly support of the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural, and United World as a central unit and to turn it into a crossroads for emerging civil-society groups to network for experience sharing, shared thinking, and joint action. To formalize this important turn, the FPH proposed that all Allies and other interested friends take part in a Consultation on a proposed Constituent Charter of the Alliance. The Charter, in particular, offered a number of new tools that would allow different entities to connect through this Web site. This consultation took place in April and May 2005.

The Alliance Charter was adopted, amended according to participants’ input. It basically provides the ethical framework and the tools that Allies are henceforth able to use to network among themselves and also enlarge their action networks. Networks that were previously an integral part of the Alliance, such as the Workgroup on Solidarity Socio-Economy (WSSE), now called the Alliance for a Responsbile, Plural and Solidarity Economy (ALOE), the Artists Alliance, and the Catalan Group became Allied Workgroups, independent but networked into the Alliance. Coming very soon, a Website tool for any group to request becoming part of the Allied Workgroups. In line with cutting-edge governance thinking, the Alliance is undergoing massive decentralization and turning into an Alliance of Alliances!

The communication team was asked to use this time and continued budget to form and set up a separate, financially independent entity that would be able to provide citizen networks with the various methodologies and tools that had been developed since the mid-1990s in the framework of the Alliance, which are original and particularly well-adapted to the needs of such networks. In 2008, the new entity, Infocom21, a competence network, provides these services and training to use them.