The idea of the Booklets of proposals comes from the determination that our societies are currently undergoing deep changes, whether economic, technological, political, or cultural. These mutations imply and will continue to imply changes in our ways of life, production, and consumption, but will also call for deep changes in our representation and education systems, and in the ways we manage our societies from the local to the global levels.

In themselves, these changes contain as much the possibility for progress in the construction of a more equitable and sustainable world as the risk of magnifying forms of domination, inequalities, and ecological unbalances. This is why we cannot leave these mutations to be managed exclusively by the public authorities or the multinational corporations, that is, by the major political and economic actors. These latter are too dependent on short-term interests, too locked up in the structures and mindsets that they have inherited from the past to consider evolutions that could question them radically.

It is therefore up to society as a whole, in all of its diversity, to mobilize the innovation dynamics it embodies to "civilize globalization." The success of recent examples of international mobilization provides the indication of a historic opportunity to set up the conditions, on a global scale, for a democratic governance that can live up to the challenges awaiting us.

Hence the idea of supporting the elaboration and circulation in several languages and in several countries of a collection of files comprising, for each of the domains that determine our future, the proposals that seem most relevant for the implementation, in our societies, of the breaks and changes needed to build a more equitable and sustainable twenty-first century.

Emerging from the place where thinking and action meet, these proposals should both serve as a catalyst for a collective international debate and constitute a tool to enhance and reinforce the action of groups and individuals who work on the implementation of new ideas and innovating practices measuring up to the challenges of this beginning millennium.

The standard size of a booklet from beginning to end is no more than fifty pages. The "breakthroughs" are presented on two pages and provide a kind of summary of the following text. The proposals are then described in detail. A certain number of elements are clearly explained in order to give the proposals a concrete basis, i.e. the context, the objectives of the proposals, the actors involved, and the experiences that exist already.