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Alliance
21: Making Another World Possible |
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| The first three parts : - Evaluation and Vision of the Future
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THE SECOND STAGE OF THE ALLIANCE
First Contribution to a Collective Thinking Process
B/ Present Assets and Weaknesses of the Alliance As It Faces the Changing Challenges of the World
a) Compartmentalization among the Allies and among the initiatives remains. The distance among the Allies and the scattered range of their interests has favored communication among themselves. The call for dialogue is often not heeded, or hardly, if only because of lack of time. Despite its name, the Alliance all too often appears as a simple juxtaposition of people, movements, and initiatives united by the same diagnosis, the same intuitions, and the same aspiration, but without, for all that, forming a really living social fabric. PeopleÕs different priorities and pressures are too different for common action to be easy. The example of the Workshops of the Socio-Economy of Solidarity Workgroup, which has achieved real interconnection and cross-cutting research, shows that decompartmentalization is no simple matter. It requires energetic action, methods, and the corresponding human and financial means. b) Due to a lack of time, human resources, and money, communication among the Allies, in the past year, has relied too much on the Internet and on the Web site. In this intermediate period, we had to interrupt the magazine Caravan. Those who received it free of cost did not wish to contribute to its financing, as shown by the failure of the subscription campaign. We also temporarily interrupted the ÒWhatÕs New?Ó which served to inform the Allies regularly on what was in progress. The FPH, through which all this information is processed, remains central in its circulation. After a period, when e-mail first started and appeared to be a tool adapted to our needs, its fantastic success has now turned it into a weakness. All those who have access to e-mail are flooded with messages. Under these conditions, it is difficult to highlight the information specific to the evolution of the Alliance if it is not organized and summarized. As for the Web site, it is a good solution to the need of organizing information but it underscores the digital divide between those who have an easy and inexpensive access to the Internet and those who do not have those same means. Moreover, it is not the proper means to circulate information regularly. From the moment the FPH stopped supporting the circulation of newsletters, the Alliance has tended to come apart. c) This finding leads us to two others: the operational costs of the ÒmaintenanceÓ of the Alliance and the passive position of many of the Allies with regard to this. The maintenance of a system of structured and multilingual information including reference information, such as the Proposal Papers, experiences, information that has to be updated such as the AlliesÕ addresses, news, and discussion forums implies incompressible operational and maintenance costs. These can be reduced if all the Allies play an active role in the construction and structuring of the information. But we cannot deny that they have become accustomed to the fact that the FPH covers these costs. d) The determination with which the FPH began in 2000-2001 to set up new Socioprofessional Networks, to demand the completion of the Proposal Papers, and to prepare the World Assembly met with some incomprehension among many Allies. This strategy had been publicly clarified as early as 1996. But that was not enough. Probably the central position of the FPH in the Alliance led to some confusion. Similarly, there was a lot of misunderstanding regarding the connection between the Proposal Papers and the debates at the World Citizens Assembly. The preparation of the World Assembly created a Òdeadline effectÓ for the production of the Proposal Papers. The objective of the Assembly was not to discuss these Papers but to elaborate a much broader cross-cultural and interprofessional dialogue. Here again, the written explanations were not enough. Many Allies would have preferred that the World Citizens Assembly be a sort of General Assembly for the Allies and that the AssemblyÕs discussions be based on the Proposal Papers. We therefore have to cope with the bitterness felt by some and think of a way of debating strategies in the future. e) Probably due to the compartmentalization and the novelty, the Proposal Papers and the cross-summarization of the Papers to determine the common priorities for the twenty-first century are yet to be owned by the whole of the Allies. On the one hand, very few have the time and the capacity to absorb all the material to produce their own summary. Of the other, not everyone is prepared to adopt and to own a summary commissioned by the Foundation (for the Proposal Papers), or that I produced myself (as for the summary of the World Citizens Assembly). We still havenÕt found the means to move from the stage of a collectively shared diagnosis to the stage of shared proposals. Even when there is an organized system for the collective elaboration of the summaries, as in the case of the Socio-Economy of Solidarity Workgroup of the Alliance, ownership by everyone of the findings is not that simple. Collective ownership remains a major challenge of the second stage. f) The thematic approach is the easiest. So far, the geocultural approach, through Local or Regional groups, with the remarkable exception of the Sao Paulo group, has not been conclusive. We were not able, for example, to make the appropriate connections between the African Caravan and the Allies of the different countries that it traveled through. Nor did we maintain the promising links born of the European Continental Assembly. g) Is the Alliance only a lot of nice rhetoric? Is it capable of turning into concrete action for change? What is the relationship between global thinking and local action? During the first stage of the Alliance, the focus was on starting from everyoneÕs experiences and innovationsÑhence from the actionÑand in pooling these to determine broader perspectives. But the absence of institutionalization of the Alliance hampered the visibility of everyoneÕs commitments on a local level, making it impossible to put forth a common rhetoric for the Alliance. Many Allies suffered from this, and now that the Proposal Papers has been drawn up, the challenge before us is that of our capacity to translate these proposals into strategies for change and into local action. h) The idea of setting up a different way of working than the ways traditionally used by organizations, unions, or political movements is probably more commonly shared today than it was three years ago. The fact remains that the question of the governance of the Alliance is raised. i) Similarly, the question of the position of the FPH in the Alliance is raised. The FPH has shown its determination not to ÒdropÓ the Alliance. It acknowledges a moral responsibility to a process that it contributed extensively to start up and to develop. In the next few months, it will state its orientations and priorities with regard to the Alliance. It is its duty to do so. But if the Allies do not come up with a consistent perspective for the second stage, it will have to define its strategy on its own. The AlliesÕ perspective has yet to emerge.
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