Productions - Resources

Our globalized world is obviously undergoing a major, multifaceted systemic crisis; it is economic, ecological, social, and even humanitarian. An entire civilization—based on conquering and domesticating nature for economic growth, seen as infinite, on exacerbating inequalities, competition, and war, in particular for control over raw materials and energy—seems on the verge of collapsing.

Voices and initiatives the world over are making themselves heard that are taking up the challenge to lead long-term change to sustainable societies everywhere, from local levels to the planet. At the core of the transition to sustainable societies is the need to adopt an ethics of responsability in every area, from individual choices to international law.

The intercultural and interreligious work of many years accomplished by the Alliance for Responsible and Sustainable Societies, an international program involving players in all the continents, shows that responsibility is an authentically universal value, that it is ingrained in every culture, and that it reflects the need to manage interdependences of a new nature, which makes it the backbone of the ethics of the twenty-first century. This work is the legacy of the rich experience of three former projects: the Alliance for a Responsible and United World, the Charter of Human Responsibilities, and the Forum of Ethics and Responsibility.

Responsibility is thus the cross-cutting issue of the major challenges to which we have to respond: the emergence of a “global community” united by a common destiny; the invention of new forms of democratic governance of human communities; transition from our current production and consumption model to œconomy, a responsible, plural, and solidarity-based economy; exploration of the conditions for the renewal of education systems in the sense of an education to world citizenship; and the search for a new paradigm able to manage the interdependences between humanity and the biosphere.