A concluding proposal: to share this twenty-year review of the partnership between Pacts and the FPH to promote active citizenship that is interconnected from local to global.

In the 1990s, the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind (FPH) undertook to contribute to systemic changes. By opening up national public debate in 1995 for “a framework law against exclusion that leaves no one out and forgets no one”, the FPH created a space for expression open to practitioners who identified with a territorial approach to the issues of social cohesion and employment.  One of the results was the creation of the Local Pacts Collective in 1998. By recognizing that deep-seated change requires long timescales, it paved the way for a mutually beneficial partnership rooted in shared desires and target results as agreed upon by the concreating parties. This review reconstructs the stages in and lessons learned from the ensuring form of cooperation.

On this basis, Local Pacts succeeded in establishing trust between a diverse range of organizations and people, highlighting the potential for active citizenship with territorial roots. The pooling of these experiences via the Learning Journey, as an open and non-judgemental dialogue, served to formalize shared references. Although the contexts and cultures differed, these new forms of cooperation with multiple partners met concrete needs posed by daily life and the management of shared resources. They encountered similar problems in obtaining recognition and the support necessary to their development. As the process unfolded, the fact that people shared ideas based on their own observations increased the feeling of belonging to the same community with the same goals and desire for concrete results. This gradually led the Local Pacts collective to become the catalyzer of a learning method.