Without learning by communities and political systems, ie changing our behaviour from reflecting on experience, development will fail, or at the least be incomplete, short-sighted and unbalanced. It is not only individuals that learn.

PASCAL is about good Governance as well as technical management. With ever-larger and more complex systems – nation-states, global-financial and other corporations, IT systems etc. – we realise that many high-level policy decisions will be barren without commitment and action down the line at local levels. If we are to carry out what we say we want to do, to survive and live better. Is it not essential that a committed and active citizenry works to achieve the results now willed, but not delivered through normal political process?

Asking what changes the narrative also pushes us beyond individual cases. How to get new understandings to policy-makers and the wider public so as to alter discourse and cause change? It sets Outside the Box (OTB) a challenge – individually and to Pascal – taking us outside PAC and PASCAL to ask how governance and opinion-forming occur nowadays. Who or what determines how we think and talk, what we believe and take for granted, what is on and off the agenda, even the terms that we use?

Can we uncover how political and cultural processes work today, then as the PASCAL Observatory work with the grain to get results?

What is transparent to everyone, and what is a mystery to ordinary citizens? What is the immediate, the short-term, and the deeper impact and power of the social media; of older media; of lobbyists and ‘captains of industry’, as well as press barons? Does one medium and political channel trump the others? Is ‘civil society’ an engine or a sop? And how is it most effective?

Does anyone outside the PASCAL and PAC box listen to our discourse about learning and learning cities, then act on what it says? If so, is this action – local, piecemeal, gradualistic – of a kind that becomes a critical mass, helping a cultural paradigm shift so that we - citizens and governing classes - see and act on the world differently?

I want to know what works and how, so that we can be more effective in turning what James Powell calls maturing conversation into effective action.

We connect this also with another OTB theme area: what many people in the wider world see as a vital problem and challenge: do local solutions help address the disillusion, even cynicism and crisis, of western democracy and leadership in this media and poll-driven era?

This OTB question is lodged under Development, learning and management of place; ultimately all the OTB questions connect in the fragmented world outside each box; but we hope to add to and apply better understanding of some key issues along the way.