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Youth, Governance and Conservation: Lessons from a Regional Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean

Beyond Participation: Youth Building Governance for Conservation

Over the past several years, the Celebration of Protected and Conserved Areas of Latin America and the Caribbean has engaged young people from different countries, territories, and sectors in processes related to conservation, territorial governance, and regional collaboration.



However, one of the main lessons learned is that youth participation cannot be assessed solely by the number of young people involved, but rather by the quality of the spaces they occupy, the responsibilities they assume, and their actual ability to influence processes and decisions.

This reflection is particularly relevant in a context where young people are increasingly recognized as strategic actors in the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework, climate action, and environmental governance. Organizations such as UNICEF, the United Nations Youth Office, and other international institutions agree that meaningful youth participation requires effective influence on decision-making, access to information, capacity development, recognition of contributions, and accountability mechanisms.


An Experience Built Through Practice

The Celebration is a regional initiative aimed at strengthening territorial processes that sustain conservation through collaboration, capacity development, evidence generation, and advocacy.

Between 2021 and 2025, the initiative connected experiences across 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, engaged more than 300 protected and conserved areas, and built a regional network of ambassadors committed to promoting territorial conservation processes.


During this period, many young people assumed substantial responsibilities at different levels of the initiative. They not only participated in activities and events, but also coordinated processes, led territorial celebrations, managed social media, coordinated, trained, and evaluated more than 90 ambassadors, developed communication strategies, fostered partnerships, supported resource mobilization, strengthened relationships with territorial actors, and contributed to the initiative’s methodological and technological development.

They also played key roles in the logistical and programmatic organization of the Latin American and Caribbean Protected and Conserved Areas Day, the preparation of regional reports, participation in advocacy spaces, and the development of proposals for the initiative’s strategic repositioning toward 2026.

These experiences demonstrate that young people can play significant roles in regional conservation processes when genuine opportunities are available.


What Worked

The accumulated experience allows us to identify several factors that supported youth participation.

First, assigning concrete responsibilities. Processes in which young people assumed specific coordination, facilitation, or management roles tended to generate higher levels of commitment and continuity than those where participation was limited to occasional activities.

Second, the opportunity to build regional networks.

Third, experiential learning. Much of the knowledge developed emerged through direct involvement in real governance, organizational, and territorial coordination processes rather than through traditional training activities.

Finally, organizational flexibility allowed people with diverse backgrounds, capacities, and levels of availability to find different ways of contributing to the initiative.


What We Also Learned

The experience also shows that youth participation faces important challenges.

The existence of opportunities to participate does not automatically guarantee effective influence. In some cases, perceptions emerged regarding limited visibility, difficulties accessing decision-making spaces, or constraints in sharing territorial experiences within regional forums.

Challenges related to the sustainability of volunteer engagement also became evident. Much of the work carried out by both young people and adults was performed without dedicated funding, while simultaneously balancing professional, academic, family, and personal responsibilities.


Conservation processes require continuity, yet youth trajectories are often shaped by changes in education, employment, residence, and personal priorities. This creates ongoing challenges for maintaining teams, leadership, and participation over time.

Likewise, managing complex collaborative networks inevitably involves conflicts, differing expectations, communication challenges, and organizational tensions affecting both younger and more experienced participants. Collaborative governance is not about the absence of conflict, but about the capacity to address it transparently, respectfully, and constructively.

A particularly important lesson relates to the structural limits of volunteer work in Latin America and the Caribbean. While commitment, public service motivation, and a sense of belonging have been essential to sustaining the initiative, conservation cannot depend indefinitely on unpaid labor. In contexts characterized by socioeconomic inequalities, labor insecurity, limited access to funding, and multiple family and community responsibilities, prolonged volunteer engagement often results in overload, emotional exhaustion, leadership turnover, and the loss of accumulated capacities. This reality affects both young people and adults and represents one of the main challenges to the sustainability of territorial conservation initiatives.


The Celebration’s experience has shown that volunteerism can be a powerful driver of innovation, collaboration, and collective action, but also that it requires enabling conditions to remain sustainable over time.

These conditions include recognition of contributions, balanced distribution of responsibilities, support and well-being mechanisms, opportunities for capacity development, and, whenever possible, access to resources that strengthen processes without permanently transferring the costs of conservation to those already dedicating their time, knowledge, and effort to their territories.

Strengthening governance also means recognizing and addressing the human and institutional conditions that sustain collective action.


A New Cycle Focused on Governance and Evidence

The 2026 repositioning process seeks to respond to many of these lessons.

The initiative is evolving from a model focused primarily on showcasing celebrations toward an approach aimed at understanding how collaborative governance contributes to effective conservation.

Through the socio-environmental research project “Models of Territorial Governance and Socioecological Resilience in Latin America and the Caribbean,” the initiative seeks to systematically analyze the relationship between participation, inclusion, trust, legitimacy, collective action, and conservation outcomes.

The study will employ a participatory action research approach and a longitudinal design based on three stages of monitoring (diagnosis, design, and evaluation), generating verifiable territorial evidence on the conditions that strengthen governance and conservation in protected and conserved areas across the region.

Youth constitute a cross-cutting dimension of this process. The research will help better understand how youth participation influences the legitimacy, sustainability, and collaborative capacity of territorial initiatives.


An Invitation to Build the Next Stage

The conservation challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean require stronger capacities, networks, and governance mechanisms capable of bringing diverse actors together around shared objectives.

For this reason, the 2026 cycle invites organizations, communities, institutions, young people, ambassadors, and partners to register and develop territorial celebrations that contribute to improving governance and effective conservation in protected and conserved areas.

Rather than simply increasing the number of activities, the goal is to better understand which processes generate meaningful change, what conditions strengthen collective action, and how territorial experiences can contribute both to nature conservation and to human well-being.

The most important lesson learned so far is that conservation does not depend solely on protected areas or public policies. It also depends on people, relationships, trust, and the collective capacity to build a shared future from the territories themselves.



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